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Author: William Harvey Krieger
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739112496
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
Can There Be a Philosophy of Archaeology? provides a historical and philosophical analysis of the rise and fall of the philosophical movement know as logical positivism, focusing on the effect of that movement on the budding science of archaeology. Significant problems resulted from the grafting of logical positivism onto what became known as processual, or new archaeology, and as a result of this failure, archaeologists distanced themselves from philosophers of science, believing that archaeology would be best served by a return to the dirt. By means of a thorough analysis of the real reasons for failures of logical empiricism and the new archaeology, as well as a series of archaeological case studies, Krieger shows the need for the resumption of dialogue and collaboration between the two groups. In an age where philosophers of science are just beginning to look beyond the standard examples of scientific practice, this book demonstrates that archaeological science can hold its own with other sciences and will be of interest to archaeologists and philosophers of science alike.
Author: William Harvey Krieger
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739112496
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
Can There Be a Philosophy of Archaeology? provides a historical and philosophical analysis of the rise and fall of the philosophical movement know as logical positivism, focusing on the effect of that movement on the budding science of archaeology. Significant problems resulted from the grafting of logical positivism onto what became known as processual, or new archaeology, and as a result of this failure, archaeologists distanced themselves from philosophers of science, believing that archaeology would be best served by a return to the dirt. By means of a thorough analysis of the real reasons for failures of logical empiricism and the new archaeology, as well as a series of archaeological case studies, Krieger shows the need for the resumption of dialogue and collaboration between the two groups. In an age where philosophers of science are just beginning to look beyond the standard examples of scientific practice, this book demonstrates that archaeological science can hold its own with other sciences and will be of interest to archaeologists and philosophers of science alike.
Author: Edward Jayne
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0761869670
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
An Archaeology of Disbelief traces the origin of secular philosophy to pre-Socratic Greek philosophers who proposed a physical universe without supernatural intervention. Some mentioned the Homeric gods, but others did not. Atomists and Sophists identified themselves as agnostics if not outright atheists, and in reaction Plato featured transcendent spiritual authority. However, Aristotle offered a physical cosmology justified by evidence from a variety of scientific fields. He also revisited many pre-Socratic assumptions by proposing that existence consists of mass in motion without temporal or spatial boundaries. In many ways his analysis anticipated Newton’s concept of gravity, Darwin’s concept of evolution, and Einstein’s concept of relativity. Aristotle’s follower Strato invented scientific experimentation. He also inspired the pursuit of science and advocated the rejection of all beliefs unconfirmed by science. Carneades in turn distorted Aristotelian logic to ridicule the god concept, and Lucretius proposed a grand secular cosmology in his epic De Rerum Natura. In the two dialogues, Academica and De Natura Deorum, Cicero provided a useful retrospective assessment of this entire movement. The Roman Empire and advent of Christianity effectively terminated Greek philosophy except for Platonism reinvented as stoicism. Widespread destruction of libraries eliminated most early secular texts, and the Inquisition played a major role in preventing secular inquiry. Aquinas later justified Aristotle in light of Christian doctrine, and secularism’s revival was postponed until the seventeenth century’s paradoxical reaction against his interpretation of Aristotle. Today it nevertheless remains possible to trace western civilization’s remarkable secular achievement to its initial breakthrough in ancient Greece. The purpose of this book is accordingly to trace the origin and development of its secular thought through close examination of texts that still exist today in light of Aristotle’s writings.
Author: Anton Killin
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030610527
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
This volume explores various themes at the intersection of archaeology and philosophy: inference and theory; interdisciplinary connections; cognition, language and normativity; and ethical issues. Showcasing this heterogeneity, its scope ranges from the method of analogical inference to the evolution of the human mind; from conceptual issues in assessing the health of past populations to the ethics of cultural heritage tourism. It probes the archaeological record for evidence of numeracy, curiosity and creativity, and social complexity. Its contributors comprise an interdisciplinary cluster of philosophers, archaeologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, from a variety of career stages, of whom many are leading experts in their fields. Chapter 3 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Author: Robert Chapman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317576233
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 383
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Book Description
How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence? Material Evidence takes a resolutely case-based approach to this question, exploring instances of exemplary practice, key challenges, instructive failures, and innovative developments in the use of archaeological data as evidence. The goal is to bring to the surface the wisdom of practice, teasing out norms of archaeological reasoning from evidence. Archaeologists make compelling use of an enormously diverse range of material evidence, from garbage dumps to monuments, from finely crafted artifacts rich with cultural significance to the detritus of everyday life and the inadvertent transformation of landscapes over the long term. Each contributor to Material Evidence identifies a particular type of evidence with which they grapple and considers, with reference to concrete examples, how archaeologists construct evidential claims, critically assess them, and bring them to bear on pivotal questions about the cultural past. Historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, and science studies scholars are increasingly interested in working with material things as objects of inquiry and as evidence – and they acknowledge on all sides just how challenging this is. One of the central messages of the book is that close analysis of archaeological best practice can yield constructive guidelines for practice that have much to offer archaeologists and those in related fields.
