The Best Epistemology Philosophy Books 2024

1. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Pre-Owned (Hardcover)

Pre-Owned - The most influential book of the past seventy-five years: a groundbreaking exploration of everything we know about what we don't know, now with a new section called On Robustness and Fragility. A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the impossible. For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. In this revelatory book, Taleb will change the way you look at the world, and this second edition features a new philosophical and empirical essay, On Robustness and Fragility, which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan is a landmark book--itself a black swan.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Pre-Owned (Hardcover)

2. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

Pre-Owned - Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung is one of the most important philosophical works of the 19th century, the basic statement of one important stream of post-Kantian thought. It is without question Schopenhauer's greatest work, and, conceived and published before the philosopher was 30 and expanded 25 years later, it is the summation of a lifetime of thought. For 70 years, the only unabridged English translation of this work was the Haldane-Kemp collaboration. In 1958, a new translation by E. F. J. Payne appeared which decisively supplanted the older one. Payne's translation is superior because it corrects nearly 1,000 errors and omissions in the Haldane-Kemp translation, and it is based on the definitive 1937 German edition of Schopenhauer's work prepared by Dr. Arthur Hubscher. Payne's edition is the first to translate into English the text's many quotatioins in half a dozen languages, and Mr. Payne has provided a comprehensive index of 2,500 items. It is thus the most useful edition for the student or teacher.

The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

3. The Great Unknown : Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science, Used [Hardcover]

"An engaging voyage into some of the great mysteries and wonders of our world." --Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dream and The Accidental Universe "No one is better at making the recondite accessible and exciting." --Bill Bryson Brain Pickings and Kirkus Best Science Book of the Year Every week seems to throw up a new discovery, shaking the foundations of what we know. But are there questions we will never be able to answer--mysteries that lie beyond the predictive powers of science? In this captivating exploration of our most tantalizing unknowns, Marcus du Sautoy invites us to consider the problems in cosmology, quantum physics, mathematics, and neuroscience that continue to bedevil scientists and creative thinkers who are at the forefront of their fields. At once exhilarating, mind-bending, and compulsively readable, The Great Unknown challenges us to consider big questions--about the nature of consciousness, what came before the big bang, and what lies beyond our horizons--while taking us on a virtuoso tour of the great breakthroughs of the past and celebrating the men and women who dared to tackle the seemingly impossible and had the imagination to come up with new ways of seeing the world.

The Great Unknown : Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science, Used [Hardcover]

4. Beyond the Limits of Thought, Used [Paperback]

Graham Priest presents a new, expanded edition of his highly original exploration of the nature and limits of thought. Drawing on recent developments in the field of logic, Priest shows that the description of such limits leads to contradiction, and argues that these contradictions are in facttrue. Beginning with an analysis of the way in which these limits arise in pre-Kantian philosophy, Priest goes on to illustrate how the nature of these limits was theorized by Kant and Hegel. He offers new interpretations of Berkeley's master argument for idealism and Kant on the antinomies. Heexplores the paradoxes of self-reference, and provides a unified account of the structure of such paradoxes. The book goes on to trace the theme of the limits of thought in modern philosophy of language, including discussions of the ideas of Wittgenstein and Derrida.The second edition includes new chapters on Heidegger and Nagarjuna, as well as reflections on reactions to the first edition. This clear, provocative, and systematic work offers a radically different approach to philosophy and logic.

Beyond the Limits of Thought, Used [Paperback]

5. Evidence Inquiry (Paperback)

In this important new work, Haack develops an original theory of empirical evidence or justification, and argues its appropriateness to the goals of inquiry. In so doing, Haack provides detailed critical case studies of Lewis's foundationalism; Davidson's and Bonjour's coherentism; Popper's 'epistemology without a knowing subject'; Quine's naturalism; Goldman's reliabilism; and Rorty's, Stich's, and the Churchlands' recent obituaries of epistemology.

