Being and time : introduction -- What is metaphysics? -- On the essence of truth -- The origin of the work of art -- Letter on humanism -- Modern science, metaphysics, and mathematics -- The question concerning technology -- Building dwelling thinking -- What calls for thinking? -- The way to language -- The end of philosophy and the task of thinking.

Written by a team of distinguished scholars, this is an authoritative and comprehensive history of Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings to the present day. Illustrated with over 150 color and black-and-white pictures, chosen to illuminate and complement the text, this lively and readable work is an ideal introduction to philosophy for anyone interested in the history of ideas. From Plato's Republic and St. Augustine's Confessions through Marx's Capital and Sartre's Being and Nothingness, the extraordinary philosophical dialogue between great Western (...) minds has flourished unabated through the ages. Dazzling in its genius and breadth, the long line of European and American intellectual discourse tells a remarkable story--a quest for truth and wisdom that continues to shape our most basic ideas about human nature and the world around us. That quest is brilliantly brought to life in The Oxford History of Western Philosophy. With spectacular illustrations--including sixteen pages of full-color plates--this splendidly written volume takes the reader on a magnificient chronological tour through the revolutions of thought that have forged the Western philosophical tradition from ancient times to the present. Throughout, the six contributors--an internationally renowned team of philosophers including Roger Scruton, Anthony Quinton, and Anthony Kenny--bring the astonishingly diverse, wide-ranging landscape of intellectual history into sharp focus, emphasizing how notions seen today as part of an inevitable march of ideas were in their own time often considered radical, if not revolutionary. Thus we are treated, for example, to lively accounts of how Plato's "theory of forms" and Aristotle's pioneering exercises in logic broke with the past to irrevocably alter the course of Western thought. The authors also reveal the relationships between landmark thinkers, and the ways they drew on their intellectual heritage. They show, for instance, how St. Augustine and Aquinas, though advancing the cause of Christian doctrine, picked up where their pagan Greek forebears had left off. We witness how, during the Renaissance, the profound empiricist ideas underlying Descarte's famous utterance--"I think, therefore I exist"--lived in a tense but complementary relationship with Locke's rationalist theories. Moving into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the book explores how Hume greatly influenced Kant's conception of the "transcendental aesthetic," and how Hegel drew upon the lesser known (but groundbreaking) work of Fichte and Schelling. The authors bring the story up to our own time, vividly recounting the existential trend from Nietzsche ("God is dead") to Sartre, along with other increasingly fractious schools of thought. Along the way, we not only encounter the vast intellectual riches of the Western mind, but we also meet the personalities behind the great thoughts, from the saintly Hume (described by Adam Smith as having "come as near to perfection as anybody could") to the ill-mannered outcast Fichte. And the hundreds of maps and striking illustrations (including full-color reproductions of art ranging from medieval manuscripts to the works of Raphael, Ingres, and Magritte) form an integral part of the book, revealing the interweaving of art and ideas through the ages, as artists have striven to give visual immediacy to philosophical concepts. The Oxford History of Western Philosophy is the most authoritative single-volume account ever written for the general reader. Engagingly written and astonishingly far-reaching, it provides the consummate introduction to the intellectual bedrock upon which Western civilization is built. (shrink)

"Put together one of the world's best science writers with one of the universe's most fascinating subjects and you are bound to produce a wonderful book.... The subject of complexity is vital and controversial. This book is important and beautifully done."--Stephen Jay Gould "[Complexity] is that curious mix of complication and organization that we find throughout the natural and human worlds: the workings of a cell, the structure of the brain, the behavior of the stock market, the shifts of political (...) power.... It is time science... thinks about meaning as well as counting information.... This is the core of the complexity manifesto. Read it, think about it... but don't ignore it."--Ian Stewart, "Nature" This second edition has been brought up to date with an essay entitled "On the Edge in the Business World" and an interview with John Holland, author of "Emergence: From Chaos to Order.". (shrink)

Putnam's goal is to embed philosophy in social life. The first part of this book is dedicated to metaphysical questions.

"We are trying to apply the concepts of an outdated world view--the mechanistic world view of Cartesian-Newtonian science--to a reality that can no longer be understood in terms of these concepts.

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

Preface This volume contains essays written during the period 1972-1980. They are arranged roughly in order of composition. Except for the Introduction, ...

At Home in the Universe presents and extends the intellectual core ofKauffman's earlier book The Origins of Order (OUP 1993) for any intelligentgeneral reader can understand and appreciate. The reader is very effectivelyinvited into Kauffman's vision and thought processes, in one of the moreexhilarating and important books of popular science.

Examines the history and inherent flaws of the tests science has used to measure intelligence.

Poststructuralism and complexity are plural and diverse modes of thought that share a common subscription to the `anteriority of radical relationality'. They nonetheless subscribe to a different ethic of life because they address the anteriority of radical relationality in different ways. Complexity remains strategic in its bid to become a power-knowledge of the laws of becoming. It derives that strategic ethic from its scientific interest in the implicate order of non-linearity that is said to subvert Newtonian science. Poststructuralism is poetic. (...) It derives its poetic ethic from Heidegger and from the reworking of orphic and tragic sensibilities to radical relationality with the radically non-relational. Observing that all poetry is complexity avant la lettre, the article illustrates these points with the Odyssey and concludes that while complexity is ultimately concerned with fitness, poststructuralism is preoccupied with justice. (shrink)

This paper discusses some problems with the field of educational studies and considers the role of post-structuralist theory in shifting the study of education away from a 'technical rationalist' approach towards an 'intellectual intelligence' stance that stresses contingency, disidentification and risk-taking.