Purposive Behaviour and Teleological Explanations
Author: Frank Honywill George
Publisher: CRC Press
Published: 1985
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9782881241109
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Frank Honywill George
Publisher: CRC Press
Published: 1985
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9782881241109
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Lowell A. Nissen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9780847686940
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this groundbreaking new study, Lowell Nissen explores the use of teleological language in the study of subjects such as behaviorism, negative feedback, and natural selection. He argues that all existing analyses fail to explain how teleological language can be used legitimately, and provides his own analysis in terms of intentionality.
Author: Elizabeth R. Valentine
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-28
Total Pages: 262
ISBN-13: 1134962649
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This comprehensive and up-to-date textbook gives a clear account of the different philosophical and theoretical approaches to psychology and discusses major philosophical questions such as free will and the relation between mind and body.
Author: Paul K. Moser
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1999-10-07
Total Pages: 282
ISBN-13: 0195351355
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Since the beginning of philosophy, philosophers have sought objective knowledge: knowledge of things whose existence does not depend on one's conceiving of them. This book uses lessons from debates over objective knowledge to characterize the kinds of reasons pertinent to philosophical and other theoretical views. It argues that we cannot meet skeptics' typical demands for nonquestion-begging support for claims to objective truth, and that therefore we should not regard our supporting reasons as resistant to skeptical challenges. One key lesson is that a constructive, explanatory approach to philosophy must change the subject from skeptic-resistant reasons to perspectival reasons arising from variable semantic commitments and instrumental, purpose-relative considerations. The book lays foundations for such a reorientation of philosophy, treating fundamental methodological issues in ontology, epistemology, the theory of meaning, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of practical rationality. It explains how certain perennial debates in philosophy rest not on genuine disagreement, but on conceptual diversity: talk about different matters. The book shows how acknowledgment of conceptual diversity can resolve a range of traditional disputes in philosophy. It also explains why philosophers need not anchor their discipline in the physicalism of the natural sciences.
Author: Lucien R Karhausen
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Published: 2023-07-28
Total Pages: 698
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →I was encouraged to read in the Introduction that it treated philosophy of medicine as part of the philosophy of science. But I was a little sceptical on reading that as such it is comprehensive. Couldn’t a comprehensive account be written only by an amazing polymath? But it turns out that you are that amazing polymath. You seem to have read everything and succeeded in producing an encyclopedia of all the issues. It will establish itself as an essential guide to the field. Professor Jonathan Glover
Author: Terence Irwin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1990
Total Pages: 721
ISBN-13: 0198242905
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book emphasises the systemic character of Aristotle's philosophy by examining questions on metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy and mind and ethics. His reliance on dialectic as the method of philosophy appears to conflict with the metaphysical realist view of his conclusions.
Author: Jacques Havet
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2019-06-04
Total Pages: 684
ISBN-13: 3111616584
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →No detailed description available for "Legal science, philosophy".
Author: J. Trusted
Publisher: Springer
Published: 1996-06-14
Total Pages: 212
ISBN-13: 0230375243
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →`...interesting, instructive and eminently readable.' - Mary J. Seller, The Expository Times The book shows how development in the biological sciences has been influenced by ethical, religious, social and philosophical assumptions as to the nature of life and mankind's place in the world. These beliefs have been presupposed in experimental investigations as well as in biological theories. The book is not intended as a comprehensive history of biology, rather some of that history is used as evidence of external influences. To this end there are accounts of past investigations (from the time of Aristotle to the present day).
Author: J.R. Maze
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-04
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13: 0429642962
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Originally published in 1983, this title is a determined attack on personality theories current at the time. It critically examines their basic motivational constructs and rejects any that invoke goal-seeking as being inescapably teleological and therefore unacceptable as natural science. Dr Maze argues the necessity for an unqualified determinism in psychology, yet one that incorporates the role of cognitive processes in the formation of behaviour. However, action theories which profess to offer a causal account of apparently goal-seeking or voluntarist behaviour by reference to the internal states of desire for a goal and a belief about how to get it are also dismissed. For the concept of belief as an internal state is argued to be a relativistic one, defined as being intrinsically related to its object. This is an incoherent notion and one which cannot specify anything acceptable as a causal state. The one motivational theory in dynamic psychology which offered a solution to these problems was Sigmund Freud’s formulation of his instinctual drive concept, defined as an innate physiological driving mechanism with preformed consummatory behaviours: his ‘specific actions’. But his hydraulic models have been patronisingly dismissed by modern neurologists, arguing that there are no ‘flush-toilets’ in the central nervous system. This book argues that such a glib dismissal is shallow minded, and that a reformulation of Freud’s concept in terms of modern neuroscience is readily available, though the problem of identifying the relevant structures remains formidable. The book is of immediate interest to all those seriously concerned with the springs and meanings of human behaviour, whether they be psychologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers or those generally interested in social and ethical theory.
Author: Alexander Miller
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-12-18
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13: 1317489640
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The rule-following debate, in its concern with the metaphysics and epistemology of linguistic meaning and mental content, goes to the heart of the most fundamental questions of contemporary philosophy of mind and language. This volume gathers together the most important contributions to the topic, including papers by Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Graeme Forbes, Warren Goldfarb, Paul Horwich, John McDowell, Colin McGinn, Ruth Millikan, Philip Pettit, George Wilson, Crispin Wright, and Jose Zalabardo. The debate has centred on Saul Kripke's reading of the rule-following sections in Wittgenstein and his consequent posing of a sceptical paradox that threatens our everyday notions of linguistic meaning and mental content. These essays are attempts to respond to this challenge and represent some of the most important work in contemporary theory of meaning. With an introductory essay and a comprehensive guide to further reading this book is an excellent resource for courses in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, Wittgenstein, and metaphysics, as well as for all philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists with interests in these areas.