The philosophical theory of scientific explanation proposed here involves a radically new treatment of causality that accords with the pervasively statistical character of contemporary science. Wesley C. Salmon describes three fundamental conceptions of scientific explanation - the epistemic, modal, and ontic. He argues that the prevailing view (a version of the epistemic conce...(展开全部)

Since the publication of this book in 1962, Kuhn's writings (and many of his ideas, such as "paradigm shift") have been highly influential in academic and popular discourse. This book is must-reading for anyone studying the history and philosophy of science specifically, or cultural or technological change generally. Since Kuhn does not permit truth to be a criterion of scienti...(展开全部)

There are few more important philosophers at work today than John Searle, a creative and contentious thinker who has shaped the way we think about mind and language. Now he offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality--a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets and cocktail parties. The paradox he addresses in Making the Social Wor...(展开全部)

From the Internet to networks of friendship, disease transmission, and even terrorism, the concept - and the reality - of networks has come to pervade modern society. But what exactly is a network? What different types of networks are there? Why are they interesting, and what can they tell us? In recent years, scientists from a range of fields - including mathematics, physics, ...(展开全部)

Primitive man's discovery of the ability to change matter from one state to another brought about a profound change in spiritual behavior. In The Forge and the Crucible, Mircea Eliade follows the ritualistic adventures of these ancient societies, adventures rooted in the people's awareness of an awesome new power. The new edition of "The Forge and the Crucible" contains an upd...(展开全部)

The Explanation of Social Action is a sustained critique of the conventional understanding of what it means to "explain" something in the social sciences. It makes the strong argument that the traditional understanding involves asking questions that have no clear foundation and provoke an unnecessary tension between lay and expert vocabularies. Drawing on the history and philos...(展开全部)

Conventional understanding of what it means to "explain" something in the social sciences provokes unnecessary confusion and conflict, and indeed is often based more on analysts' imaginations than actors' realities. The Explanation of Social Action lays out a sustained critique of this understanding, pointing out that the root of the problem is an attempt to counterpose two rad...(展开全部)