Bøger i SpringerBriefs in Philosophy serien

This book presents a new, powerful, and practical way of making final decisions on the hard, complex, uncertain problems of life and work. What if you have looked at the data, talked with trusted colleagues, and applied all the relevant managerial and ethical frameworks, but you still don't know what is right. How should you make your final decision?This crucial question is rarely asked or answered. And some standard answers ¿ follow your moral compass, your conscience, or your values ¿ offer more inspiration than practical guidance. This book argues that, when we make final, hard decisions, we learn what is right by defining ¿ personally ¿ what is right. We find moral clarity by creating it. The book presents a fresh, challenging, and practical perspective on our hardest decisions. It offers a new conceptual approach for teachers and scholars and practical guidance for leaders and managers.

This book examines phenomenal conservatism, one of the most influential and promising internalist conceptions of non-inferential justification debated in current epistemology and philosophy of mind.

A Summary of Scientific Method is a brief description of what makes science scientific. A Summary of Scientific Method provides a clear, intuitive, and accurate model of scientific method.

Panpsychism claims that mentality is ubiquitous to reality, and in combination with dual-aspect monism it claims that anything, from fundamental particles to rocks, trees, and human animals, has two aspects: a physical aspect and a mental aspect.

This book offers the first systematic reading of Plato's Laches in English after three decades of scholarly silence. It rekindles interest in this much-neglected dialogue by providing a fresh discussion of the major issues that arise from the text. Among these issues, pride of place is taken by the virtue of courage, for the definition of which Socrates is depicted as engaging in some long-winded dialectical exchange with his interlocutors. Yet, although there is no room for doubt that the Laches is Plato's most explicit treatment of courage, this dialogue ends in perplexity and is thus traditionally thought of as an unsuccessful attempt to define what courage is. The present study challenges this suggestion. This book proposes a new paradigm for the interpretation of Plato's Laches. In fact, it constitutes the first systematic attempt to study the dialogue in light of the idea that its composition could well have formed part of Plato's overall plan to establish a well-defined and rigorous justification of the life of philosophical inquiryThe book will be of key interest to classicists, philosophers, and intellectual historians, but will also appeal to students or anyone interested in ancient Greek philosophy.

This book argues that two great problems of learning confront humanity: learning about the nature of the universe and about ourselves and other living things as a part of it;

This work breaks new ground by carefully distinguishing the concepts of belief, confirmation, and evidence and then integrating them into a better understanding of personal and scientific epistemologies. It outlines a probabilistic framework in which subjective features of personal knowledge and objective features of public knowledge have their true place. It also discusses the bearings of some statistical theorems on both formal and traditional epistemologies while showing how some of the existing paradoxes in both can be resolved with the help of this framework.This book has two central aims: First, to make precise a distinction between the concepts of confirmation and evidence and to argue that failure to recognize this distinction is the source of certain otherwise intractable epistemological problems. The second goal is to demonstrate to philosophers the fundamental importance of statistical and probabilistic methods, at stake in the uncertain conditions in which for the most part we lead our lives, not simply to inferential practice in science, where they are now standard, but to epistemic inference in other contexts as well. Although the argument is rigorous, it is also accessible. No technical knowledge beyond the rudiments of probability theory, arithmetic, and algebra is presupposed, otherwise unfamiliar terms are always defined and a number of concrete examples are given. At the same time, fresh analyses are offered with a discussion of statistical and epistemic reasoning by philosophers. This book will also be of interest to scientists and statisticians looking for a larger view of their own inferential techniques.The book concludes with a technical appendix which introduces an evidential approach to multi-model inference as an alternative to Bayesian model averaging.

In philosophy, ongoing debates about the nature of biological information, intentionality, health and disease, mechanism, and even biological trait classification, are closely related to debates about biological functions.

This book discusses the relationship between the philosophy of science and philosophy of engineering, and demonstrates how philosophers of engineering design as well as design researchers can benefit from the conceptual toolkit that the philosophy of science has to offer.

This book presents an overview of postmodernism and its social indicators, and of the postmodern condition in consciousness as an indicator of its modification and development. The book also discusses various forms of multiculturalism, including multiculturalism as multiple modernities and plural modernities, and non-Western contemporaneity.

This book deals with philosophical aspects regarding the perception of spatial relationships in two and three-dimensional art.

They argue that instead of reading Apeiron as a noun, it should be considered an adjective, with reference to the term phusis (nature), and that the phrase phusis apeiros may express the boundless power of nature, responsible for all creation and growth.

This book is open access under a CC BY license. This book offers a unique and insightful analysis of Western and Middle Eastern concepts of dignity and illustrates them with examples of everyday life. Dignity in the 21st Century - Middle East and West is unique and insightful for a range of reasons.

This book argues that Kant develops a theory of perception in the Critique of Judgment from which one can redefine his entire project, viewing and using aesthetics as its backbone, from the transcendental aesthetic of the First Critique to the Critique of Taste in the Third.

This book analyses an inconsistency within epistemic contextualism known as the factivity problem.

This book provides a systematic analysis of the ethical implications of traditional and complementary medicine (T&CM), focusing on pragmatic solutions.

The view advanced here is that philosophical materialism and minimalist assumptions about adaptation serve Darwinian psychology better than the more popular alternative view that relies on cognitive dualism and propositional-attitude psychology to formulate evolutionary psychology theory.

This book is a contribution to the understanding of psychosomatic health problems.

The second chapter (How to Study Scientific Explanation?) scrutinizes the working-method of three important philosophers of explanation, Carl Hempel, Philip Kitcher and Wesley Salmon and shows what went wrong.

The ancient Chinese scholars are fond of applying the Yin and Yang diagram to correlate almost everything. This book continues that tradition and uses the model to study other non-dialectical theories and models.

This book provides an introductory overview to the social debate over enhancement technologies with an overview of the transhumanists' call to bypass human nature and conservationists' argument in defense of it.

Paradoxes provide a vehicle for exposing misinterpretations and misapplications of accepted principles. for instance, startling claims concerning human destiny and the nature of reality are directly related to fallacious reasoning in a betting paradox, and a problem analyzed in philosophy journals is resolved by means of a computer program.

This book carries out an epistemological analysis of the decision, including a critical analysis through the continuous reference to an interdisciplinary approach including a synthesis of philosophical approaches, biology and neuroscience.

Risk has become one of the main topics in fields as diverse as engineering, medicine and economics, and it is also studied by social scientists, psychologists and legal scholars. The Essentials of Risk Theory will be a helpful starting point for all risk scholars who are interested in broadening and deepening their current perspectives.

The aim of the book is to argue for the restoration of theoretical and practical reason to economics. Institutions allow us to deliberate on and guide our decisions about capabilities, through the use of practical reason.

This volume offers a new understanding of Titchener's influential system of psychology popularly known as introspectionism, structuralism and as classical introspective psychology.

Explores the practical applicability of the philosophy of science to scientific research, but also considers its relevance to practice within the realms of technology, design, crafts, and even within the world of arts and the humanities.

This book explains the first published consistency proof of PA. A notable aspect of the proof is the representation of ordinal numbers that was developed by Gentzen. The topic should interest researchers and students who work on proof theory, history of proof theory or Hilbert's program and who do not mind reading mathematical texts.