Las "Investigaciones Lógicas" han marcado la filosofía contemporánea como quizá ningún otro libro lo haya hecho. Sin embargo, la edición original se ha interpretado casi siempre desde la segunda, es decir, desde un estadio posterior y esencialmente diferente del desarrollo de la escuela fenomenológica. Edmund Husserl, en efecto, no permitió que su gran obra se reeditara sin modificarla muy hondamente, de acuerdo con las tesis nuevas de la fenomenología transcendental. Tampoco consintió traducciones que no se hicieran sobre la edición corregida. (...) De este modo, el contenido real de las primitivas Investigaciones se olvidó. No se tuvo presente en su justa medida hasta qué punto la psicognosia y la metafísica de Franz Brentano habían influido en Husserl. Este libro permite leer los Prolegómenos a la Lógica Pura tal como aparecieron primitivamente. Además, ofrece ya una clave hermenéutica global sobre el conjunto de las Investigaciones, cuya traducción comentada queda reservada para un volumen futuro. (shrink)

How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the “science wars” over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring patterns divided into two main sets of disciplines. Genetic influences were emphasized (...) in the evolutionary social sciences, evolutionary humanities, psychology, empirical study of the arts, philosophy, economics, and political science. Environmental influences were emphasized in most of the humanities disciplines and in anthropology, sociology, education, and women's or gender studies. Confidence in scientific explanation correlated positively with emphasizing genetic influences on behavior, and negatively with emphasizing environmental influences. Knowing the current actual landscape of belief should help scholars avoid sterile debates and ease the way toward fruitful collaborations with neighboring disciplines. (shrink)

There is growing interest in developing co-operation between adult literacy researchers and practitioners to further research skills and approaches. Canada’s National Literacy Secretariat has recently initiated a series of policy debates that suggested several possibilities: targeted research grants, research internships for practitioners, practical sabbaticals for researchers, support for networking between literacy researchers and practitioners, and joint seminars and workshops between researchers and practitioners. A common theme throughout these discussions is the need to develop critical thinking about both collaborative research and (...) adult literacy. In this paper we discuss two collaborative initiatives between university-based researchers and adult literacy groups in the provinces of British Columbia and Ontario. Each project was based on the notion of “research circles” and specifically designed to enhance research capacity and critical thinking about literacy research. (shrink)

[Edited from Conclusion section:] We have looked at various challenging issues to do with getting connectionism to cope with high-level cognitive activities such a reasoning and natural language understanding. The issues are to do with various facets of generalization that are not commonly noted. We have been concerned in particular with the special forms these issues take in the arena of propositional attitude processing. The main problems we have looked at are: (1) The need to construct explicit representations of generalizations, (...) not just generalize correctly to individual cases; (2) The need to be able to match two or more complex short-term information structures, to enable rapid generalization from recent examples rather than from long-term memories; (3) The need to represent and reason with anomalous combinations of concepts; (4) The need to perform embedded reasoning. This presents special problems for systems using non-concatenative representations (as in mainstream connectionist approaches). We also touched on vague quantification in attitude report complements. Neither this topic nor that of analogies between short-term structures (point 2) has been adequately addressed in the symbolic framework, let alone in connectionism. -/- The opportunities and problems covered are put forward as things worth being optimistic about or pessimistic about, respectively. They are not put forward as decisive arguments for or against connectionism. The hope is that this chapter contributes to a greater understanding of the connectionist/symbolist gap by presenting some unusual issues and by throwing new light on some well known ones. (shrink)

As genomic science has evolved, so have policy and practice debates about how to describe and evaluate the ways in which genomic information is treated for individuals, institutions, and society. The term genetic exceptionalism, describing the concept that genetic information is special or unique, and specifically different from other kinds of medical information, has been utilized widely, but often counterproductively in these debates. We offer genomic contextualism as a new term to frame the characteristics of genomic science in the debates. (...) Using stasis theory to draw out the important connection between definitional issues and resulting policies, we argue that the framework of genomic contextualism is better suited to evaluating genomics and its policy-relevant features to arrive at more productive discussion and resolve policy debates. (shrink)

Americans seem to fear that their society is breaking apart, but how accurate is this portrayal and how justified is the fear? Introducing a balanced viewpoint into this intense debate, John Hall and Charles Lindholm demonstrate that such alarm is unfounded. Here they explore the institutional structures of American society, emphasizing its ability to accommodate difference and defuse conflict. The culture, too, comes under scrutiny: influenced by Calvinistic beliefs, Americans place faith in the individual but demand high moral commitment (...) to the community. Broad in scope and ambition, this short book draws a realistic portrait of a society that is among the most powerful and stable in the world, yet is perennially shaken by self-doubt. (shrink)

Ernest Gellner was a multilingual polymath who set the agenda in the study of nationalism and the sociology of Islam for an entire generation of academics and students. This definitive biography follows his trajectory from his early years in Prague, Paris and England to international success as a philosopher and public intellectual. Known both for his highly integrated philosophy of modernity and for combining a respect for nationalism with an appreciation for science, Gellner was passionate in his defence of reason (...) against every for of relativism. (shrink)

Schumaker (philosophy, science and technology department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) examines how the terms of posture encompass all the major disciplines and investigates a variety of philosophical topics: abstract thought, ...

Some irrational numbers are "random" in a sense which implies that no algorithm can compute their decimal expansions to an arbitrarily high degree of accuracy. This feature of (most) irrational numbers has been claimed to be at the heart of the deterministic, but chaotic, behavior exhibited by many nonlinear dynamical systems. In this paper, a number of now classical chaotic systems are shown to remain chaotic when their domains are restricted to the computable real numbers, providing counterexamples to the above (...) claim. More fundamentally, the randomness view of chaos is shown to be based upon a confusion between a chaotic function on a phase space and its numerical representation in Rn. (shrink)

Critical study of the Naiṣkarmyasiddhi, compendium of Advaita philosophy of Sureśvarācārya.

This chapter argues that scientific and philosophical progress in our understanding of the living world requires that we abandon a metaphysics of things in favour of one centred on processes. We identify three main empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology: metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence. We show how taking a processual stance in the philosophy of biology enables us to ground existing critiques of essentialism, reductionism, and mechanicism, all of which have traditionally been associated with (...) substance ontology. We illustrate the consequences of embracing an ontology of processes in biology by considering some of its implications for physiology, genetics, evolution, and medicine. And we attempt to locate the subsequent chapters of the book in relation to the position we defend. (shrink)

"The book provides an excellent historical summary of the debates over continental drift theory in this century." —Contemporary Sociology "This is a useful discussion of the way that science works. The book will be of value to philosophers of science... " —Choice "... will find an important place in university and department libraries, and will interest afficionados of the factual and intellectual history of the earth sciences." —Terra Nova "... an excellent core analysis... " —The Times Higher Education Supplement "... (...) an ambitious and important contribution to the new sociology of science." —American Journal of Sociology "... Stewart's book is a noble effort, an interesting and readable discussion, and another higher notch on the scoreboard of critical scholarship that deserves wide examination and close attention." —Geophysics This fascinating book describes the rise and fall and rebirth of continental drift theory in this century. It uses the recent revolution in geoscientinsts' beliefs about the earth to examine questions such as, How does scientific knowledge develop and change? The book also explores how well different perspectives help us to understand revolutionary change in science. (shrink)

Previously published in The mountain path, quarterly published from Sri Ramanansramam.

Religious discourse uses ordinary language in an extraordinary way. This book surveys Western and Indian discussions of the nature and aspects of religious discourse. It presents the first cross-cultural elucidation of Advaita Vedānta as religious discourse.