Evidence Inquiry (Paperback)

6. Natural Knowledge in Preclassical Antiquity [Paperback - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. In describing the origins of modern "science," historians often fail to appreciate or misread how the ancients understood and used significant expressions of "natural knowledge." Few read the story of the cyclops, for example, as useful advice about where to travel and settle -- and where not to. Others search for "lost Egyptian wisdom" rather than see how the great pyramids of the Old Kingdom could be built with the simple tools and cumbersome mathematics of the time. Mott T. Greene reexamines the remnants of ancient life using conceptual tools seldom brought to bear on such material. The result is a fresh appraisal of what the evidence will yield about natural phenomena and modes of thought in the distant past. Greene builds on the work of modern scholars but contributes scientific precision and tenacity to debates in areas as diverse as archaeology, early art history, Egyptian fractions, Indo-Iranian religion, classical Greek verse, and Plato's "problem of knowledge."

Natural Knowledge in Preclassical Antiquity, Used [Paperback]

7. Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred (MIT Press), Used [Hardcover]

Rembrandt's famous painting of an anatomy lesson, the shrunken head of an Australian indigenous leader, an aerial view of Paris from a balloon: all are windows to enchantment, curiosities that illuminate something shadowy and forgotten lurking behind the neat facade of a rational world. In Curious Visions of Modernity, David Martin unpacks a collection of artifacts from the visual and historical archives of modernity, finding in each a slippage of scientific rationality--a repressed heterogeneity within the homogenized structures of post-Enlightenment knowledge. In doing so, he exposes modernity and its visual culture as haunted by precisely those things that rationality sought to expunge from the "enlightened" world: enchantment, magic, and wonderment. Martin traces the genealogies of what he considers three of the most distinct and historically immediate fields of modern visual culture: the collection, the body, and the mapping of spaces. In a narrative resembling the many-drawered curiosity cabinets of the Renaissance rather than the locked glass cases of the modern museum, he shows us a world renewed through the act of collecting the wondrous and aberrant objects of Creation; tortured and broken flesh rising from the dissecting tables of anatomy theaters to stalk the discourses of medical knowledge; and the spilling forth of a pictorializing geometry from the gilt frames of Renaissance panel paintings to venerate a panoptic god. Accounting for the visual disenchantment of modernity, Martin offers a curious vision of its reenchantment.

Curious Visions of Modernity : Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred, Used [Hardcover]

8. Theaetetus [Paperback - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. This series is intended to serve the needs of philosophers and students of philosophy interested in Plato in much the same way as those interested in Aristotle are served by the well-known Clarendon Aristotle Series. Each volume contains a new translation (usually of a single, medium-length dialogue), and exegetical and critical notes on the philosophical content and agruments.

Theaetetus, Used [Paperback]

9. Historical Knowledge, Historical Error : A Contemporary Guide to Practice, Used [Paperback]

In the past thirty years, historians have broadened the scope of their discipline to include many previously neglected topics and perspectives. They have chronicled language, madness, gender, and sexuality and have experimented with new forms of presentation. They have turned to the histories of non-Western peoples and to the troubled relations between ?the West? and the rest. Allan Megill welcomes these developments, but he also suggests that there is now confusion among historians about what counts as a justified account of the past. In Historical Knowledge, Historical Error , Megill dispels some of the confusion. Here, he discusses issues of narrative, objectivity, and memory. He attacks what he sees as irresponsible uses of evidence while accepting the art of speculation, which incomplete evidence forces upon historians. Along the way, he offers succinct accounts of the epistemological road historians have traveled from Herodotus and Thucydides through Leopold von Ranke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and on to Hayden White, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Lynn Hunt.

Historical Knowledge, Historical Error : A Contemporary Guide to Practice, Used [Paperback]

10. The Problems of Philosophy, Used [Paperback]

In Problems of Philosophy Russell attempts to create a brief and accessible guide to the problems of philosophy. He introduces important theories of Plato, Aristotle, Rene Descartes, David Hume, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel and others to lay the foundation for philosophical inquiry. The Theory of Knowledge occupies a larger space than metaphysics in the present volume, and some topics much discussed by philosophers are treated very briefly, if at all. Still this volume is a must read for anyone wishing a better understanding of philosophy."

The Problems of Philosophy, Used [Paperback]