Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Philosophy & Social Aspects

Drawing the border between the old Aristotelianism and the new mechanical philosophy faces historians with a delicate task, if not an impossible mission. There were many natural philosophers who actually crossed the border between the two worlds, and, inside each of these worlds, there was a vast spectrum of doctrines, arguments and intellectual practices. The expression mechanical...

Questions like these--questions of causality--form the basis of modern scientific inquiry, posing profound intellectual and methodological challenges for researchers in the physical, natural, biomedical, and social sciences. In this groundbreaking book, noted psychiatrist and author Peter Rabins offers a conceptual framework for analyzing daunting questions...

The theory of nonlinear, complex systems has become by now a proven problem-solving approach in the natural sciences. And it is now also recognized that many if not most of our social, ecological, economical and political problems are essentially of a global, complex and nonlinear nature. And it is now further accepted than any holistic perspective of the human mind and brain can hardly be achieved by any other approach. In this wide-ranging, scholarly but very concise treatment, physicist, computer scientist and philosopher Klaus Mainzer discusses, in essentially nontechnical language,...

In 1962, the publication of Thomas Kuhn's Structure 'revolutionized' the way one conducts philosophical and historical studies of science. Through the introduction of both memorable and controversial notions, such as paradigms, scientific revolutions, and incommensurability, Kuhn argued against the traditionally accepted notion of scientific change as a progression towards the truth about nature, and instead substituted the idea that science is a puzzle solving activity, operating under paradigms, which become discarded after it fails to respond accordingly to anomalous challenges...

This book examines the historical roots and evolution of simulation from an epistemological, institutional and technical perspective. Rich case studies go far beyond documentation of simulation s capacity for application in many domains; they also explore the "functional" and "structural" debate that continues to traverse simulation thought and action. This book is an essential contribution to the assessment of simulation as scientific instrument.

Researchers agree that schools construct a particular image of science, in which some characteristics are featured while others end up in oblivion. The result is that although most children are likely to be familiar with images of heroic scientists such as Einstein and Darwin, they rarely learn about the messy, day-to-day practice of science in which scientists are ordinary humans. Surprisingly, the process by which this imagination of science in education occurs has rarely been theorized. This is all the more remarkable since great thinkers tend to agree that the formation of...

Freud promised his patients absolute confidentiality, regardless of what they revealed, but privacy in psychotherapy began to erode a half-century ago. Psychotherapists now seem to serve as "double agents" with a dual and often conflicting allegiance to patient and society. Some therapists even go so far as to issue Miranda-type warnings, advising patients that what they say in therapy may be used against them.

Confidentiality and Its Discontents explores the...

The trade aspects of risk and the risk aspects of trade deserve more systematic and genuine interdisciplinary attention if we are to really understand the global, international and supranational dimensions of risk regulation. This book brings together legal and social science research on risk regulation from across the world to explore risk regulation in a trade context. The interdisciplinary collaboration provided in this book is needed to address the trade versus risk balancing act both in empirical and theoretical terms.

Although it is obvious that legal, social, cultural...