In September 2007, more than 100 philosophers came to Prague with the determination to approach Karl Popper’s philosophy as a source of inspiration in many areas of our intellectual endeavor. This volume is a result of that effort. Topics cover Popper’s views on rationality, scientific methodology, the evolution of knowledge and democracy; and since Popper’s philosophy has always had a strong interdisciplinary influence, part of the volume discusses the impact of his ideas in such areas as education, economics, psychology, biology, or ethics. The concept of falsification, the problem of demarcation, the ban on induction, or the role of the empirical basis, along with the provocative parallels between historicism, holism and totalitarianism, have always caused controversies. The aim of this volume is not to smooth them but show them as a challenge. In this time when the traditional role of reason in the Western thought is being undermined, Popper’s non-foundationist model of reason brings the Enlightenment message into a new perspective. Popper believed that the open society was vulnerable, due precisely to its tolerance of otherness. This is a matter of great urgency in the modern world, as cultures based on different values gain prominence.  The processes related to the extending of the EU, or the increasing economic globalization also raise questions about openness and democracy. The volume’s aim is to show the vitality of critical rationalism in addressing and responding to the problems of this time and this world.

Product Description: Gyorgy Tamas works in the philosophy of logic, that difficult interdisciplin­ ary region wherein the notion of categories is both basic and subtle. To understand ways of thinking, to understand patterns of whatever is real, to recognize what is possible and to reject the nonsensical and the impossible is to comprehend the categories...read more

Product Description: Fundamental problems of the uses of formal techniques and of natural and instrumental practices have been raised again and again these past two decades, in many quarters and from varying viewpoints. We have brought a number of quite basic studies of these issues together in this volume, not linked con­ ceptually nor by any rigorously defined problematic, but rather simply some of the most interesting and even provocative of recent research accomplish­ ments...read more

Product Description: Book by

Product Description: By North-American standards, philosophy is not new in Quebec: the first men­ tion of philosophy lectures given by a Jesuit in the College de Quebec (founded 1635) dates from 1665, and the oldest logic manuscript dates from 1679. In English-speaking universities such as McGill (founded 1829), philosophy began to be taught later, during the second half of the 19th century...read more

Product Description: This selection of papers that were presented (or nearly so!) to the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science during the seventies fairly re­ presents some of the most disturbing issues of scientific knowledge in these years...read more

Product Description: Within the last ten years, the interest of historians and philosophers of science in the epistemological writings of the Polish medical microbiologist Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961), who had up to then been almost completely unknown, has advanced with great strides...read more

Product Description: To the scientists and philosophers of our time, Hegel has been either a ne­ glected or a provocative thinker, a source of irrelevant dark metaphysics or of complex but insightful analysis. His influence upon the work of natural scientists has seemed minimal, in the main; and his stimulus to the nascent sciences of society and to psychology has seemed to be as often an obstacle as an encouragement...read more

Product Description: These essays on the conceptual understanding of modern physics strike directly at some of the principal difficulties faced by contemporary philos­ ophers of physical science. Moreover, they reverberate to earlier and classical struggles with those difficulties...read more

Product Description: Boris Kuznetsov was a scientist among humanists, a philosopher among scientists, a historian for those who look to the future, an optimist in an age of sadness. He was steeped in classical European culture, from earliest times to the latest avant-garde, and he roamed through the ages, an inveterate time-traveller, chatting and arguing with Aristotle and Descartes, Heine and Dante, among many others...read more

Product Description: Among the extraordinary Polish philosophers of the past one hundred years, Zygmunt Zawirski deserves to be given particular attention for his fusion of analytic and historical scholarship. Strikingly versatile, and con­ tributing original work in all his fields of competence, Zawirski thought through issues in the philosophical aspects of relativity theory, on the claims of intuitionalistic foundations of mathematics, on the nature and usefulness of many-value Logics, and on the calculus of probability, on the axiomatic method in science and in the philosophy of science, on the genesis and development of scientific and philosophical concepts, and in his crowning achievement, the conceptual history of notions of time...read more

Product Description: In his letter to B. K. Matilal, dated February 20, 1977, the author of this book wrote about his work on Advaita-Vedanta: " ... It was not to present Advaita in the light of current problems of the logic of scientific discovery and modern philosophy of language ...read more

Product Description: For a North American seeking to know the Mexican mind, and especially the sciences today and in their recent development, a great light of genius is to be found in Mexico City in the late 17th century. Tbe genius is that of one who surely may be counted as the first Mexican philosopher of nature, a nun of the Order of Saint Jerome: Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz...read more

Product Description: Azarya Polikarov was born in Sofia on October 9, 1921. Through the many stages of politics, economy, and culture in Bulgaria, he maintained his rational humanity and scientific curiosity. He has been a splendid teacher and an accomplished critical philosopher exploring the conceptual and historical vicis­ situdes of physics in modern times and also the science policies that favor or threaten human life in these decades...read more

Product Description: The various efforts to develop a Marxist philosophy of science in the one­ time 'socialist' countries were casualties of the Cold War. Even those who were in no way Marxists, and those who were undogmatic in their Marxisms, now confront a new world...read more

Product Description: The essays collected here in honor of Marx Wartofsky's sixty-fifth birthday are a celebration of his rich contribution to philosophy over the past four decades and a testimony to the wide influence he has had on thinkers with quite various approaches of their own...read more

Product Description: In three volumes, a distinguished group of scholars from a variety of disciplines in the natural and social sciences, the humanities and the arts contribute essays in honor of Robert S. Cohen, on the occasion of his 70th birthday...read more

Product Description: In three volumes, a distinguished group of scholars from a variety of disciplines in the natural and social sciences, the humanities and the arts contribute essays in honor of Robert S. Cohen, on the occasion of his 70th birthday...read more

Product Description: The Law of Causality and its Limits was the principal philosophical work of the physicist turned philosopher, Philipp Frank. Born in Vienna on March 20, 1884, Frank died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 21, 1966. He received his doctorate in 1907 at the University of Vienna in theoretical physics, having studied under Ludwig Boltzmann; his sub­ sequent research in physics and mathematics was represented by more than 60 scientific papers...read more

Product Description: The splendid achievements of Japanese mathematics and natural sciences during the second half of our 20th century have been a revival, a Renaissance, of the practical sciences developed along with the turn toward Western thinking in the late 19th century...read more

Product Description: Gyorgy Tamas works in the philosophy of logic, that difficult interdisciplin­ ary region wherein the notion of categories is both basic and subtle. To understand ways of thinking, to understand patterns of whatever is real, to recognize what is possible and to reject the nonsensical and the impossible is to comprehend the categories...read more

Product Description: This  classic created a new system of mechanics based on space, time, and mass, taking into account logic, observation, and "a priori" elements. The two-part treatment begins with the geometry and kinematics of material systems and concludes with the mechanics of material systems...read more