Epistemology category: 1240 books

A philosophical examination of the study of history, from its logic and semantics to its metaphysical and epistemological implications. This book is intended for the highly intelligent reader, who is interested in considering the difficulties, problems, and challenges of understanding and writing...

From the Copernican revolution of Immanuel Kant to the cognitive mapping of Fredric Jameson to the postcolonial politics of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, representation has been posed as both indispensable and impossible. In his pathbreaking work, The Abyss of Representation, George Hartley traces the...

Applying the tools and methods of analytic philosophy, analytic feminism is an approach adopted in discussions of sexism, classism and racism. The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism presents the first comprehensive reference resource to the nature, history and significance of this growing tradition...

This guide explains Dilthey's theory of hermeneutics in simple, easy to understand language. It covers all the important concepts including the distinction between the natural and human sciences, Dilthey's historical epistemology, and his concepts of interest and 'exegesis'.

l. THE GENERAL PROBLEM OF EPISTEMOLOGY There is a philosophical issue that surely precedes all other possible questions. It concerns the very possibility of our thinking about some­ thing to some purpose. Short of this no philosophy, theory or research would be possible. But it is not immediately...

This book reconsiders the nature of positivist philosophy in social science theory based on classical and medieval thought in what later became "Europe." It argues that social theory is being held back by antagonistic debates over science, positivism, objectivity, and universal law - debates...

Peter Munz, a former student of both Popper and Wittgenstein, begins his comparison of the two great twentieth-century philosophers, by explaining that since the demise of positivism there have emerged, broadly speaking, two philosophical options: Wittgenstein, with the absolute relativism of his...

"Leaving Truth" offers a radically new, and potentially conclusive, contribution to our ancient science vs. religion debate. It is a collection of five essays, one main and four subsidiary. The collection addresses how we can most coherently select proposals as knowledge, and the limitation...

The question of relativism is a perennial one, and as fundamental and far­ reaching as the question of truth itself. Is truth absolute and universal, the same everywhere and for everyone? Or is truth historically, culturally, biologically, or otherwise relative, varying from one epoch or species...

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Smirnov was born on March 2, 1931. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1954. From 1957 till 1961 he was a lecturer in philosophy and logic at the Tomsk University. Since 1961 his scientific activity continued in Moscow at the Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences...

John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of Liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, he...

Adolf Reinach was one of the leading figures of the Munich and Göttingen circles of phenomenology, and Husserl's first real co-worker. Although his writings are highly original and remarkably clear, Reinach's tragic death in the First World War prevented him from formulating a definitive statement...

This book addresses some of the key questions that scientists have been asking themselves for centuries: what is knowledge? What is information? How do we know that we know something? How do we construct meaning from the perceptions of things? Although no consensus exists on a common definition of...

This book collects case studies and theoretical papers on expertise, focusing on four major themes: legitimation, the aggregation of knowledge, the distribution of knowledge and the distribution of power. It focuses on the institutional means by which the distribution of knowledge and the distribution...