2024 Hardcover Reprint of Original 1959 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This book by one of the world's foremost philosophers of science presented a striking new picture of the logical character of scientific discovery--a picture which does full justice to the liberating effect of the Einsteinian revolution in physics and its immense impact upon scientific thought in general. For this new English edition Dr. Popper did his own translation and has written 150 pages of entirely new text. Ernest Nagel considered this work "a first rate contribution to the logic of scientific method. The book contains a very interesting chapter on quantum mechanics, which performs one of the few sensible analyses of the Indeterminacy Principle which I have seen in print... The book is highly stimulating and contains much that is bed-rock for future work."--From the Dusk Jacket.

Arthur Waley's brilliant and definitive translation of one of the foremost of all mystical books, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, has become a modern classic in its own right. Unlike previous translations, it is founded not on the medieval commentaries but on a close study of all the early Chinese literature, and it provides a singular example of authoritative scholarship skillfully blended with brilliant, precise writing. In his introduction, Dr. Waley gives an extensive scholarly account of Chinese thought down to the end of the third century B.C. Here, the author presents a full picture of Chinese prehistory, early philosophy, and literature, showing the original, lofty conception of Taoism before the gradual corruption through the course of centuries, tracing this conflict of philosophies and its background of politics.

"Texts Without Referents" offers a detailed and systematic theory of human culture, ranging across both Anglo-American and Continental European philosophy, and their allied disciplines. In it Joseph Margolis provides an account of history and interpretation and the ontology of cultural entities (persons, artefacts, artworks, words and sentences, actions, institutions, societies). Central to the book is the question of the coherent relationship between the human and the natural sciences. The author elaborates a theory that may be said to question, and challenge, the traditional emphasis given in the Western philosophical canon to the subordination of the human sciences to the physical sciences. Margolis' strategy is to show the strong conceptual evidence offered by such diverse movements as pragmatism, naturalism, phenomenology, deconstruction, Marxism, Frankfurt Critical Theory, hermeneutics, and Wittgensteinian and Nietzschean currents, for overturning this ranking. Margolis argues that it is the physical sciences that depend on the human for their distinctive rigour, and that they need to be brought under the larger constraints of social existence if, together, they are to yield a coherent and comprehensive picture of the full powers of human inquiry. This, the third volume in Margolis' trilogy, brings the issues of the first two volumes together, reworking them within a general theory of cultural life. A number of strategic questions are examined, including the nature of texts, reference, selves, praxis, thinking, and historical time. Expansive and challenging, it represents the climax to an ambitious reassessment of the relationship, within the world of culture, between the natural and the human sciences, and a reassessment of the complexities of human existence. The books is aimed at students and specialists in philosophy, social theory and the philosophy of culture.

This volume collects the notable published book reviews of Martha C. Nussbaum, an acclaimed philosopher who is also a professor of law and a public intellectual. Her academic work focuses on questions of moral and political philosophy and on the nature of the emotions. But over the past 25 years she has also written many book reviews for a general public, in periodicals such as The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. Dating from 1986 to the present, these essays engage, constructively and also critically, with authors like Roger Scruton, Allan Bloom, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, Richard Posner, Catharine MacKinnon, Susan Moller Okin, and other prominent intellectuals of our time. Throughout, her views defy ideological predictability, heralding valuable work from little-known sources, deftly criticizing where criticism is due, and generally providing a compelling picture of how philosophy in the Socratic tradition can engage with broad social concerns. For this volume, Nussbaum provides an intriguing introduction that explains her selection and provides her view of the role of the public philosopher.