BiblioVault - Books about Epistemology

Objectivity and Diversity

Another Logic of Scientific Research

Sandra Harding

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Worries about scientific objectivity seem never-ending. Social critics and philosophers of science have argued that invocations of objectivity are often little more than attempts to boost the status of a claim, while calls for value neutrality may be used to suppress otherwise valid dissenting positions. Objectivity is used sometimes to advance democratic agendas, at other times to block them; sometimes for increasing the growth of knowledge, at others to resist it.

Sandra Harding is not ready to throw out objectivity quite yet. For all of its problems, she contends that objectivity is too powerful a concept simply to abandon. In Objectivity and Diversity, Harding calls for a science that is both more epistemically adequate and socially just, a science that would ask: How are the lives of the most economically and politically vulnerable groups affected by a particular piece of research? Do they have a say in whether and how the research is done? Should empirically reliable systems of indigenous knowledge count as "real science"? Ultimately, Harding argues for a shift from the ideal of a neutral, disinterested science to one that prizes fairness and responsibility.

[more]

On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing

Selected Writings

Max Scheler

University of Chicago Press, 1992

One of the pioneers of modern sociology, Max Scheler (1874-
1928) ranks with Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, and Ernst
Troeltsch as being among the most brilliant minds of his
generation. Yet Scheler is now known chiefly for his
philosophy of religion, despite his groundbreaking work in
the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of emotions, and
phenomenological sociology. This volume comprises some of
Scheler's most interesting work—including an analysis of the
role of sentiments in social interaction, a sociology of
knowledge rooted in global social and cultural comparisons,
and a cross-cultural theory of values—and identifies some of
his important contributions to the discussion of issues at
the forefront of the social sciences today.

Editor Harold J. Bershady provides a richly detailed
biographical portrait of Scheler, as well as an incisive
analysis of how his work extends and integrates problems of
theory and method addressed by Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons,
among others.

Harold J. Bershady, professor of sociology at the University
of Pennsylvania, is the author of Ideology and Social
Knowledge and the editor of Social Class and
Democratic Leadership.

Heritage of Sociology series

[more]

On Knowing--The Social Sciences

Richard P. McKeon

University of Chicago Press, 2017

As a philosopher, Richard McKeon spent his career developing Pragmatism in a new key, specifically by tracing the ways in which philosophic problems arise in fields other than philosophy—across the natural and social sciences and aesthetics—and showed the ways in which any problem, pushed back to its beginning or taken to its end, is a philosophic problem. The roots of this book, On Knowing—The Social Sciences, are traced to McKeon’s classes where he blended philosophy with physics, ethics, politics, history, and aesthetics.

This volume—the second in a series—leaves behind natural science themes to embrace freedom, power, and history, which, McKeon argues, lay out the whole field of human action. The authors McKeon considers—Hobbes, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Kant, and J. S. Mill—show brilliantly how philosophic methods work in action, via analyses that do not merely reduce or deconstruct meaning, but enhance those texts by reconnecting them to the active history of philosophy and to problems of ethics, politics, and history. The waves of modernism and post-modernism are receding. Philosophic pluralism is now available, fully formulated, in McKeon’s work, spreading from the humanities to the social sciences.

[more]

On the Nature of the Gods. Academics

Cicero

Harvard University Press

The philosopher-statesman on theology and epistemology.

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician, and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension, and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

[more]

On What We Know We Don't Know

Explanation, Theory, Linguistics, and How Questions Shape Them

Sylvain Bromberger

University of Chicago Press, 1992

In this collection of essays, Bromberger explores the centrality of questions and predicaments they create in scientific research. He discusses the nature of explanation, theory, and the foundations of linguistics.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 14

Commemorative Practices in Science: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Collective Memory

Edited by Pnina G. Abir-Am and Clark A. Elliot

University of Chicago Press, 2000

This volume breaks new ground in the study of how national culture, disciplinary tradition, epistemological choice, and political expediency affect the construction of collective memory and, then, how historians work with—and sometimes against—those constructions. Essays focus on a variety of commemorative rites, ranging from the quincentennial of Copernicus to the centennials of Pasteur, Darwin, and Planck; from the tercentenary of Harvard to the half centennial of Los Alamos; from the centennial of evolutionary theory to anniversaries of research schools in molecular biology.

Contributors include Clark A. Elliott, Owen Gingerich, Dieter Hoffmann, Dominque Pestre, Robert W. Seidel, and V. Betty Smocovitis.

[more]

Outlines of Pyrrhonism

Sextus Empiricus

Harvard University Press

A suspicious mind.

Sextus Empiricus (ca. AD 160–210), exponent of scepticism and critic of the Dogmatists, was a Greek physician and philosopher, pupil and successor of the medical sceptic Herodotus (not the historian) of Tarsus. He probably lived for years in Rome and possibly also in Alexandria and Athens. His three surviving works are Outlines of Pyrrhonism (three books on the practical and ethical scepticism of Pyrrho of Elis, ca. 360–275 BC, as developed later, presenting also a case against the Dogmatists); Against the Dogmatists (five books dealing with the Logicians, the Physicists, and the Ethicists); and Against the Professors (six books: Grammarians, Rhetors, Geometers, Arithmeticians, Astrologers, and Musicians). These two latter works might be called a general criticism of professors of all arts and sciences. Sextus’ work is a valuable source for the history of thought especially because of his development and formulation of former sceptic doctrines.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Sextus Empiricus is in four volumes.

[more]