Co-published with the University of Queensland Press. HPC holds rights in North America and U. S. Dependencies. Since its first publication in 1976, Alan Chalmers's highly regarded and widely read work--translated into eighteen languages--has become a classic introduction to the scientific method, known for its accessibility to beginners and its value as a resource for advanced students and scholars. In addition to overall improvements and updates inspired by Chalmers's experience as a teacher, comments from his readers, and recent developments (...) in the field, this fourth edition features an extensive chapter-long postscript that draws on his research into the history of atomism to illustrate important themes in the philosophy of science. Identifying the qualitative difference between knowledge of atoms as it figures in contemporary science and metaphysical speculations about atoms common in philosophy since the time of Democritus offers a revealing and instructive way to address the question at the heart of this groundbreaking work: What is this thing called science? (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay considers the nature of mourning and melancholia in light of Patrizio Guzman’s film, Nostalgia for the Light. It examines the position of three women dealing with the aftermath o...

¿Qué debemos pensar del sonado escenario cosmológico con materia oscura? ¿Se trata de un escenario revolucionario, en crisis, o el resultado de la ciencia normal? En el presente trabajo se argumenta que para describir al escenario favorito de la cosmología actual hace falta un concepto de una ciencia erigida sobre sus propias anomalías.

It has been argued, and not without emotional detachment, that the Holocaust is unlike other events in world and Jewish history. Those who offer such arguments also claim that comparisons between events of ethnic cleansing, mass murder and other sorts of criminal behavior are not meant to purvey a kind of moral one-upmanship. The suffering and harm in one instance is as morally repugnant as those in any other instance, whether it is a Jewish child gassed and cremated by the (...) Nazis, a black child lynched in the southern United States, an Armenian child deliberately poisoned in a Turkish hospital, a Ukrainian child starved to death in a Stalinist blockade, a Native American child shot to death by Conquistadors, a Rwandan child hacked to death, or a Bosnian child blown to pieces by a land mine or sniper. (shrink)

Countering the influential view of Critical Legal Studies that law is an incoherent mixture of conflicting political ideologies, this book forges a new paradigm for understanding the common law as being unified and systematic. Alan Brudner applies Hegel's legal and moral philosophy to fashion a comprehensive synthesis of the common law of property, contract, tort, and crime. At a time when there is a strong tendency among scholars to view the common law as essentially fragmentary, inconsistent, and contradictory, Brudner (...) suggests instead a coherence that synthesizes several interrelated dichotomies: good-centered and right-based legal paradigms, instrumental and non-instrumental conceptions of law, externalist and internalist interpretations of the common law system, and communitarian and individualist attempts to found the legal enterprise. Brudner covers genuinely new ground through an interpretation of the common law from the standpoint of Hegelian legal philosophy. His unifying notion of common law corresponds to Hegel's notion of Geist, suggesting a designation of the mutual dependence of the community and the atomistic self for their confirmation as ends. (shrink)

This text attempts to show why the academic split between ethics and social sciences has been disastrous and argues that advances in vigour and sensitivity are made possible by closing this artificial divide.

Plato’s Charmides suggests that there are really four notions that are deeply connected with one another, and in order to understand sôphrosunê we need to get a proper hold on them and their relation: these four notions are Knowledge of Ignorance, Self-Knowledge, Knowledge of the Good, and Knowledge of the Whole. My aim is to explore these four notions in two stages. First, I will try to explain Socrates’s notion of knowledge of ignorance, so that the nature and coherence of (...) this Socratic idea will come into focus, and shed some light on its connection to self-knowledge and knowledge of the good. Second, I will turn to explain what I call the origin (archê) or even “truth” of Socrates’s conception of sôphrosunê by examining the idea of the physician of the soul in Plato’s Charmides and Plato’s use of the dialogue form, and thereby make a connection to knowledge of the whole. I will show that seeing sôphrosunê as “whole-mindedness,” connects to Socrates’s description of our in-between state as human beings, and that the study of this “in-between-ness,” is the supremely insightful glimpse into Socrates and his philosophical activity (perhaps the very definition of it). (shrink)