Political scientists often ask themselves what might have been if history had unfolded differently: if Stalin had been ousted as General Party Secretary or if the United States had not dropped the bomb on Japan. Although scholars sometimes scoff at applying hypothetical reasoning to world politics, the contributors to this volume--including James Fearon, Richard Lebow, Margaret Levi, Bruce Russett, and Barry Weingast--find such counterfactual conjectures not only useful, but necessary for drawing causal inferences from historical data. Given the importance of counterfactuals, it is perhaps surprising that we lack standards for evaluating them. To fill this gap, Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin propose a set of criteria for distinguishing plausible from implausible counterfactual conjectures across a wide range of applications. The contributors to this volume make use of these and other criteria to evaluate counterfactuals that emerge in diverse methodological contexts including comparative case studies, game theory, and statistical analysis. Taken together, these essays go a long way toward establishing a more nuanced and rigorous framework for assessing counterfactual arguments about world politics in particular and about the social sciences more broadly.

William Whewell was one of the more prolific and influential writers of early Victorian England. This study reconstructs the historical origins of his two major works and evaluates their philosophical claims, and critically appraises Whewell's mature philosophical position.

Book by Ravetz, Jerome R.

Consists of the third of the John Dewey lectures delivered at Columbia University under the department of Philosophy and eleven additional essays. Focuses on the logic of scientific inquiry and some of its limitations.

In this book, after discussing the fundamental problems of current science and other philosophic concepts, beginning with controversies between Heraclitus and Parmenides, Ilya Prigogine launches into a message of great hope: the future has not been determined. Contrary to globalisation and the apparent contemporary mass culture society, individual behaviour is beginning to increasingly become the key factor which governs the evolution of both the world and society as a whole. It is a message that challenges existing widespread views, implicitly or explicitly, through mass communication, moreover the importance of the individual's actions implies a reflection of each person on the responsibilities that each one assumes when taking or acting upon a decision. This responsibility is associated with the freedom of thought as well as a critical analysis of fashions, customs, preconceived ideas, and ideologies, externally imposed: exactly contrary to the ideas of those who wish us to be "perfect consumers" in a world dominated only by monetary wealth. Challenging this drive towards the elimination of freedom of though in the individual is now imperative if we are to save man and his planet from catastrophe which seems to be ever imminent and (unfortunately) irreversible. This last book of Ilya Prigogine provides a small, disputable, but nonetheless valuable contribution towards that end.

Das Manuskript zu diesem Buch ist unter merkwürdigen Um ständen entstanden. Ich begann die Niederschrift 1939 in New York, setzte sie 1940 in Chicago fort und beendete den größten Teil 1941 in Boston. Das Manuskript war in deutscher Sprache geschrieben, aber begreiflicherweise unter der damaligen Reichs regierung nicht für eine Veröffentlichung in deutscher Sprache bestimmt; 'es sollte ins Englische übersetzt und in Amerika ver öffentlicht werden. Bevor die übersetzung beendet war, wurde die Einsteinsche Relativitätstheorie, die oft als eine spekulative Hypothese an gesehen und unterschätzt wurde, die Grundlage einer ganz neuen Wendung in der technischen Entwicklung der Menschheit: Die Kernenergie des Atoms wurde die Energiequelle der Zukunft, und all die trüben Prophezeiungen über ein Versagen der Energie quellen konnten zum alten Gerümpel geworfen werden. Jm Jahre 1945 fügte ich eine Darstellung dieser Wendung in englischer Sprache hinzu, und dieser Teil ist der einzige im Buch, der aus dem Englischen übersetzt ist. Die amerikanische Ausgabe erschien 1947; große Teile der deutschen Fassung wurden nicht aufgenom men. Daher ist das vorliegende Buch die erste vollständige Wieder gabe meines Manuskriptes.

2014 Reprint of 1959 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was an eminent theorist across the fields of philosophy, physical chemistry and economics. Elected to the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his contributions to research in the social sciences, and his theories on positivism and knowledge, are of critical academic importance. The three lectures included in this comprehensive volume, first published in 1959, argue for Polanyi's principle of 'tacit knowing' as a fundamental component of knowledge. They were intended to accompany Polanyi's earlier work, "Personal Knowledge," and as a tribute to the philosophical and educational work of Lord A. D. Lindsay.

