Empiricism and History

Empiricism and History PDF Author: Stephen Davies
Publisher: Red Globe Press
ISBN: 0333964705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this concise introduction, Steve Davies explains what historians

Empiricism and History

Empiricism and History PDF Author: Stephen Davies
Publisher: Red Globe Press
ISBN: 0333964705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
In this concise introduction, Steve Davies explains what historians

Empiricism and History

Empiricism and History PDF Author: Stephen Davies
Publisher: Red Globe Press
ISBN: 9780333964705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
The central doctrine of empiricism - that true knowledge or understanding of the world comes ultimately from sense impressions - underlies most of the practices and arguments of professional historians, but many historians have denied that there is a theory behind what they do. In the last twenty years, however, postmodernism has had a powerful effect on the discipline of history and is now forcing empiricist historians to articulate their methods, and to defend them as both possible and virtuous. In this concise introduction, Stephen Davies explains what historians mean by empiricism, examines the origins, growth and persistence of empirical methods, and shows how students can apply these methods to their own work.

Empiricism and History

Empiricism and History PDF Author: Stephen Davies
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780333964699
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
The central doctrine of empiricism that true knowledge or understanding of the world comes ultimately from sense impressions underlies most of the practices and arguments of professional historians, but many historians have denied that there is a theory behind what they do. Since the 1980s, however, postmodernism has had a powerful effect on the discipline of history and is now forcing empiricist historians to articulate their methods, and to defend them as both possible and virtuous. In this introduction, Stephen Davies explains what historians mean by empiricism, examines the origins, growth and persistence of empirical methods, and shows how students can apply these methods to their own work.

The Houses of History

The Houses of History PDF Author: Anna Green
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719052552
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
The only history and theory textbook to include accessible extracts from a wide range of historical writing. Provides a comprehensive introduction to the theorists who have most inflenced twentieth-century historians. Chapters follow a consistent structure, putting difficult ideas into an accessible context. This is the only critical reader aimed at the undergraduate market.

Historia

Historia PDF Author: Gianna Pomata
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262162296
Category : Europe
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
Essays examine how the genre of historia reflects connections between the study of nature and the study of culture in early modern scholarly pursuits. The early modern genre of historia connected the study of nature and the study of culture from the early Renaissance to the eighteenth century. The ubiquity of historia as a descriptive method across a variety of disciplines--including natural history, medicine, antiquarianism, and philology--indicates how closely intertwined these scholarly pursuits were in the early modern period. The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that historia can be considered a key epistemic tool of early modern intellectual practices. Focusing on the actual use of historia across disciplines, the essays highlight a distinctive feature of early modern descriptive sciences: the coupling of observational skills with philological learning, empiricism with erudition. Thus the essays bring to light previously unexamined links between the culture of humanism and the scientific revolution. The contributors, from a range of disciplines that echoes the broad scope of early modern historia, examine such topics as the development of a new interest in historical method from the Renaissance artes historicae to the eighteenth-century tension between "history" and "system"; shifts in Aristotelian thought paving the way for revaluation of historia as descriptive knowledge; the rise of the new discipline of natural history; the uses of historia in anatomical and medical investigation and the writing of history by physicians; parallels between the practices of collecting and presenting information in both natural history and antiquarianism; and significant examples of the ease with which early seventeenth-century antiquarian scholars moved from studies of nature to studies of culture.

Introducing Empiricism

Introducing Empiricism PDF Author: Dave Robinson
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
ISBN: 1785780174
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Our knowledge comes primarily from experience – what our senses tell us. But is experience really what it seems? The experimental breakthroughs in 17th-century science of Kepler, Galileo and Newton informed the great British empiricist tradition, which accepts a 'common-sense' view of the world – and yet concludes that all we can ever know are 'ideas'. In Introducing Empiricism: A Graphic Guide, Dave Robinson - with the aid of Bill Mayblin's brilliant illustrations - outlines the arguments of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, J.S. Mill, Bertrand Russell and the last British empiricist, A.J. Ayer. They also explore criticisms of empiricism in the work of Kant, Wittgenstein, Karl Popper and others, providing a unique overview of this compelling area of philosophy.

