Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists

D.C. Stove

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Language: English

Published by Pergamon Press, 1982

0080267912 / 9780080267913

Series: Book 15 of 21 - Pergamon International Library of Science, Technology, Engineering & Social Studies

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Seller: CHARLES BOSSOM, Ely, CAMBS, United KingdomCHARLES BOSSOM

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Paperback, crease to one corner. 128 pages, clean and tight. Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend occupy leading positions in Western philosophy of science in this century. To them we owe the prevailing view that scientific knowledge is never true (nor even probable), and never false (nor even improbable). Even the best scientific opinion, at any time, is nothing more than an unjustified conjecture, a socially-imposed dogma, or a fashionable gestalt. Some consequences of this attitude to scientific truth verge on the lunatic, and David Stove demonstrates how irrationalists turn the trick of concealing absurdity by a variety of logical and linguistic devices. He then examines the aetiology of the irrationalist thesis, and traces the fatal conjunction of empiricism with perfectionism back to Hume: 'Nothing fatal to empiricist philosophy of science follows from the admission that arguments from the observed to the unobserved are not the best, unless this admission is combined, as it was by Hume, with the fatal assumption that only the best will do.' In this business-like declothing of philosophical emperors, he performs a valuable service for all students of philosophy. By exposing the 'frivolous elevation of the critical attitude into a categorical imperative of intellectual life', he resurrects a philosophical basis for holding that, for example. Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood was right. or that Ptolemaic astronomy was wrong, or that scientific knowledge has advanced over the last four hundred years. For non-philosophers and others who have always held such views, David Stove provides a lucid and amusing account of an extraordinary movement in the history of ideas. Size: 8vo.

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Title
Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists
Author
D.C. Stove
Publisher
Pergamon Press
Publication year
1982
Condition
Very Good
Binding
Soft Cover
Language
English
ISBN 10
0080267912
ISBN 13
9780080267913
Series
Book 15 of 21: Pergamon International Library of Science, Technology, Engineering & Social Studies

CHARLES BOSSOM

Ely, CAMBS, United Kingdom

5-star seller

AbeBooks seller since August 16, 2004

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Charles Bossom, 9 LODE WAY, HADDENHAM, ELY, CB6 3UL charles.bossom@googlemail.com Charles Bossom has worked in the Book Trade since 1963, commencing at WH Smith Oxford and retiring in 1999 as Regional Manager Central England. The Charles Bossom bookselling business was started in early 2000. hhtp://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesbossom

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