検索キーワード： 認識論

The universe was perfectly content until someone arrived and began to ask why. Stars burned, rivers ran, and matter rearranged itself without complaint—until consciousness appeared and demanded an explanation that was never going to come. From that single, fateful encounter, the absurd was born.

For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by peace and freedom from fear, the absence of pain, and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that pleasure and pain are the measures of what is good and evil; death is the end of both body and soul and should therefore not be feared; the gods neither reward nor punish humans; the universe is infinite and eternal; and events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms.

Everyone remembers Denis Diderot as the man who tried to squeeze all the knowledge in the world into one enormous alphabetical order. Almost no one notices where he actually hid his most dangerous ideas. Not inside the entries, where the censors were looking, but in the invisible links between them. A page on cannibals that quietly points the reader toward a page on Holy Communion. Each entry innocent on its own. Together, a small controlled explosion. This book argues that Diderot's real invention was not a reference book at all.

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...

Is causation a fundamental principle that orders the universe, or a construct invented by human beings? What does it mean to exist? In this provocative audio series, Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, creator and host of the hit PBS series Closer to Truth, probes causality, existence, and other heady philosophical topics in intimate conversations with 13 of the world’s greatest thinkers. Known for his erudite yet down-to-earth interviews, Kuhn takes you on a fascinating and accessible journey into the world of philosophy.

Conjectures and Refutations is one of Karl Popper’s most wide-ranging and popular works, notable not only for its acute insights into the way scientific knowledge grows, but also for applying those insights to politics and to history. It provides one of the clearest and most accessible...

Best-selling historian and philosopher Will Durant devoted his entire life to studying the most significant eras, individuals, and achievements of human history. Here is a summation of Durant's work, as he presents the best of world history. Filled with Durant's renowned wit, knowledge, and unique ability to explain events in simple and exciting terms, it is a concise liberal arts education.

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.

This collection brings together history, science, philosophy and comedy to explore our age-old search for meaning. We live in an age of self-improvement and self-examination - lifehacking, wellbeing, self-care, mindfulness retreats - but this seemingly very modern phenomenon is a pursuit that...

The basic principles that Bergson articulates, especially his way of thinking about reality as a dynamic process and his view of human beings as creative and evolving, should be helpful to anyone who seeks to go beyond simply dealing with the practical demands of daily life and consider the nature of things. Of special importance is Bergson’s claim that it is both possible and necessary to know from the inside rather than confining our attention to external perspectives and points of view. Intuition is able to get beyond what is relative and place us inside reality.

One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind examines where the self comes from – and how our selves can exist in the minds of others. “I Am a Strange Loop is a work of rigorous thinking, but it’s also an extraordinary tribute to the memory of romantic love: The Year of...

Our beliefs constitute a large part of our knowledge of the world. We have beliefs about objects, about culture, about the past, and about the future. We have beliefs about other people, and we believe that they have beliefs as well. We use beliefs to predict, to explain, to create, to console, to entertain. Some of our beliefs we call theories, and we are extraordinarily creative at constructing them. Theories of quantum mechanics, evolution, and relativity are examples.

Plagued with doubt and uncertainty in sensory knowledge, Descartes is struck with the idea that everything he knows is false. He considers the possibility that he has been deceived by an 'evil demon' and is left with nothing to lean on, until he arrives at the phrase 'cogito ergo sum' ('I think, therefore I am'). Among the most quoted philosophical works in history, Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on the Method together display the full workings of Descartes' skeptical method and the formation of his famous phrase.

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.

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to this succinct account of the philosophy of Wittgenstein in just one hour. Ludwig Wittgenstein saw himself as ‘the last philosopher’. In his view, philosophy in the traditional sense was finished. A superb logician, Wittgenstein distrusted language and...

We do not see reality as it is. We see reality as we are. Imagine standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean. The wind on your face, the roar of the surf, and the deep blue of the water feel immediate, tangible, and unquestionably real. But how much of that experience belongs to the world itself, and how much belongs entirely to your brain? The physical universe exists independently of us, but our biological access to it is permanently indirect. The human mind does not present raw reality; it builds a highly customized model.

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.

How do we tell the difference between knowledge and a story that merely sounds like knowledge? For most of the twentieth century, one answer dominated. A claim deserves the name scientific, Karl Popper argued, not because it can be proven, but because it can be proven wrong. A theory that forbids nothing, that bends to fit any outcome, explains everything and therefore tells us nothing. Real science sticks its neck out. It risks refutation. It can be killed by a single stubborn fact.

For centuries, consciousness was the sacred ground of philosophy and science—the one thing that supposedly separated thinking beings from mere mechanisms. Then came artificial intelligence, and everything changed. AI systems reason, create, converse, and solve problems that once required the finest human minds. Yet when asked if they are conscious, they deny it.

Richard Rorty told the twentieth century something it did not want to hear: that there is no final vocabulary, no last word, no floor beneath our descriptions of the world. He called the person who understands this an ironist, and he argued that such a person could still care about cruelty, still stand with the humiliated, still build a decent society — not on a foundation, because there is none, but on a refusal. His critics replied that he had talked himself out of the right to object to anything.