検索キーワード： 認識論

Throughout history philosophers have sought to define, understand, and delineate concepts important to human well-being. One such concept is "knowledge." Many philosophers believed that absolute, certain knowledge, is possible—that the physical world and ideas formulated about it could be given solid foundation unaffected by the varieties of mere opinion.

Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: Observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria.

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?

The novelty of the book lies in its reimagining of Kant's philosophy as a dynamic tool of inquiry rather than a fossilized dogma. The author argues that treating Kant's work as a sacred, immutable canon betrays its very essence. Kant's thought was, from the outset, critical—meant to probe the boundaries of reason and to craft methods of knowing, not to hand down definitive answers carved in philosophical stone. The book highlights the central paradox: by turning Kant's ideas into doctrine, one drains them of the very critical energy that Kant himself saw as the lifeblood of philosophy.

In The War Between Mind and Matter: Berkeley and Idealism of Reality, Boris Kriger stages the ultimate philosophical showdown between idealism and materialism—and the results are far less predictable than you might expect. With wit, intellectual rigor, and an irreverent sense of humor, Kriger guides the listener through Berkeley's radical vision of a world made of ideas, pits it against the strongest objections materialism can muster, and reveals why every attempt to refute idealism only proves its point.

Kant's Prolegomena, although a small book, is without doubt the most important of his writings, writes the translator, Paul Carus. Prolegomena means, literally, prefatory or introductory remarks, and it furnishes us with a key to his main work, The Critique of Pure Reason; in fact, it is an extract containing all the salient ideas of Kant's system. It approaches the subject in the simplest and most direct way and is therefore best adapted as an introduction into his philosophy. 

The New Organon is the second part of Bacon's philosophical work, The Great Instauration on the renewal of the sciences, which was published in 1620. The title refers to Aristotle's work Organon - meaning “trumpeter” - a treatise on logic and syllogism. Bacon’s work offers a new method of investigating nature, named “the Interpretation of Nature”.

In this book, Harding explores the proposition that tools are "extensions of the body", and that there's no absolute boundary between the "natural" and the "artificial". Crossing over the line between the self and the not-self, Harding realized that there is no definite frontier where you can say you stop and the rest of the world begins. The Meaning and Beauty of the Artificial takes you on a wide-ranging safari through the animal kingdom and then into the human world, where you see "man and machine" with new eyes.

A formally written, deeply introspective, and meticulously detailed account of one year spent working the midnight shift inside a vast Municipal Archive. Told through the eyes of a self-reflective narrator a method essayist this nonfiction work eschews conclusion and moral, focusing instead on the texture of quiet thought, the persistence of small insect life, the low-frequency hum of machinery, and the minute details (the scratch on a door, the stain on a marble floor) that reveal the building’s own slow, private life.

Classical epistemology asked "how does the mind acquire knowledge of the world?" and spent three and a half centuries unable to answer, because the question was badly posed. It presupposed a division between mind and world, between subject and object, between inner representation and outer reality — a division that does not exist in nature.

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.

For thousands of years, the faithful have honed proselytizing strategies and talked people into believing the truth of one holy book or another. Indeed, the faithful often view converting others as an obligation of their faith - and are trained from an early age to spread their unique brand of religion. The result is a world broken in large part by unquestioned faith. As an urgently needed counter to this tried-and-true tradition of religious evangelism, this audiobook offers the first-ever guide not for talking people into faith - but for talking them out of it.

A thoroughly updated introduction to the concepts, methods, and standards of critical thinking, A Practical Guide to Critical Thinking: Deciding What to Do and Believe, Second Edition is a unique presentation of the formal strategies used when thinking through reasons and arguments in many areas of expertise. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach to critical thinking, the audiobook offers a broad conception of critical thinking and explores the practical relevance to conducting research across fields such as, business, education, and the biological sciences.   

Brought to you by Penguin. From the world-renowned physicist and best-selling author of The Elegant Universe comes this captivating exploration of deep time and humanity's search for purpose In both time and space, the cosmos is astoundingly vast, and yet is governed by simple, elegant...

You are not imagining it. The years really are getting shorter. Not on any clock, not on any calendar — but inside the three pounds of tissue between your ears, something has changed. The summers that once stretched into lazy eternities now collapse into a long weekend. A decade vanishes like a coin in a magician's hand. And the unsettling sense that you are being robbed of time — that life is accelerating toward some finish line you never agreed to approach — is shared by nearly everyone who has lived long enough to notice it.

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.

What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT's anti-disciplinarian César Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural sciences of information, networks, and complexity. To understand the growth of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of order.

Endlessly captivating and intensely thoughtful, in The World as I See It Einstein reveals profound meditations on religion, nationalism, politics and, of course, life itself. He discusses his upbringing in Germany, as well as his concerns about the rife anti-Semitism in the country, and what he hopes the League of Nations will do to address it.

Redeeming the West is an introduction to the core ideas shaping the world in epistemology, ethics, and social and political theory. Specifically, it is about what the Bible says about reason, self-interest, individualism, and individual rights. Libolt, Brunton, and Graber explore how misunderstandings of these philosophical topics account for cultural decline in the West, both inside and outside the Church. The aim of this book is to equip Christians to defend what is good within Western Civilization—and specifically to restore the life of the mind within Christianity.

Why do we remember what never happened? Why do we plan for futures that never arrive as planned? Why do we seek meaning where none exists and feel torn between what we think and what we feel? For centuries, these contradictions have been treated as flaws in human reasoning—bugs in the cognitive machinery that education and willpower should correct. But what if they are not bugs at all? What if they are features?