検索キーワード： 認識論

From one of the world's most beloved and respected public intellectuals comes a sweeping work of musical criticism, examining the distance between the performer and their audience "Not since Virgil Thomson have we had a music critic with as wide ranging a view as Edward Said."—Studs Terkel...

A transformative and philosophical investigation into how we ask questions, full of practical advice on how we can harness the power of questions for ourselves We live in a world that wants answers. Answers provide solutions to our problems, teach us about the world, and help us navigate our...

What if every truth we hold began as a beautiful mistake? This book is a meditation on the nature of illusion—not as deception, but as one of the mind’s essential ways of knowing. Here, illusion is not debunked or dismissed; it is explored as a bridge between ignorance and understanding, a necessary fiction through which humans reach toward the incomprehensible.

Every act of knowing carries within it a quiet act of forgetting. Knowledge as Oblivion reveals the hidden symmetry between learning and loss, understanding and erasure, showing that progress in thought is not an accumulation but a perpetual renewal through disappearance. In this bold and luminous work, Boris Kriger dismantles the myth of intellectual continuity and invites the listener to reconsider what it means to “know.”

IIIT Books-In-Brief Series is a valuable collection of the Institute’s key publications written in condensed form to give listeners a core under-standing of the main contents of the original. Our established, age-old notions of knowledge have ceased to be meaningful in postnormal times. What we define as true knowledge, and the ways in which we create it, have changed radically. The emergence of ‘Big Data’ and Artificial Intelligence, as well as ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, ‘deep fake’, and ‘post-truth’ have changed the nature of knowledge production.

This book explores the laser’s journey from obscure theoretical roots to its central place in medicine, warfare, communications, and cosmology. Alongside its technical story runs a deeper inquiry: what does this sharpened light reveal about the nature of order, attention, and the human desire for focus amid chaos? What begins as a tool becomes a metaphor, and finally a mirror—reflecting the structure of thought itself.

In a world overflowing with information yet starved for understanding, Prisoners of the Mind invites listeners on a fearless exploration of the hidden structures that shape thought, distort perception, and quietly govern belief. Drawing on philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and cultural critique, this book dismantles the comforting illusions through which modern life is too often navigated—illusions of control, certainty, merit, and even selfhood.

Unreal Reality: The Paradox of Existence is a lucid and unflinching exploration of reality, illusion, and the ethical demands of being. Blending philosophy, science, and reflective clarity, this book journeys through the shifting ground beneath perception, memory, identity, and knowledge. It challenges the need for certainty, confronts the limits of understanding, and insists that meaning can—and must—be forged even when truth remains out of reach.

This book is a philosophical journey into the heart of uncertainty. From ancient myths of the abyss to modern science, from entropy to fractals, from Michel Serres’s poetics of noise to the digital floods of our age, Pursuing Chaos asks whether knowledge is possible without illusions—and whether truth can survive without rhetoric.

A sweeping and intellectually rigorous work of literary criticism that moves the field forward, from one of the preeminent public scholars “[Said’s] book is relaxed and discursive, original, immensely learned, fluently written.”―John Bayley, The New York Times Book Review Edward W. Said...

From one of the world's most beloved and outspoken public intellectuals comes an illuminating book on the nature of criticism "Readers will be surprised, stimulated, instructed, impressed."―The New Yorker “What is a beginning? What must one do in order to begin? What is special about...

Artificial intelligence can answer almost anything. The tragedy is that people have nothing to ask. Surrounded by infinite knowledge, we shrink our curiosity to absurdities: “Do you have legs?” This book is about that paradox. Not about machines, but about us—about how to learn again, how to build methods of thinking, how to cultivate curiosity before it disappears.

Was geschieht, wenn wir Kant nicht mehr als marmornes Denkmal, sondern als lebendigen Menschen lesen? Diese Frage bildet den Kern dieses Buches. Immanuel Kants Philosophie war niemals dazu bestimmt, als unverrückbares Dogma verehrt zu werden. Sie war ein kritisches Projekt, ein Versuch, die Grenzen der Vernunft sichtbar zu machen und Werkzeuge für weiteres Denken zu schaffen.

As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that shape our future circumstances and affect the sort of person we will be. When choosing whether to start a family, or deciding on a career, we often think we can assess the options by imagining what different experiences would be like for us. L. A. Paul argues that, for choices involving dramatically new experiences, we are confronted by the brute fact that we can know very little about our subjective futures. This has serious implications for our decisions.

This book introduces the Anthropic-Independent Reality Index, a conceptual framework designed to assess the degree to which ideas are shaped — or distorted — by evolved cognitive structures. Drawing on insights from evolutionary epistemology, cognitive neuroscience, and the philosophy of science, the index offers a non-utilitarian scale for measuring the ontological independence of a concept from the adaptive biases of the human mind.

This book explores the concept of abstraction as both a central method of philosophical inquiry and a process that inevitably encounters multiple forms of limitation. Through logical, epistemological, ontological, linguistic, existential, and mystical perspectives, it examines how abstraction can clarify, distort, transcend, or collapse into self-reference and emptiness. It argues that while abstraction is essential for conceptual thought, it also risks severing ties with lived experience, language, and meaning.

In We Might Be NPCs, Ray Brownlee takes you on a sharp, funny, and mind-bending tour through one of the strangest ideas in modern thought, the Simulation Hypothesis. Blending philosophy, physics, and a dash of pop culture, this book asks the unsettling question: What if reality isn’t… real?

This book introduces and develops the concept of Historic Antiteleology as a radical reorientation of historical thought beyond the metaphysics of progress, redemption, or narrative coherence. Drawing on the insights of Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, and poststructuralist thinkers such as Foucault and Benjamin, the essay critiques the enduring influence of teleological models in historiography — models that frame history as a purposeful sequence culminating in moral, political, or technological fulfillment.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is a towering figure of modern Western philosophy, someone whose thought continues to exert an influence across all areas of the discipline. His work is characterized by both breadth and unity: he writes powerfully about mind, epistemology, metaphysics, logic, mathematics, natural science, ethics, politics, aesthetics, education, and more. The Oxford Handbook of Kant provides an up-to-date account of recent scholarship on Kant's philosophy, taking in all areas of his writings.

A seminal work of scientific and philosophical exploration. Ever since the Greeks coined the language we commonly use for scientific description, mythology and science have developed separately. But what if we could prove that all myths have one common origin in a celestial cosmology? What if the gods, the places they lived, and what they did are but ciphers for celestial activity, a language for the perpetuation of complex astronomical data?