: Joseph Margolis
: Culture and Cultural Entities - Toward a New Unity of Science Toward a New Unity of Science
: Springer-Verlag
: 9789048125548
: 2
: CHF 85.90
:
: Allgemeines, Lexika
: English
: 156
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: PDF

Culture and Cultural Entitiesprovides an original philosophical analysis of the nature and explanation of cultural phenomena, with special attention to ontology and methodology. It addresses in depth such topics as: the relation between physical and biological nature and cultural phenomena; the analysis of intentionality; the nature and explanation of action; causality; causal explanation and the unity of science; theories of language; historicity; animal and human intelligence; psychological and social phenomena; technology and evolution. Its approach features a form of non-reductive materialism, examines a wide range of views, and is highly readable, making it suitable for professionals, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and an informed general audience. A new chapter was added to give a sense of pertinent trends since the appearance of the first edition, particularly with respect to the history of philosophy, pragmatism, the unity of science, and evolution. The unity, scope, and simplicity of the theory are well-regarded.



The author is currently Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University (Philadelphia, USA). He's taught and lectured widely in the United States and worldwide and has published close to forty books. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki and has been awarded a fulbright fellowship to Sweden.

He's written widely in most of the principal areas of philosophical research and is particularly known for his attempt to integrate the whole of philosophy in terms of a close analysis of the cultural world: with special attention to the analysis of the self; history and historicity; language, art and technology; the physical and human sciences; action and meaning; mind and knowledge, theory and practice. He's particularly known for his heterodox defense of the flux (against invariance); the artifactual nature of the human self (against a biologized human nature); the subsumption of the physical sciences under the more general concerns of the human sciences; problems of intentionality (penetrated in culturaly significant ways); the defense of relativism, emergentism, historicism, and non-reductive materialism. He is also known for his sustained analysis of American philosophy during its most important and influential period and his reinterpretation of the prospects of a redirected pragmatism within the whole of Eurocentric philosophy.

Contents7
Preface to the Second Edition (2009)8
Preface12
Acknowledgements14
Chapter 1 Nature, Culture, and Persons15
Notes27
Chapter 2 The Concept of Consciousness30
Notes44
Chapter 3 Animal and Human Minds47
Notes61
Chapter 4 Action and Causality64
Notes76
Chapter 5 Puzzles About the Causal Explanation of Human Actions79
Notes92
Chapter 6 Cognitivism and the Problem of Explaining Human Intelligence94
Notes115
Chapter 7 Wittgenstein and Natural Languages: An Alternative to Rationalist and Empiricist Theories120
Notes140
Chapter 8 Afterwords (2009): Closer to the New Unity144
Notes156
Index158