Empfehlungen basierend auf "The Bedside Book of Philosophy: 125 Historic Events and Big Ideas to Push the Limits of Your Knowledge (Bedside Books)"

Paperback. Pub Date :2013-06-06 Pages: 544 Language: English Publisher: Penguin Books The hottest thinker in the world Bryan Appleyard. Sunday TimesIn The Black Swan. Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world ... Here Taleb stands uncer-tainty on its head. making it desirable. even necessary The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust The resil-ient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension. many things in life benefit from stress. disorder. volatility. and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.Whats more . the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the cit...

In a single work of colossal scope one of the world’s greatest scientists has given us a complete and unrivalled guide to the glories of the universe.The Road to Reality is the most important and ambitious work of science for a generation. It provides nothing less than a comprehensive account of the physical universe and the essentials of its underlying mathematical theory. It assumes no particular specialist knowledge on the part of the reader — for example, the early chapters give us the vital mathematical background to the physical theories explored later in the book.Roger Penrose’s purpose is to describe as clearly as possible our present understanding of the universe and to convey a feeling for its deep beauty and philosophical implications, as well as its intricate logical interconnections. Rarely less than challenging, the book is leavened by vivid descriptive passages, as well as hundreds of hand-drawn diagrams.The Road to Reality was a Sunday Times top-ten bestseller in the hardcover edition, with over 40,000 copies sold.

Kurt Godel, the greatest logician of our time, startled the world of mathematics in 1931 with his Theorem of Undecidability, which showed that some statements in mathematics are inherently "undecidable." His work on the completeness of logic, the incompleteness of number theory, and the consistency of the axiom of choice and the continuum theory brought him further worldwide fame. In this introductory volume, Raymond Smullyan, himself a well-known logician, guides the reader through the fascinating world of Godel's incompleteness theorems. The level of presentation is suitable for anyone with a basic acquaintance with mathematical logic. As a clear, concise introduction to a difficult but essential subject, the book will appeal to mathematicians, philosophers, and computer scientists.

The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the Collège de France. Here, he continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditions based on courage and conviction. His death, on June 25th, 1984, tempts us to detect the philosophical testament in these lectures, especially in view of the prominence they give to the themes of life and death.

" . . . a great read. It is masterfully presented, and is an ideal text both for advanced undergraduates and graduate students." —International Journal of African Historical Studies" . . . a detailed, critical guide to fifty years of African philosophy . . . " —Teaching Philosophy"Masolo offers an expansive and lucidly panoramic view of the origin and developments in African philosophy." —Africa Today"The excellence of this book lies in the wealth of perspectives that it brings to the discussion on what constitutes philosophy, rationality, and meaningful reflection. It is both thought provoking and illuminating." —EthicsA Kenyan philosopher surveys themes and debates in African philosophy over the last five decades. Masolo's purview includes Francophone and Anglophone philosophers in both the analytic and phenomenological traditions.

Here in one convenient volume are Volumes VII, VIII, and IX – complete and unabridged – of the acclaimed reference work that has dominated the field of philosophy for two decades. Volume VII considers such world-famous modern Western philosophers as Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Schopenhauer Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Volume VIII, on British empiricism, the idealist movement in Great Britain, idealism in America, the pragmatist movement, and the revolt against idealism, covers such thinkers as Bentham, Herbert Spencer, T. H. Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, Royce, C. S. Peirce, William James, G. E. Moore, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell. Volume IX presents the prominent French philosophical thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with full attention to the themes of human freedom and man in society – including Maine de Biran, Comte, Henri Bergson, Garrigou-Lagrange, and Sartre. These individual volumes have been hailed as "objective, yet critical. . . significant. . . clear-sighted. . . intelligent. . . unrivalled." Now available as a three-in-one paperback, it will be welcomed by new and seasoned students and scholars of modern philosophy as a reference work that no library should be without.

'...every page shows evidence of great mastery of the subject.' Trans. Faraday Society 'this book is destined to play a major part in the future education of theoretical physicists.' Proceedings of the Physical Society This edition has been completely revised to include some 20% of new material. Important recent developments such as the theory of Regge poles are now included. Many problems with solutions have been added to those already contained in the book.

"This book is valuable as expounding in full a theory of meaning that has its roots in the work of Frege and has been of the widest influence. . . . The chief virtue of the book is its systematic character. From Frege to Quine most philosophical logicians have restricted themselves by piecemeal and local assaults on the problems involved. The book is marked by a genial tolerance. Carnap sees himself as proposing conventions rather than asserting truths. However he provides plenty of matter for argument."—Anthony Quinton, Hibbert Journal

Causation is a central topic in many areas of philosophy. In metaphysics, philosophers want to know what causation is, and how it is related to laws of nature, probability, action, and freedom of the will. In epistemology, philosophers investigate how causal claims can be inferred from statistical data, and how causation is related to perception, knowledge and explanation. In the philosophy of mind, philosophers want to know whether and how the mind can be said to have causal efficacy, and in ethics, whether there is a moral distinction between acts and omissions and whether the moral value of an act can be judged according to its consequences. And causation is a contested concept in other fields of enquiry, such as biology, physics, and the law. This book provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of these and other topics, as well as the history of the causation debate from the ancient Greeks to the logical empiricists. The chapters provide surveys of contemporary debates, while often also advancing novel and controversial claims; and each includes a comprehensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The book is thus the most comprehensive source of information about causation currently available, and will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates through to professional philosophers.

Truth, Language, and History is the much-anticipated final volume of Donald Davidson's philosophical writings. In the four groups of essays that comprise it, Davidson continues to explore the themes that occupied him for more than fifty years: the relations between language and the world; speaker intention and linguistic meaning; language and mind; mind and body; mind and world; mind and other minds. He asks: what is the role of the concept of truth in these explorations?And, can a scientific world view make room for human thought without reducing it to something material and mechanistic?Davidson's underlying picture, which can be seen in many of these essays, is that we are acquainted directly with the world, not indirectly via some intermediary such as sense-data, representations, or language itself; that thought emerges in the first place through interpersonal communication in a shared material world, and continues to develop as we engage each other in dialogue; and that language depends on communication, not vice versa. This is the triangulating situation - two creaturescommunicating about a common world - about which Davidson has written elsewhere. As for the mind-body relation: our ontology need posit nothing more that material objects and events; but as explainers we require two mutually irreducible vocabularies: mind and body. In the last six essays Davidson findsinterconnections between his own views and those of some of the major philosophers of the past.Including a new introduction by his widow, Marcia Cavell, this volume completes Donald Davidson's colossal intellectual legacy.