Without of course adopting a Platonic metaphysics, the eighteenth-century philosophes were Grecophiles who regarded the Athenian philosophers as their intellectual forbearers and mentors. So powerful was their identification with c1assification that ancient ideas were taken as keys to the design of the modem world, but usually the ideas were taken separately and as divided from their systematic context. The power of number was an idea the En lightenment thinkers deployed with their legendary passion and vigor, particularly as an instrument for social reconstruction. It is no exaggemtion to say that the role of quantities in contemporary social scientific theorizing cannot be understood with any depth absent a recollection of the philosophes' axial development of the notion of quantification. It is a commonplace that for the philosophes progress required releasing human abilities to have power over nature. Aprerequisite for this power was knowledge of the underlying causes of natural events, knowledge that required quantitative precision. Enlightenment thinkers were sufficiently aware of themselves as products of their time to appreciate the importance of a liberal social environment to the knowledge enterprise; the supposition that the reverse is also the case, that enhanced knowledge could advance social conditions, came easily.

The Lvov-Warsaw School was active in all spheres of philosophy. Its members worked in the border area between philosophy and disci­ plines such as psychology, linguistics, and literary theory. But its most important achievements were without doubt in logic and philosophical analysis based on logic. The present book is concerned with fields to which the Lvov-Warsaw School made its most important and famous contributions. Data on the School as a whole are included only in the first and last part of the book. This work is based on my monograph (1985), which appeared in Polish. But it is not merely a translation, because some fragments of the Polish version have been omitted (e. g. , the chapter on ethics), and some have been revised. Many persons helped me in my work on the book in Polish as well as on the present edition. I must first mention the late Izydora D~mbska, to whom this book is dedicated. On various detailed issues I have availed myself of advice and information given to me by Stefan Amsterdamski, Zdzislaw Augustynek, Kazimierz Czarnota, Henryk Hii, Boleslaw Iwanus, Jacek Jadacki, Jacek KabziIiski, Stanislaw Kiczuk, Tomasz Komendzinski, Janina Kotarbinska, Czeslaw Lejewski, Jerzy Perzanowski, Marian Przet~cki, the late Jerzy Slupecki, Klemens Szaniawski, Stefan Zamecki, Zbigniew Zwinogrodzki i Jan Zygmunt. I am indebted to Jaakko Hintikka for suggesting that my book be trans­ lated into English and published by Reidel. Olgierd Wojtasiewicz helped me to prepare the English text.

I. Spinoza and Seventeenth Century Science.- Spinoza in the Century of Science.- Spinoza and Cartesian Mechanics (translated by Debra Nails and Pascal Gallez).- Spinoza and the Rise of Modern Science in the Netherlands.- II. Spinoza: Scientist.- Spinoza: Scientist and Theorist of Scientific Method.- Spinoza and Euclidean Arithmetic: The Example of the Fourth Proportional (translated by David Lachterman).- III. Spinoza and the Human Sciences: Politics and Hermeneutics.- Towards a Canonic Version of Classical Political Theory.- Some New Light on the Roots of Spinoza's Science of Bible Study.- IV. Scientific-Metaphysical Reflections.- Self-Knowledge as Self-Preservation?.- Spinoza's Version of the Eternity of.- V. Spinoza and Twentieth Century Science.- Parallelism and Complementarity: The Psycho-Physical Problem in Spinoza and in the Succession of Niels Bohr.- Res Extensa and the Space-Time Continuum.- Einstein and Spinoza (translated by Michel Paty and Robert S. Cohen).- VI. Bibliography.- Annotated Bibliography of Spinoza and the the Mind Sciences.- Index Locorum.- General Index.

In this important study Ernst Cassirer analyzes the non-rational thought processes that go to make up culture. He demonstrates that beneath both language and myth there lies an unconscious "grammar" of experience, whose categories and canons are not those of logical thought. He shows that this prelogical "logic" is not merely an undeveloped state of rationality, but something basically different, and that this archaic mode of thought still has enormous power over even our most rigorous thought, in language, poetry and myth. The author analyzes brilliantly such seemingly diverse (yet related) phenomena as the metaphysics of the Bhagavat Gita, the Melanesian concept of Mana, the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, modern poetry, Ancient Egyptian religion, and symbolic logic. He covers a vast range of material that is all too often neglected in studies of human thought. These six essays are of great interest to the student of philosophy or the philosophy of science, the historian, or the anthropologist. They are also remarkably timely for students of literature, what with the enormous emphasis placed upon "myth" in modern literary speculation. This book is not superficial speculation by a dabbler, but a penetrating study by one of the most profound and sensitive philosophic minds of our time.

