検索キーワード： 認識論

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.

Writing, according to Thomas Moore, is sacred practice. Though we often don't think of it in these terms, everything we write - whether a love letter or a shopping list - connects us to the classic tradition of logos, or word. Once a revered practice, guarded by monks in the sanctity of the scriptorium, writing continues to offer us all direct passage to the soul's innermost corridors.

A system can describe what we see (the solar system), operate a computer (Windows 10), or be made on a page (the 14 engineered lines of a sonnet). In this book, Clifford Siskin shows that system is best understood as a genre - a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to understand it. Indeed, many Enlightenment authors published works they called "system" to compete with the essay and the treatise.

A professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, Harry G. Frankfurt penned a surprise smash hit with his New York Times best seller On Bullshit, which insightfully and wittily captured the human capacity for, and tendency toward, BS. Now he examines the other side of the coin with this equally entertaining and provocative follow-up.

First published in 1710, George Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge is a seminal contribution to Empiricist philosophy. Making the bold assertion that the physical world consists only of ideas and thus does not exist outside the mind, this work establishes Berkeley as the founder of the immaterialist school of thought. A major influence on such later philosophers as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, Berkeley's ideas have played a role in such diverse fields as mathematics and metaphysics and continue to spark debate today.

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.

What if numbers are not the building blocks of the universe—but reflections of the human mind? For over two thousand years, the Pythagorean vision has shaped our understanding of the cosmos: a universe ruled by harmony, order, and mathematical law. From the “music of the spheres” to modern physics, the idea that reality can be perfectly described by numbers has guided both science and philosophy. Yet as quantum mechanics, neuroscience, and information theory now suggest, this vision may be an exquisite illusion.

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.

This audiobook explores metaphor not as an ornament of language but as the fundamental mechanism of human cognition. It argues that every act of understanding—scientific, poetic, or everyday—is rooted in the transfer of structure from one experiential domain to another. Metaphor is presented as the mind’s first technology, a generative tool through which complexity is compressed into meaningful form. Far from being a deviation from literal speech, it is shown to be the very fabric of thought itself, underlying logic, mathematics, and the formation of conceptual categories.

This book advances the Principle of Anti-Symmetry: the claim that symmetry has never existed in nature as more than a cognitive projection. What science repeatedly reveals as “symmetry breaking” is not the loss of an original balance, but the disclosure of reality’s true structure—irreducible imbalance.

From the first flicker of gesture around the prehistoric fire to the endless hum of machine speech in the digital age, this book traces the evolution of communication — and with it, the evolution of thought, culture, and consciousness itself. Language is the foundation of civilization: the matrix from which society, morality, and meaning arise. Yet it is also our most dangerous creation — capable of liberation or control, truth or deception, empathy or manipulation. Through language, we built worlds; through language, we can also destroy them.

To Know or Not to Know is a meditation on curiosity, doubt, and the fragile brilliance of awareness—a journey through the architectures of thought toward the stillness where understanding becomes reverence.

Unlock the profound intellect of René Descartes, the renowned philosopher whose ideas continue to shape our understanding of the world. "The Descartes Dictionary" invites you on an enlightening exploration of his most frequent words and ideas, providing a comprehensive guide to his revolutionary philosophy. With each entry, gain an in-depth understanding of Descartes' vocabulary and the profound implications behind his words. Engage with the complex interplay of reason and faith, and discover the profound implications of Descartes' views on God, creation, and divine providence.

Research is anchored by assumptions. How do we complete research—and why? This book—The Three Monkeys of Research—explores epistemology, ontology and methodology. Tara Brabazon explores how ideas become knowledge, and how arguments are verified, believed and disseminated to scholars, stakeholders and citizens.

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.”

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...

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.