Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists, in terms of symmetry and invariance. In this book van Fraassen argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. He analyzes and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe there are, and argues that we should disregard the idea of law as an adequate clue to science. After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the author develops the empiricist (...) view of science as a construction of models to represent the phenomena. (shrink)

What is empiricism and what could it be? Bas C. van Fraassen, one of the world’s foremost contributors to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, here undertakes a fresh consideration of these questions and offers a program for renewal of the empiricist tradition. The empiricist tradition is not and could not be defined by common doctrines, but embodies a certain stance in philosophy, van Fraassen says. This stance is displayed first of all in a searing, recurrent critique of metaphysics, (...) and second in a focus on experience that requires a voluntarist view of belief and opinion._ _Van Fraassen focuses on the philosophical problems of scientific and conceptual revolutions and on the not unrelated ruptures between religious and secular ways of seeing or conceiving of ourselves. He explores what it is to be or not be secular and points the way toward a new relationship between secularism and science within philosophy. (shrink)

What is empiricism and what could it be? Bas . van Fraassen, one of the world’s foremost contributors to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, here undertakes a fresh consideration of these questions and offers a program for renewal of the empiricist tradition. The empiricist tradition is not and could not be defined by common doctrines, but embodies a certain stance in philosophy, van Fraassen says. This stance is displayed first of all in a searing, recurrent critique of metaphysics, (...) and secondly in a focus on experience that requires a voluntarist view of belief and opinion. Van Fraassen focuses on the philosophical problems of scientific and conceptual revolutions and on the not unrelated ruptures between religious and secular ways of seeing or conceiving of ourselves. He explores what it is to be or not be secular and points the way toward a new relationship between secularism and science within philosophy. (shrink)

Propósitos del libro.--Puntos de vista progresivos.--La ciencia a la manera cartesiana.--Pensadores americanos.

Averroës, 1126-1198; Arab philosophy; views on; God; simplicity; pantheism; Islamic philosophy.

Students using Ritalin in preparation for their exams is a hotly debated issue, while meditating or drinking coffee before those same exams is deemed uncontroversial. However, taking Ritalin, meditating and drinking coffee or even education in general, can all be considered forms of cognitive enhancement. Although social acceptance might change in the future, it is interesting to examine the current reasons that are used to distinguish cases deemed problematic or unproblematic. Why are some forms of cognitive enhancement considered problematic, while (...) others are not? In this paper, we consider cognitive enhancement as the amplification or extension of core capacities of the mind, using augmentation or improvements of our information-processing systems. We will analyse cognitive enhancement in an educational setting in order to clarify the fuzzy distinction between problematic and unproblematic forms of cognitive enhancement. We will show that the apparent distinction made by many people between problematic and unproblematic enhancement is not based on any fundamental difference between these two categories. (shrink)

What is empiricism? There can be no authoritative answer to any such question. A historian of philosophy can at best try to call what is common to philosophers who either identified themselves, or have traditionally been identified, as empiricists. But what has set those philosophers apart from others, and especially from those whom they criticized, may not be captured in common views or doctrines. The historian may, in trying to fix the label, rely tacitly on a view of what philosophical (...) positions are and how they are to be identified. Finally, it is typical of philosophers who decide to range themselves under some pre-existing banner ("empiricism", "pragmatism", "phenomenology") to change the very philosophy they take on, as much as did their historical heroes in their day. I will here try to give a sustained argument about what empiricism cannot be, and then enter upon a tentative exploration of what it should be (taken to be). (shrink)

() Baul sadhana: introduction The word 'baul, in popular interpretation, is generally equated with singing: with folk song of Bengal or, more concretely, ...

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This Inspirational Guide To An Open, Critical Exchange Between India And The West Is Framed As A Tribute To Dr. Bettina Baumer, An Eminent Scholar Of Indology. Comprising 32 Essays, Segregated Into Three Sections Indian Philosophy And Spirituality, Indian Arts And Aesthetics, And Interreligious And Intercultural Dialogue.

For a long time people have been trying to develop probability theory starting from ‘finite’ events rather than collections of infinite events. In this way one can find natural replacements for measurable sets and integrable functions, but measurable functions seemed to be more difficult to find. We present a solution. Moreover, our results are constructive.

This paper formalizes part of a well-known psychological model of emotions. In particular, the logical structure underlying the conditions that trigger emotions are studied and then hierarchically organized. The insights gained therefrom are used to guide a formalization of emotion triggers, which proceeds in three stages. The first stage captures the conditions that trigger emotions in a semiformal way, i.e., without committing to an underlying formalism and semantics. The second stage captures the main psychological notions used in the emotion model (...) in dynamic doxastic logic. The third stage introduces a BDI-based framework (belief–desire–intention) with achievement goals, which is used to firmly ground the preceding stages. The result is a formalization of emotion triggers for BDI agents with achievement goals. The idea of proceeding in these stages is to provide different levels of commitment to formalisms, so that it remains relatively easy to extend or replace the used formalisms without having to start from scratch. Finally, we show that the formalization renders properties of emotions that are in line with the psychological model on which it is based. (shrink)

After Hume, attempts to forge an empiricist epistemology have taken three forms, which I shall call the First, Middle, and Third Way. The First still attempts an a priori demonstration that our cognitive methods satisfy some criterion of adequacy. The Middle Way is pursued under the banners of naturalism and scientific realism, and aims at the same conclusion on non-apriori grounds. After arguing that both fail, I shall describe the general characteristics of the Third Way, an alternative epistemology suitable for (...) empiricism. (shrink)

