Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction

Most of us spend a significant portion of our lives learning, practising, and performing a wide range of skills. Many of us also have a great amount of control over which skills we learn and develop. From choices as significant as career pursuits to those as minor as how we spend our weeknight leisure time, we exercise a great amount of agency over what we know and what we can do. In this paper we argue, using a framework first developed by Carbonell [2013], that in many real-world circumstances we have moral obligations to develop some skills rather than others.     

Teaching Philosophy of Science to Science Students: An Alternative Approach

Studies in Philosophy and Education -     

Contemporary Philosophy of Science in Italy: An Overview

The paper analyses the development of some themes in the contemporary philosophy of science in Italy. Section 1 reviews the dabate on the legacy of neopositivism. The spread of the philosophy of Popper is outlined in Section 2, with particular regard to the problem of the vindication of induction. Section 3 deals with the debate on the incommensurability thesis, while Section 4 examines its consequences on the possible relationships between historical and epistemological studies of science. The last section is devoted to one of the most recent trends in the Italian philosophy of science: the resumption of Aristotelian dialectics. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

An Applied Mereology of the City: Unifying Science and Philosophy for Urban Planning

Based on their research showing that growing cities follow basic principles, two theoretical physicists, Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West, call for researchers and professionals to contribute to a grand theory of urban sustainability. In their research, they develop a ‘science of the city’ to help urban planners address problems that arise from population increases. Although they provide valuable insights for understanding urban sustainability issues, they do not give planners a manageable way to approach such problems. I argue that developing an applied mereology to understand the concept of ‘city identity’ gives planners a theoretical device for addressing urban affairs, including ethical concerns. In turn, I devise a model of city identity to show how a ‘philosophy of the city’ contributes to a grand theory of urban sustainability.     

Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A Philosophy of Science

Two philosophical traditions with much in common, (classical) pragmatism and (Heidegger's) hermeneutic philosophy, are here compared with respect to their approach to the philosophy of science. Both emphasize action as a mode of interpreting experience. Both have developed important categories – inquiry, meaning, theory, praxis, coping, historicity, life-world – and each has offered an alternative to the more traditional philosophies of science stemming from Descartes, Hume, and Comte. Pragmatism's abduction works with the dual perspectives of theory (as explanation) and praxis (as culture). The hermeneutical circle depends in addition on the lifeworld as background source of ontological meaning and resource for strategies of inquiry. Thus a hermeneutical philosophy of research involves three components: lifeworld (as ontological and strategic), theory (as explanatory), and praxis (as constitutive of culture). This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

人类学:科学与哲学

设定人类学是一门科学根据哈里斯所说 ,博厄斯 以很简明的方式表述这个论题 :“人类学是一门科学 ,而科学是历史”。[1] 马林诺夫斯基 则寻求一种关于文化的科学的定义。在他死后发表的一部题为《科学的文化理论》的文本中 ,[2 ] 他为人文学者提供了一种关于“科学”的最低限度的定义 ,从而使科学得以有别于抽象思想和常识。“科学的论述不同于常识的表述 ,首先 ,在于一位某门科学的学者会以一种学术上合规则、有条理的方式 ,很为深入地扩展考察的完整性与精密性 ;其次 ,在于经过科学训练的心智 ,会将问题的探究循着和问题相关的思路推进 ,…