Logical Empiricism

Logical Empiricism PDF Author: Paolo Parrini
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822970724
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
This collection of essays reexamines the origins of logical empiricism and offers fresh insights into its relationship to contemporary philosophy of science.

Understanding Empiricism

Understanding Empiricism PDF Author: Robert G. Meyers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317493826
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
"Understanding Empiricism" is an introduction to empiricism and the empiricist tradition in philosophy. The book presents empiricism as a philosophical outlook that unites several philosophers and discusses the most important philosophical issues bearing on the subject, while maintaining enough distance from, say, the intricacies of Locke, Berkeley, Hume scholarship to allow students to gain a clear overview of empiricism without being lost in the details of the exegetical disputes surrounding particular philosophers. Written for students the book can serve both as an introduction to current problems in the theory of knowledge as well as a comprehensive survey of the history of empiricist ideas. The book begins by distinguishing between the epistemological and psychological/causal versions of empiricism, showing that it is the former that is of primary interest to philosophers. The next three chapters, on Locke, Berkeley, Hume respectively, provide an introduction to the main protagonists in the British empiricist tradition from this perspective. The book then examines more contemporary material including the ideas of Sellars, foundations and coherence theories, the rejection of the a priori by Mill, Peirce and Quine, scepticism and, finally, the status of religious belief within empiricism. Particular attention is paid to criticisms of empiricism, such as Leibniz's criticisms of Locke on innatism and Frege's objections to Mill on mathematics. The discussions are kept at an introductory level throughout to help students to locate the principles of empiricism in relation to modern philosophy.

Aristotle's Empiricism

Aristotle's Empiricism PDF Author: Jean De Groot
Publisher: Parmenides Publishing
ISBN: 1930972849
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
In Aristotle's Empiricism, Jean De Groot argues that an important part of Aristotle's natural philosophy has remained largely unexplored and shows that much of Aristotle's analysis of natural movement is influenced by the logic and concepts of mathematical mechanics that emerged from late Pythagorean thought. De Groot draws upon the pseudo-Aristotelian Physical Problems XVI to reconstruct the context of mechanics in Aristotle's time and to trace the development of kinematic thinking from Archytas to the Aristotelian Mechanics. She shows the influence of kinematic thinking on Aristotle's concept of power or potentiality, which she sees as having a physicalistic meaning originating in the problem of movement.De Groot identifies the source of early mechanical knowledge in kinesthetic awareness of mechanical advantage, showing the relation of Aristotle's empiricism to more ancient experience. The book sheds light on the classical Greek understanding of imitation and device, as it questions both the claim that Aristotle's natural philosophy codifies opinions held by convention and the view that the cogency of his scientific ideas depends on metaphysics.

Social Empiricism

Social Empiricism PDF Author: Miriam Solomon
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262264648
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
For the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of disputes about scientific change: that scientists reason rationally and that science is progressive. For most of this time discussions were polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress, and sociologists, who espoused relativism and constructivism. Recently, creative new ideas going beyond the polarized positions have come from the history of science, feminist criticism of science, psychology of science, and anthropology of science. Addressing the traditional arguments as well as building on these new ideas, Miriam Solomon constructs a new epistemology of science. After discussions of the nature of empirical success and its relation to truth, Solomon offers a new, social account of scientific rationality. She shows that the pursuit of empirical success and truth can be consistent with both dissent and consensus, and that the distinction between dissent and consensus is of little epistemic significance. In building this social epistemology of science, she shows that scientific communities are not merely the locus of distributed expert knowledge and a resource for criticism but also the site of distributed decision making. Throughout, she illustrates her ideas with case studies from late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century physical and life sciences. Replacing the traditional focus on methods and heuristics to be applied by individual scientists, Solomon emphasizes science funding, administration, and policy. One of her goals is to have a positive influence on scientific decision making through practical social recommendations.