This richly textured book bridges analytic and hermeneutic and phenomenological philosophy of science. It features unique resources for students of the philosophy and history of quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen Interpretation, cognitive theory and the psychology of perception, the history and philosophy of art, and the pragmatic and historical relationships between religion and science.

The study of material culture is concerned with the relationship between persons and things in the past and in the present, in urban and industrialized and in small-scale societies across the globe. The Handbook of Material Culture provides a critical survey of the theories, concepts, intellectual debates, substantive domains and traditions of study characterizing the analysis of things. It is cutting-edge: rather than simply reviewing the field as it currently exists. It also attempts to chart the future: the manner in which material culture studies may be extended and developed. The Handbook of Material Culture is divided into five sections. • Section I maps material culture studies as a theoretical and conceptual field. • Section II examines the relationship between material forms, the human body and the senses. • Section III focuses on subject-object relations. • Section IV considers things in terms of processes and transformations in terms of production, exchange and consumption, performance and the significance of things over the long-term. • Section V considers the contemporary politics and poetics of displaying, representing and conserving material and the manner in which this impacts on notions of heritage, tradition and identity. The Handbook charts an interdisciplinary field of studies that makes an unique and fundamental contribution to an understanding of what it means to be human. It will be of interest to all who work in the social and historical sciences, from anthropologists and archaeologists to human geographers to scholars working in heritage, design and cultural studies.

Here is a vivid, poetic, and evocative story of the painter Vincent van Gogh's struggle to become his true self. The author listens in on Vincent's most intimate, frequently startling thoughts on a host of topics, drawn from three volumes of his correspondence and his 900 extant paintings. What emerges is the portrait of an artist whose spiritual vision was borne of an agonizingly prolonged experience of the "dark night of the soul" through which his art dared to envision the triumph of joy over sorrow, of resurrection over suffering and death. Readers will discover that in many ways Vincent's story is as much about us as about him. Tracing van Gogh's pilgrimage from being an apprentice art dealer to being called to minister, in self-renunciation and misery, among destitute coal miners, the narrative follows his winding, tortuous path into adulthood as he struggles with family, associates, lovers--and with himself. Constantly evidenced in Vincent's own eloquent words and paintings is his tussle with the mysterious presence and maddening absence of God. Vocation unveils as a process of summoning and birthing his own self, through an attempt to imitate Christ, calling forth van Gogh's extraordinary creative powers from deep within. Adding choice supplies from other observers, Davidson here weaves his own exact, artful tapestry of interpretation, producing a suspenseful excursion into the life of van Gogh that offers profound meaning at every turn.

Observation and conceptual interpretation constitute the two major ways through which human beings engage the world. The World Observed/The World Conceived presents an innovative analysis of the nature and role of observation and conceptualization. While these two actions are often treated as separate, Hans Radder shows that they are inherently interconnected-that materially realized observational processes are always conceptually interpreted and that the meaning of concepts depends on the way they structure observational processes and abstract from them. He examines the role of human action and conceptualization in realizing observational processes and develops a detailed theory of the relationship between observation, abstraction, and the meaning of concepts. The World Observed/The World Conceived will prove useful to many areas of scholarly study including ontology, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, science studies, and cognitive science.

This volume is a contribution to the ongoing debate on the distinction between a ‘context of justification’ and a ‘context of discovery’. It is meant for researchers and advanced students in philosophy of science, and for natural and social scientists interested in foundational topics. Spanning a wide range of disciplines, it combines the viewpoint of philosophers and scientists and casts a new interdisciplinary perspective on the problem of observation and experimentation.

Here is a much needed study of the American historian and philosopher, E.A. Burtt. H. Floris Cohen, author of "The Scientific Revolution, A Historiography", has described Burtt as an "individual thinker...beyond philosophical or historical currents or fashion." Burtt's book, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, is something of a puzzle within the context of twentieth-century intellectual history, especially American intellectual history. Burtt's pioneering study of the scientific revolution has proved to prophetic in its rejection of both scientism and positivism. Published in 1924, Burtt's book continues to be read in educated circles and remains both the rose and the thorn on university reading lists, raising skeptical questions about science methods and science knowledge just as it did seventy-five years ago. This book examines Burtt's public, academic and personal life. From his politics of conscience after World War I on through the Cold War Burtt is shown to be a man of unparalleled integrity, whose relentless search for philosophic understanding drove his more quixotic philosophical quests and steered his personal life, including its tragic dimension, toward simple virtue. The many who have been affected by The Metaphysical Foundations will be especially interested in this new perspective on the life and thought of its author. Those who have not read Burtt's books might be inspired to study this unusual American thinker.

Do knowledge and science arise from the application of canons of rationality and scientific method? Or is all our scientific knowledge caused by socio-political factors, or by our interests in the socio-political - the view of sociologists of "knowledge"? Or does it result from interplay of relations of power - the view of Michel Foucault? Or does our knowledge arise from "the will to power" - the view of Nietzsche? This volume sets out to critically examine the theses of those who would debunk the idea of rational explanation. The book is wide-ranging. The theories of method of Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend (amongst others) are discussed and related to the views of Marx, Foucault, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche as well as sociologists of science such as Mannheim and Bloor. The author provides a wide interpretative framework which links the doctrines espoused by many of these authors; it is argued that they inherit many of the difficulties in the Strong Programme in the sociology of "knowledge", and that they fail to reconcile the normativity of knowledge with their naturalism. It is argued that neither relativists, sceptics, nihilists, sociologists of "knowledge" nor the postmodernists successfully debunk the claims of rational explanation, far from it: these theorists presuppose much of the theory of methodology they deny.

This book explores the work of Thomas Seebohm (1934-2014), a leading phenomenologist and hermeneuticist. It features papers that offer a critical and constructive dialogue about Seebohm’s analyses and their implications for the sciences. The net result is an in-depth study and a helpful overview of Seebohm’s general approach and his specific views on various areas of modern science. The contributors focus especially upon his final text, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences. They view this as the culmination and summary of his historical and phenomenological investigations into the foundations, nature, and limits of modern sciences. This includes not just history but the Geisteswissenschaften more generally, along with the social and natural sciences as well. The essays in this volume reflect that range. This volume presents insightful discussions about the nature and legitimacy of the human sciences as sciences and the unique character of the social sciences. It will be of interest not just as a matter of historical scholarship, but also and above all as an important contribution to phenomenology and to the philosophy of science and the sciences as such. It deserves attention by scholars from any philosophical tradition interested in thinking about the foundations of their disciplines and a philosophy of science that includes, but is not limited to, the natural sciences.

Modes of Explanation is the first book in decades to attempt to bring these conflicting approaches together and to offer a compelling narrative to explore how the paradox of 'explanation' can converge.

This book contains a selection of the papers presented at the Logic, Reasoning and Rationality 2010 conference (LRR10) in Ghent. The conference aimed at stimulating the use of formal frameworks to explicate concrete cases of human reasoning, and conversely, to challenge scholars in formal studies by presenting them with interesting new cases of actual reasoning. According to the members of the Wiener Kreis, there was a strong connection between logic, reasoning, and rationality and that human reasoning is rational in so far as it is based on (classical) logic. Later, this belief came under attack and logic was deemed inadequate to explicate actual cases of human reasoning. Today, there is a growing interest in reconnecting logic, reasoning and rationality. A central motor for this change was the development of non-classical logics and non-classical formal frameworks. The book contains contributions in various non-classical formal frameworks, case studies that enhance our apprehension of concrete reasoning patterns, and studies of the philosophical implications for our understanding of the notions of rationality.