Author: Michele Marsonet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135173430X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
This title was first published in 2003:This book explores the problem of realism, both metaphysical and scientific. Renowned specialists in the field - including Michael Devitt, David Papineau, Mark Sainsbury and Wesley Salmon - contribute new essays that shed new light on the main topics in the current realism/antirealism debate. Discussing a wide range of issues related to realism, both in metaphysics and in the philosophy of science, they address more specific questions including those concerning metaphysical realism, scientific realism, the relations between epistemology and ontology, causation, dispositions and personal identity, and the relations between science and common sense. Presenting a comprehensive overview of the problem of realism, as well as in-depth discussion of particular topics, this book offers valuable insights for both students and researchers in the field. It can also be used in undergraduate and graduate courses of philosophy.
Author: Athanassios Raftopoulos
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521198771
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
The chapters in the book address the problem of reference as it relates to perception and to debates about realism.
Author: Michael Davitt Bell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226042022
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Ever since William Dean Howells declared his "realism war" in the 1880s, literary historians have regarded the rise of "realism" and "naturalism" as the great development in American post-Civil War fiction. Yet there are many problems with this generalization. It is virtually impossible, for example, to extract from the novels and manifestoes of American writers of this period any consistent definitions of realism or naturalism as modes of literary representation. Rather than seek common traits in widely divergent "realist" and "naturalist" literary works, Michael Davitt Bell focuses here on the role that these terms played in the social and literary discourse of the 1880s and 1890s. Bell argues that in America, "realism" and "naturalism" never achieved the sort of theoretical rigor that they did in European literary debate. Instead, the function of these ideas in America was less aesthetic than ideological, promoting as "reality" a version of social normalcy based on radically anti-"literary" and heavily gendered assumptions. What effects, Bell asks, did ideas about realism and naturalism have on writers who embraced and resisted them? To answer this question, he devotes separate chapters to the work of Howells and Frank Norris (the principal American advocates of realism and naturalism in the 1880s and 1890s), Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Bell reveals that a chief function of claiming to be a realist or a naturalist was to provide assurance that one was a "real" man rather than an "effeminate" artist. Since the 1880s, Bell asserts, all serious American fiction writers have had to contend with this problematic conception of literary realism. The true story of the transformation of American fiction after the Civil War is the history of this contention - a history of individual accommodations, evasions, holding actions, and occasional triumphs.
Author: Peter Gratton
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441163670
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Speculative realism is one of the most talked-about movements in recent Continental philosophy. It has been discussed widely amongst the younger generation of Continental philosophers seeking new philosophical approaches and promises to form the cornerstone of future debates in the field. This book introduces the contexts out of which speculative realism has emerged and provides an overview of the major contributors and latest developments. It guides the reader through the important questions asked by realism (what can I know? what is reality?), examining philosophy's perennial questions in new ways. The book begins with the speculative realist's critique of 'correlationism', the view that we can never reach what is real beneath our language systems, our means for perception, or our finite manner of being-in-the-world. It goes on to critically review the work of the movement's most important thinkers, including Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, and Graham Harman, but also other important writers such as Jane Bennett and Catherine Malabou whose writings delineate alternative approaches to the real. It interrogates the crucial questions these thinkers have raised and concludes with a look toward the future of speculative realism, especially as it relates to the reality of time.
Author: K. Brad Wray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415210
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
Provides a spirited defence of anti-realism in philosophy of science. Shows the historical evidence and logical challenges facing scientific realism.
Author: Patrick Greenough
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199288885
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Is truth objective or relative? What exists independently of our minds? This book is about these two questions. The essays in its pages variously defend and critique answers to each, grapple over the proper methodology for addressing them, and wonder whether either question is worth pursuing. In so doing, they carry on a long and esteemed tradition - for our two questions are among the oldest of philosophical issues, and have vexed almost every major philosopher, from Plato, to Kant to Wittgenstein. Fifteen eminent contributors bring fresh perspectives, renewed energy and original answers to debates which have been the focus of a tremendous amount of interest in the last three decades both within philosophy and the culture at large.
Author: Alberto Blest Gana
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195107144
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 442
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Book Description
This is the story of a youngster who is entrusted to the household of a member of the Santiago elite. While living there he falls in love with his guardian's daughter, and their love provides a commentary about the mores of Chilean society.
Author: Darrell P. Rowbottom
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429666292
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Roughly, instrumentalism is the view that science is primarily, and should primarily be, an instrument for furthering our practical ends. It has fallen out of favour because historically influential variants of the view, such as logical positivism, suffered from serious defects. In this book, however, Darrell P. Rowbottom develops a new form of instrumentalism, which is more sophisticated and resilient than its predecessors. This position—‘cognitive instrumentalism’—involves three core theses. First, science makes theoretical progress primarily when it furnishes us with more predictive power or understanding concerning observable things. Second, scientific discourse concerning unobservable things should only be taken literally in so far as it involves observable properties or analogies with observable things. Third, scientific claims about unobservable things are probably neither approximately true nor liable to change in such a way as to increase in truthlikeness. There are examples from science throughout the book, and Rowbottom demonstrates at length how cognitive instrumentalism fits with the development of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century chemistry and physics, and especially atomic theory. Drawing upon this history, Rowbottom also argues that there is a kind of understanding, empirical understanding, which we can achieve without having true, or even approximately true, representations of unobservable things. In closing the book, he sets forth his view on how the distinction between the observable and unobservable may be drawn, and compares cognitive instrumentalism with key contemporary alternatives such as structural realism, constructive empiricism, and semirealism. Overall, this book offers a strong defence of instrumentalism that will be of interest to scholars and students working on the debate about realism in philosophy of science.
Author: James Wood
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374173401
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.
Author: Anjan Chakravartty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139468391
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
Scientific realism is the view that our best scientific theories give approximately true descriptions of both observable and unobservable aspects of a mind-independent world. Debates between realists and their critics are at the very heart of the philosophy of science. Anjan Chakravartty traces the contemporary evolution of realism by examining the most promising strategies adopted by its proponents in response to the forceful challenges of antirealist sceptics, resulting in a positive proposal for scientific realism today. He examines the core principles of the realist position, and sheds light on topics including the varieties of metaphysical commitment required, and the nature of the conflict between realism and its empiricist rivals. By illuminating the connections between realist interpretations of scientific knowledge and the metaphysical foundations supporting them, his book offers a compelling vision of how realism can provide an internally consistent and coherent account of scientific knowledge.
