Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Part IGetting Acquainted -- 1 Who Am I? Where Do I Come From? Where Am I Headed? -- 2 Who Are You? Why Are You Here? Can I Help You Achieve Your Goals? -- 3 Appendix from the Classroom: Toward a Useful Introduction to Communication -- Bibliography -- 4 On Questions of the Form ``What Is X?'', and on the Seemingly Innocent Question ``What Is Communication?'' in Particular -- Bibliography -- Part IIToward a Philosophy of Communication -- 5 Emergence and Reduction -- Bibliography -- 6 The Fundamental Problem of the Study of Communication -- Bibliography -- 7 Is There Communication in the Reduced World? -- Bibliography -- 8 The Unbelievable Complexity of the Truly Simple -- Bibliography -- 9 Information in Context -- Bibliography -- 10 The Reductionist Point of View---Extensionalism -- Bibliography -- 11 A Note on the Intelligence of Computers -- Bibliography -- 12 Revisiting Context and Meaning: Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication -- Bibliography -- 13 On Errors, on Correcting Them, and Thus on Goals (with and Without Scare Quotes): Cybernetics and Reductionism -- Bibliography -- 14 Back to the Basic Problem of Communication: The Limitations of Cybernetics -- Bibliography -- 15 Toward a Philosophy of Communication -- Bibliography -- Part IIIToward the Simple Introduction toCommunication -- 16 The Simple Introduction to Communication: A Methodological Preface -- Bibliography -- 17 Example #1: The Classroom -- Bibliography -- 18 Example #2: Stigmergy and Autonomy in the Cyber Age -- Bibliography -- Name Index -- Subject Index.

In his last book, Agassi reiterates Critical Rationalism as a full-fledged philosophy of life. He criticizes Paternalism and Relativism as degenerative, and even pathological, attempts to grant life a meaning, and suggests, in their place, that fallibilism is the minimal condition for a meaningful life.

In this paper I offer a brief summary of Popper's views on metaphysics. I then explain Agassi's criticism of those views, and why I regard them as fruitful improvements.

Quine's philosophy comprises a bewildering set of views whose integrating principle is his "confirmed extensionalism". The paper offers a historical as well as an intellectual reconstruction of extensionalism. Traditional extensionalism (Boole) freed logic from Aristotelian essentialism that had inhibited the development of logic. Quine's confirmed extensionalism is the acceptance, as a matter of course, of the validity of Frege's criticism of [Boole's] extensionalism. His confirmed extensionalism is a generalized version of the philosophy of science known as conventionalism. As such, it places the advancement of science outside the province of science proper. It is, thus, at odds with Quine's repeated expressions of alliance with the Popperian (hypothetico-deductive) model of science.

Classical thinking on rationality regards it as an all-or-nothing affair. It thus fails to account for the fact that institutions are powerful social factors that frame the contexts within which rational agents supposedly exercise their ability to choose. This poses the classic dilemma: should social explanation refer to individual decisions or to institutions? Wettersten skillfully criticizes some of the most advanced solutions to it, and attempts to formulate a better explanatory unit for the social sciences: the partially rational individual. Since the partially rational individual is also only partially an individual,Wettersten's methodological reconciliation between individualism and holism seems to have some ontological implications too, ones that he seems reluctant to embrace. His book is nevertheless an interesting contribution to the controversy regarding the limits to the explanatory power of social theories.

This volume features forty-two essays written in honor of Joseph Agassi. It explores the work and legacy of this influential philosopher, an exciting and challenging advocate of critical rationalism. Throughout six decades of stupendous intellectual activity, Agassi called attention to rationality as the very starting point of every notable philosophical way of life.The essays present Agassi?s own views on critical rationalism. They also develop and expand upon his work in new and provocative ways. The authors include Agassi's most notable pupils, friends, and colleagues. Overall, their contributions challenge the received view on a variety of issues concerning science, religion, and education.Readers will find well-reasoned arguments on such topics as the secular problem of evil, religion and critical thinking, liberal democratic educational communities, democracy and constitutionalism, and capitalism at a crossroad.To Joseph Agassi, philosophy is the practice of reason, where reason is understood as the relentless search for criticisms of the best available explanations that we have to the world around us. 0