Author: Robert Hahn
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 9780791491546
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Anaximander and the Architects opens a previously unexplored avenue into Presocratic philosophy—the technology of monumental architecture. The evidence, coming directly from sixth century B.C.E. building sites and bypassing Aristotle, shows how the architects and their projects supplied their Ionian communities with a sprouting vision of natural order governed by structural laws. Their technological innovations and design techniques formed the core of an experimental science and promoted a rational, not mythopoetical, discourse central to our understanding of the context in which early Greek philosophy emerged. Anaximander's prose book and his rationalizing mentality are illuminated in surprising ways by appeal to the ongoing, extraordinary projects of the archaic architects and their practical techniques.
Author: Gary Gutting
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521366984
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
An introduction to the critical interpretation of the work of Michael Foucault.
Author: Merrilee H. Salmon
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 148329577X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
Philosophy and Archaeology
Author: Robert Hahn
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438464916
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
Bringing together geometry and philosophy, this book undertakes a strikingly original study of the origins and significance of the Pythagorean theorem. Thales, whom Aristotle called the first philosopher and who was an older contemporary of Pythagoras, posited the principle of a unity from which all things come, and back into which they return upon dissolution. He held that all appearances are only alterations of this basic unity and there can be no change in the cosmos. Such an account requires some fundamental geometric figure out of which appearances are structured. Robert Hahn argues that Thales came to the conclusion that it was the right triangle: by recombination and repackaging, all alterations can be explained from that figure. This idea is central to what the discovery of the Pythagorean theorem could have meant to Thales and Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE. With more than two hundred illustrations and figures, Hahn provides a series of geometric proofs for this lost narrative, tracing it from Thales to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans who followed, and then finally to Plato's Timaeus. Uncovering the philosophical motivation behind the discovery of the theorem, Hahn's book will enrich the study of ancient philosophy and mathematics alike.
Author: Flavia Padovani
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319143492
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
This highly multidisciplinary collection discusses an increasingly important topic among scholars in science and technology studies: objectivity in science. It features eleven essays on scientific objectivity from a variety of perspectives, including philosophy of science, history of science, and feminist philosophy. Topics addressed in the book include the nature and value of scientific objectivity, the history of objectivity, and objectivity in scientific journals and communities. Taken individually, the essays supply new methodological tools for theorizing what is valuable in the pursuit of objective knowledge and for investigating its history. The essays offer many starting points, while suggesting new avenues of research. Taken collectively, the essays exemplify the very virtues of objectivity that they theorize—in reading them together, the reader can sense various anxieties about the dangerously subjective in our age and locate commonalities of concern as well as differences of approach. As a result, the volume offers an expansive vision of a research community seeking a communal understanding of its own methods and its own epistemic anxieties, struggling to enunciate the key problems of knowledge of our time and offer insight into how to overcome them.
Author: Karl Widerquist
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748678670
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
How modern philosophers use and perpetuate myths about prehistoryThe state of nature, the origin of property, the origin of government, the primordial nature of inequality and war why do political philosophers talk so much about the Stone Age? And are they talking about a Stone Age that really happened, or is it just a convenient thought experiment to illustrate their points?Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall take a philosophical look at the origin of civilisation, examining political theories to show how claims about prehistory are used. Drawing on the best available evidence from archaeology and anthropology, they show that much of what we think we know about human origins comes from philosophers imagination, not scientific investigation.Key FeaturesShows how modern political theories employ ambiguous factual claims about prehistoryBrings archaeological and anthropological evidence to bear on those claimsTells the story of human origins in a way that reveals many commonly held misconceptions