This volume contains the papers read at the conference on 'Semantics from different points of view' that took place at Konstanz University in Septem ber 1978. This interdisciplinary conference Vias organized by the':Sonderfor schungsbereich 99 - Linguistik' and sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsge meinschaft. Li~guists, philosophers, logicians, and psychologists met to dis cuss recent developments in the study of the semantics of natural language from the point of view of their disciplines. But this is not to say that there was (...) one particular topic shared by all the participants. The conference was organized because the seven research groups that constitute the Sonderforschungsbereich wanted to discuss their results in an international context and to get advice and guidance for the work still to be done. Therefore, quite a number of topics were covered, though at different levels of precision, under the general label 'semantics'. And the selection of topics, as well as the relative importance given to them, is due to the research interests currently represented in the Sonderforschungs bereich. (shrink)

The book combines a series of chapters considering a range of responses to the idea of 'de-westernizing' film studies with a series of in-depth interviews with filmmakers, scholars and critics.

Transcript of speeches by a Hindu philosopher, chiefly on Hindu philosophy and Hinduism.

The story of how Perrin’s experimental work established the reality of atoms and molecules has been a staple in (realist) philosophy of science writings (Wesley Salmon, Clark Glymour, Peter Achinstein, Penelope Maddy, …). I’ll argue that how this story is told distorts both what the work was and its significance, and draw morals for the understanding of how theories can be or fail to be empirically grounded.

In response to parts I-III of G Rosen's "What is Constructive Empiricism?", "Philosophical Studies", 74, 1994, 143-178, this paper examines several construals of the position of constructive empiricism. At issue, in part, is the equation of intentional aspects of science with the intentions and opinions of scientists. In addition it is necessary to distinguish the constructive empiricist -- a philosopher holding that acceptance of theories in science need not involve belief that they are true -- from the scientific agnostic' who (...) accepts but does not believe current science. What is at stake for empiricism is a view of science that will admit it as a paradigm for rational inquiry. (shrink)

A general form is proposed for epistemological theories, the relevant factors being: the family of epistemic judgments, the epistemic state, the epistemic commitment, and the family of possible epistemic inputs. First a simple theory is examined in which the states are probability functions, and the subject of probability kinematics introduced by Richard Jeffrey is explored. Then a second theory is examined in which the state has as constituents a body of information and a recipe that determines the accepted epistemic judgments (...) on the basis of this corpus. Through an examination of several approaches to the statistical syllogism, a relation is again established with Jeffrey's generalized conditionalization. (shrink)

A general form is proposed for epistemological theories, the relevant factors being: the family of epistemic judgments, the epistemic state, the epistemic commitment , and the family of possible epistemic inputs . First a simple theory is examined in which the states are probability functions, and the subject of probability kinematics introduced by Richard Jeffrey is explored. Then a second theory is examined in which the state has as constituents a body of information and a recipe that determines the accepted (...) epistemic judgments on the basis of this corpus. Through an examination of several approaches to the statistical syllogism, a relation is again established with Jeffrey's generalized conditionalization. (shrink)

Science tends to find a solution to the problem of the unreliability of human perception by understanding objectivity as the absence of subjectivity. However, from a phenomenological point of view, subjectivity is not so much a problem as an inevitable starting-point. That does not mean that the problem of the correctness of people’s accounts of their own perceptions is no problem at all—in fact the problem is so great that the authority of a person’s knowledge of his or her own (...) mind can be doubted. The problem of subjectivity can only be solved when it is related to the problem of interpretation. Analyses of narratives are interpretations of interpretations. The phenomenologist must make sure that the data he or she analyses are lived interpretations and not interpretations of interpretations. (shrink)

In this book van Fraassen develops an alternative to scientific realism by constructing and evaluating three mutually reinforcing theories.

cz. 1. Wprowadzenie do materializmu historycznego.

Bd. 1. Von der Antike bis zur Aufklärung.

Locatedness is one of the fundamental notions in constructive mathematics. The existence of a positivity predicate on a locale, i.e. the locale being overt, or open, has proved to be fundamental in constructive locale theory. We show that the two notions are intimately connected.Bishop defines a metric space to be compact if it is complete and totally bounded. A subset of a totally bounded set is again totally bounded iff it is located. So a closed subset of a Bishop compact (...) set is Bishop compact iff it is located. We translate this result to formal topology. ‘Bishop compact’ is translated as compact and overt. We propose a definition of locatedness on subspaces of a formal topology, and prove that a closed subspace of a compact regular formal space is located iff it is overt. Moreover, a Bishop-closed subset of a complete metric space is Bishop compact — that is, totally bounded and complete — iff its localic completion is compact overt.Finally, we show by elementary methods that the points of the Vietoris locale of a compact regular locale are precisely its compact overt sublocales.We work constructively, predicatively and avoid the use of the axiom of countable choice. (shrink)

We study operators with located graph in Bishop-style constructive mathematics. It is shown that a bounded operator has an adjoint if and only if its graph is located. Locatedness of the graph is a necessary and sufficient condition for an unbounded normal operator to have a spectral decomposition. These results suggest that located operators are the right generalization of bounded operators with an adjoint.