Conquest of Abundance

Author: Paul Feyerabend
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226245348
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
From flea bites to galaxies, from love affairs to shadows, Paul Feyerabend reveled in the sensory and intellectual abundance that surrounds us. He found it equally striking that human senses and human intelligence are able to take in only a fraction of these riches. "This a blessing, not a drawback," he writes. "A superconscious organism would not be superwise, it would be paralyzed." This human reduction of experience to a manageable level is the heart of Conquest of Abundance, the book on which Feyerabend was at work when he died in 1994. Prepared from drafts of the manuscript left at his death, working notes, and lectures and articles Feyerabend wrote while the larger work was in progress, Conquest of Abundance offers up rich exploration and startling insights with the charm, lucidity, and sense of mischief that are his hallmarks. Feyerabend is fascinated by how we attempt to explain and predict the mysteries of the natural world, and he looks at the ways in which we abstract experience, explain anomalies, and reduce wonder to formulas and equations. Through his exploration of the positive and negative consequences of these efforts, Feyerabend reveals the "conquest of abundance" as an integral part of the history and character of Western civilization. "Paul Feyerabend . . . was the Norman Mailer of philosophy. . . . brilliant, brave, adventurous, original and quirky."—Richard Rorty, New Republic "As much a smudged icon as a philosophical position holder, [Feyerabend] was alluring and erotic, a torch singer for philosophical anarchy."—Nancy Maull, New York Times Book Review "[A] kind of final testament of Feyerabend's thought . . . Conquest of Abundance is as much the product of a brilliant, scintillating style as of an immense erudition and culture. . . . This book is as abundant and rich as the world it envisions."—Arkady Plotnitsky, Chicago Tribune

Killing Time

Author: Paul Feyerabend
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226245322
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Killing Time is the story of Paul Feyerabend's life. Trained in physics and astronomy, Feyerabend was best known as a philosopher of science. His fame was in powerful, plain-spoken critiques of "big" science and "big" philosophy.

Science in a Free Society

Author: Paul Feyerabend
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788731921
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
No study in the philosophy of science created such controversy in the seventies as Paul Feyerabend's Against Method. In this work, Feyerabend reviews that controversy, and extends his critique beyond the problem of scientific rules and methods, to the social function and direction of science today. In the first part of the book, he launches a sustained and irreverent attack on the prestige of science in the West. The lofty authority of the "expert" claimed by scientists is, he argues, incompatible with any genuine democracy, and often merely serves to conceal entrenched prejudices and divided opinions with the scientific community itself. Feyerabend insists that these can and should be subjected to the arbitration of the lay population, whose closes interests they constantly affect-as struggles over atomic energy programs so powerfully attest. Calling for far greater diversity in the content of education to facilitate democratic decisions over such issues, Feyerabend recounts the origin and development of his own ideas-successively engaged by Brecht, Ehrenhaft, Popper, Mill and Lakatos-in a spirited intellectual self-portrait. Science in a Free Society is a striking intervention into one of the most topical debates in contemporary culture and politics.

Philosophy of Nature

Author: Paul K. Feyerabend
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745694764
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Philosopher, physicist, and anarchist Paul Feyerabend was one of the most unconventional scholars of his time. His book Against Method has become a modern classic. Yet it is not well known that Feyerabend spent many years working on a philosophy of nature that was intended to comprise three volumes covering the period from the earliest traces of stone age cave paintings to the atomic physics of the 20th century – a project that, as he conveyed in a letter to Imre Lakatos, almost drove him nuts: “Damn the ,Naturphilosophie.” The book’s manuscript was long believed to have been lost. Recently, however, a typescript constituting the first volume of the project was unexpectedly discovered at the University of Konstanz. In this volume Feyerabend explores the significance of myths for the early period of natural philosophy, as well as the transition from Homer’s “aggregate universe” to Parmenides’ uniform ontology. He focuses on the rise of rationalism in Greek antiquity, which he considers a disastrous development, and the associated separation of man from nature. Thus Feyerabend explores the prehistory of science in his familiar polemical and extraordinarily learned manner. The volume contains numerous pictures and drawings by Feyerabend himself. It also contains hitherto unpublished biographical material that will help to round up our overall image of one of the most influential radical philosophers of the twentieth century.

