Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts

Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts PDF

Author: Katerina Ierodiakonou

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-06-09

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9004201769

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By analysing thought experiments from various periods in the history of philosophy and science, the essays in this volume seek to clarify how thought experiments work, what their limits are, and what their conceptualisation could be.

Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts

Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts PDF

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-06-09

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 9004201777

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By analysing thought experiments from various periods in the history of philosophy and science, the essays in this volume seek to clarify how thought experiments work, what their limits are, and what their conceptualisation could be.

The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments

The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments PDF

Author: Michael T Stuart

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-20

Total Pages: 709

ISBN-13: 1351705512

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Thought experiments are a means of imaginative reasoning that lie at the heart of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the modern era, and they also play central roles in a range of fields, from physics to politics. The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments is an invaluable guide and reference source to this multifaceted subject. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion covers the following important areas: · the history of thought experiments, from antiquity to the trolley problem and quantum non-locality; · thought experiments in the humanities, arts, and sciences, including ethics, physics, theology, biology, mathematics, economics, and politics; · theories about the nature of thought experiments; · new discussions concerning the impact of experimental philosophy, cross-cultural comparison studies, metaphilosophy, computer simulations, idealization, dialectics, cognitive science, the artistic nature of thought experiments, and metaphysical issues. This broad ranging Companion goes backwards through history and sideways across disciplines. It also engages with philosophical perspectives from empiricism, rationalism, naturalism, skepticism, pluralism, contextualism, and neo-Kantianism to phenomenology. This volume will be valuable for anyone studying the methods of philosophy or any discipline that employs thought experiments, as well as anyone interested in the power and limits of the mind.

Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science

Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science PDF

Author: Lorenzo Magnani

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-05-22

Total Pages: 1180

ISBN-13: 3319305263

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This handbook offers the first comprehensive reference guide to the interdisciplinary field of model-based reasoning. It highlights the role of models as mediators between theory and experimentation, and as educational devices, as well as their relevance in testing hypotheses and explanatory functions. The Springer Handbook merges philosophical, cognitive and epistemological perspectives on models with the more practical needs related to the application of this tool across various disciplines and practices. The result is a unique, reliable source of information that guides readers toward an understanding of different aspects of model-based science, such as the theoretical and cognitive nature of models, as well as their practical and logical aspects. The inferential role of models in hypothetical reasoning, abduction and creativity once they are constructed, adopted, and manipulated for different scientific and technological purposes is also discussed. Written by a group of internationally renowned experts in philosophy, the history of science, general epistemology, mathematics, cognitive and computer science, physics and life sciences, as well as engineering, architecture, and economics, this Handbook uses numerous diagrams, schemes and other visual representations to promote a better understanding of the concepts. This also makes it highly accessible to an audience of scholars and students with different scientific backgrounds. All in all, the Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science represents the definitive application-oriented reference guide to the interdisciplinary field of model-based reasoning.

Current and Historical Debates in Social Sciences: Field Studies and Analysis

Current and Historical Debates in Social Sciences: Field Studies and Analysis PDF

Author: Emrah Doğan

Publisher: IJOPEC PUBLICATION

Published: 2020-10-24

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1913809099

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Historical and current debates in social sciences mirror the reality of human existence. However, the reality and facts of human existence are also different from each other. At the same time, these phenomena in social sciences are multidimensional. In this sense, some of the human cases were included in this study. Besides, historical and current analyses in this study have been examined in other social science studies. The multidimensional perspective of the field of social science encourages re-examining the topics covered and revealing different trends. In this context, this study aimed to clarify light on the dark points in the field of social science by reconsidering the discussed or not discussed issues.

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible PDF

Author: Vlad Petre Glăveanu

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-01-25

Total Pages: 1812

ISBN-13: 3030909131

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The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible represents a comprehensive resource for researchers and practitioners interested in an emerging multidisciplinary area within psychology and the social sciences: the study of how we engage with and cultivate the possible within self, society and culture. Far from being opposed either to the actual or the real, the possible engages with concrete facts and experiences, with the result of transforming them. This encyclopedia examines the notion of the possible and the concepts associated with it from standpoints within psychology, philosophy, sociology, neuroscience and logic, as well as multidisciplinary fields of research including anticipation studies, future studies, complexity theory and creativity research. Presenting multiple perspectives on the possible, the authors consider the distinct social, cultural and psychological processes - e.g., imagination, counterfactual thinking, wonder, play, inspiration, and many others - that define our engagement with new possibilities in domains as diverse as the arts, design and business.

Time and Cosmology in Plato and the Platonic Tradition

Time and Cosmology in Plato and the Platonic Tradition PDF

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-02-14

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9004504699

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This book assembles an international team of scholars to move forward the study of Plato’s conception of time, to find fresh insights for interpreting his cosmology, and to reimagine the Platonic tradition.

Medieval Allegory as Epistemology

Medieval Allegory as Epistemology PDF

Author: Marco Nievergelt

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-03-21

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 0192665839

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In Medieval Allegory as Epistemology, Marco Nievergelt argues that late medieval dream-poetry was able to use the tools of allegorical fiction to explore a set of complex philosophical questions regarding the nature of human knowledge. The focus is on three of the most widely read and influential poems of the later Middle Ages: Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose; the Pélerinages trilogy of Guillaume de Deguileville; and William Langland's vision of Piers Plowman in its various versions. All three poets grapple with a collection of shared, closely related epistemological problems that emerged in Western Europe during the thirteenth century, in the wake of the reception of the complete body of Aristotle's works on logic and the natural sciences. This study therefore not only examines the intertextual and literary-historical relations linking the work of the three poets, but takes their shared interest in cognition and epistemology as a starting point to assess their wider cultural and intellectual significance in the context of broader developments in late medieval philosophy of mind, knowledge, and language. Vernacular literature more broadly played an extremely important role in lending an enlarged cultural resonance to philosophical ideas developed by scholastic thinkers, but it is also shown that allegorical narrative could prompt philosophical speculation on its own terms, deliberately interrogating the dominance and authority of scholastic discourses and institutions by using first-person fictional narrative as a tool for intellectual speculation.

What If?

What If? PDF

Author: Nicholas Rescher

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-06

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1351321862

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Thought experimentation has been a staple of philosophical methodology since classical antiquity, when Xenophanes of Colophon speculated that if horses had gods, they would be equine in form. Nicholas Rescher's What If? undertakes a systematic survey of the role and utility of thought experiments in philosophy. After surveying the historical issues, Rescher examines the principles involved, and explains the conditions under which thought experimentation can validly yield instructive results in philosophy. The reader gains understanding of the differences between scientific and philosophical experiments. What If? begins by examining the nature of thought experiments. It presents an overview of how thought experiments have figured in natural science and in historical studies, before moving on to examine how they function as an instrument of philosophical inquiry. After examining thought experiments from the pre-Socratics to the present day, Rescher turns from history to analysis, and examines the modes of reasoning involved in the use of speculative hypotheses in philosophical problem solving. He shows the limitations of speculative ontology, showing that thought experimentation can lead readily to paradox in a way that increasingly diminishes its usefulness. The book concludes by arguing and illustrating how and when it becomes pointless to push speculation, or thought experimentation beyond the limits of intelligibility and cogent sense. Among the principal features of Rescher's book is its elaborate analysis of the appropriate conditions for philosophical thought experimentation. Its cardinal thesis is that there indeed are limits to the appropriateness of this important methodological resource and that transgressing these limits destroys the prospect of drawing any valid lessons for the philosophical enterprise. What If? will be of interest to philosophers, students of philosophy, and theorists of logic and reasoning.