Stanley Fish is an equal opportunity antagonist. A theorist who has taken on theorists, an academician who has riled the academy, a legal scholar and political pundit who has ruffled feathers left and right, Fish here turns with customary gusto to the trouble with principle. Specifically, Fish has a quarrel with neutral principles. The trouble? They operate by sacrificing everything people care about to their own purity. And they are deployed with equal highmindedness and equally absurd results by liberals and conservatives alike. In this bracing book, Fish argues that there is no realm of higher order impartiality--no neutral or fair territory on which to stake a claim--and that those who invoke one are always making a rhetorical and political gesture. In the end, it is history and context, the very substance against which a purportedly abstract principle defines itself, that determines a principle's content and power. In the course of making this argument, Fish takes up questions about academic freedom and hate speech, affirmative action and multiculturalism, the boundaries between church and state, and much more. Sparing no one, he shows how our notions of intellectual and religious liberty--cherished by those at both ends of the political spectrum--are artifacts of the very partisan politics they supposedly transcend. The Trouble with Principle offers a provocative challenge to the debates of our day that no intellectually honest citizen can afford to ignore.

Praised by President Richard Nixon as his favorite read for 1987, The Search for Historical Meaning presents the postwar American conservative movement against a background of ideas with which it has only rarely been identified. This important book--updated with a new preface--examines the influence of Hegelian concepts on the historical attitudes and cultural judgments of prominent postwar conservatives who, because of their concern with personal freedom as a political and ontological value, denounced Hegel while ascribing their own Hegelian ideas to less offensive sources. Gottfried argues that the lack of a true historical perspective was a serious defect in the postwar American conservative movement, and it grew worse in the years that followed. Essential reading for conservative thinkers, political philosophers, and American political historians, The Search for Historical Meaning concludes with an incisive examination of the American conservative movement that has implications for today.

In this new and revised edition of Oswald Spengler’s classic, Man and Technics , Spengler makes a number of predictions that today, more than eighty years after the book was first published, have turned out to be remarkably accurate. Spengler predicted that industrialisation would lead to serious environmental problems and that countless species would become extinct. He also predicted that labour from Third World countries would increasingly outcompete Western workers by doing the same work for much lower wages, and that industrial production would therefore move to other parts of the world, such as East Asia, India, and South America. According to Spengler, technology has not only made it possible for man to harness the forces of nature; it has also alienated him from nature. Modern technology now dominates our culture instead of that which is natural and organic. After having made himself the master of nature, man has himself become technology’s slave. ‘The victor, crashed, is dragged to death by the team’, Spengler summarises. Finally, Spengler foresaw that Western man would eventually grow weary of his increasingly artificial lifestyle and begin to hate the civilisation he himself created. There is no way out of this conundrum as the unrelenting progress of technological development cannot be halted. The current high-tech culture of the West is therefore doomed, destined to be consumed from within and destroyed. A time will come, Spengler writes, when our giant cities and skyscrapers have fallen in ruins and lie forgotten ‘just like the palaces of old Memphis and Babylon’. It remains to be seen if this last, and most dire, of Spengler’s prophecies will also come true.

Isaak Illich Rubin (12 June 1886, Dinaburg, now Latvia - 27 November 1937, Aktobe, now Kazakhstan) was a Soviet Marxian economist. His main work Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was published in 1924. He was executed in 1937 during the course of the Great Purge, but his ideas have since been rehabilitated. Rubin's main work emphasised the importance of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism in the labor theory of value. Against those who counterposed Marx's early interest in alienation with his later economic theory, Rubin argued that Marx's mature economic work represented the culmination of his lifetime project to understand how human creative power is shaped, defined, and limited by social structures, which take on a uniquely "objective" economic form under capitalism. Significantly, Rubin is at pains to argue that simple commodity production is not a historical phenomenon that developed into capitalism, as it is often understood by both Marxists and critics of Marx; rather, it is a theoretical abstraction that explains one aspect of a fully developed capitalist economy. The concept of value, as understood by Rubin, cannot exist without the other elements of a full-blown capitalist economy: money, capital, the existence of a proletariat, and so on. Rubin's work was never reissued in the Soviet Union after 1928, but in 1972 Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was translated into English by Fredy Perlman and Milos Samardzija. This work became a foundation stone of the "value-form" approach to Marxist theory, exemplified by Hans-Georg Backhaus, Chris Arthur, Geert Reuten, and the "Konstanz-Sydney" group (Michael Eldred, Mike Roth, Lucia Kleiber, and Volkbert Roth). In this interpretation of Marx, "it is the development of the forms of exchange that is seen as the prime determinant of the capitalist economy rather than the content regulated by it". Capitalism is here understood as a method of regulating human labor by giving it the social form of an exchangeable commodity (the "value-form"), rather than a disguised or mystified system that is otherwise similar in content to other class-based societies. According to Arthur, the rediscovery of Rubin's "masterly exegesis" was "the most important single influence on the value form approach to Capital". (wikipedia.org)