Interpreting Feyerabend

Author: Karim Bschir
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108620531
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
This collection of new essays interprets and critically evaluates the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. It offers innovative historical scholarship on Feyerabend's take on topics such as realism, empiricism, mimesis, voluntarism, pluralism, materialism, and the mind-body problem, as well as certain debates in the philosophy of physics. It also considers the ways in which Feyerabend's thought can contribute to contemporary debates in science and public policy, including questions about the nature of scientific methodology, the role of science in society, citizen science, scientism, and the role of expertise in public policy. The volume will provide readers with a comprehensive overview of the topics which Feyerabend engaged with throughout his career, showing both the breadth and the depth of his thought.

The Conquest of Fear

Author: Basil King
Publisher: Garden City, N.Y. : Garden City Pub.
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
The author portrays his own struggle with ill health and eventual spiritual growth

Two Dimensions of Meaning

Author: Andrew Goatly
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000600181
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Book Description
The book takes as its point of departure the notion that similarity and contiguity are fundamental to meaning. It shows how they manifest in oral, literate, print, and internet cultures, in language acquisition, pragmatics, dialogism, classification, the semantics of grammar, literature, and, most centrally, metaphor and metonymy. The book situates these reflections on similarity and contiguity in the interplay of language, cognition, culture, and ideology, and within broader debates around such issues as capitalism, biodiversity, and human control over nature. Positing that while similarity-focused systems can be reductive, and have therefore been contested in social science, philosophy, and poetry, and contiguity-based ones might disregard useful statistical and scientific evidence, Andrew Goatly argues for the need for humans to entertain diverse metaphors, models, and languages as ways of understanding and acting on our world. The volume also considers the cognitive connections between the similarity-contiguity duality and the noun-verb distinction. This innovative volume will appeal to scholars involved in wider debates on meaning, within the fields of cognitive semantics, pragmatics, metaphor and metonymy theory, critical discourse analysis, and the philosophy of language. Equally, the motivated and intelligent general reader, interested in language, philosophy, culture, and ecology, should find the later chapters of the book fascinating, and the earlier technical chapters accessible.

The Tyranny of Science

Author: Paul K. Feyerabend
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745651897
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Paul Feyerabend is one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century and his book Against Method is an international bestseller. In this new book he masterfully weaves together the main elements of his mature philosophy into a gripping tale: the story of the rise of rationalism in Ancient Greece that eventually led to the entrenchment of a mythical ‘scientific worldview’. In this wide-ranging and accessible book Feyerabend challenges some modern myths about science, including the myth that ‘science is successful’. He argues that some very basic assumptions about science are simply false and that substantial parts of scientific ideology were created on the basis of superficial generalizations that led to absurd misconceptions about the nature of human life. Far from solving the pressing problems of our age, such as war and poverty, scientific theorizing glorifies ephemeral generalities, at the cost of confronting the real particulars that make life meaningful. Objectivity and generality are based on abstraction, and as such, they come at a high price. For abstraction drives a wedge between our thoughts and our experience, resulting in the degeneration of both. Theoreticians, as opposed to practitioners, tend to impose a tyranny on the concepts they use, abstracting away from the subjective experience that makes life meaningful. Feyerabend concludes by arguing that practical experience is a better guide to reality than any theory, by itself, ever could be, and he stresses that there is no tyranny that cannot be resisted, even if it is exerted with the best possible intentions. Provocative and iconoclastic, The Tyranny of Science is one of Feyerabend’s last books and one of his best. It will be widely read by everyone interested in the role that science has played, and continues to play, in the shaping of the modern world.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Thomas Piketty
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674979850
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 817

Book Description
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

Baxter's Explore the Book

Author: J. Sidlow Baxter
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310871395
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1846

Book Description
Explore the Book is not a commentary with verse-by-verse annotations. Neither is it just a series of analyses and outlines. Rather, it is a complete Bible survey course. No one can finish this series of studies and remain unchanged. The reader will receive lifelong benefit and be enriched by these practical and understandable studies. Exposition, commentary, and practical application of the meaning and message of the Bible will be found throughout this giant volume. Bible students without any background in Bible study will find this book of immense help as will those who have spent much time studying the Scriptures, including pastors and teachers. Explore the Book is the result and culmination of a lifetime of dedicated Bible study and exposition on the part of Dr. Baxter. It shows throughout a deep awareness and appreciation of the grand themes of the gospel, as found from the opening book of the Bible through Revelation.