Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Working Knowledge PDF full book. Access full book title Working Knowledge by Joel Isaac. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Joel Isaac Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674070046 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 408
Book Description
The human sciences in the English-speaking world have been in a state of crisis since the Second World War. The battle between champions of hard-core scientific standards and supporters of a more humanistic, interpretive approach has been fought to a stalemate. Joel Isaac seeks to throw these contemporary disputes into much-needed historical relief. In Working Knowledge he explores how influential thinkers in the twentieth century's middle decades understood the relations among science, knowledge, and the empirical study of human affairs. For a number of these thinkers, questions about what kinds of knowledge the human sciences could produce did not rest on grand ideological gestures toward "science" and "objectivity" but were linked to the ways in which knowledge was created and taught in laboratories and seminar rooms. Isaac places special emphasis on the practical, local manifestations of their complex theoretical ideas. In the case of Percy Williams Bridgman, Talcott Parsons, B. F. Skinner, W. V. O. Quine, and Thomas Kuhn, the institutional milieu in which they constructed their models of scientific practice was Harvard University. Isaac delineates the role the "Harvard complex" played in fostering connections between epistemological discourse and the practice of science. Operating alongside but apart from traditional departments were special seminars, interfaculty discussion groups, and non-professionalized societies and teaching programs that shaped thinking in sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, science studies, and management science. In tracing this culture of inquiry in the human sciences, Isaac offers intellectual history at its most expansive.
Author: Joel Isaac Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674070046 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 408
Book Description
The human sciences in the English-speaking world have been in a state of crisis since the Second World War. The battle between champions of hard-core scientific standards and supporters of a more humanistic, interpretive approach has been fought to a stalemate. Joel Isaac seeks to throw these contemporary disputes into much-needed historical relief. In Working Knowledge he explores how influential thinkers in the twentieth century's middle decades understood the relations among science, knowledge, and the empirical study of human affairs. For a number of these thinkers, questions about what kinds of knowledge the human sciences could produce did not rest on grand ideological gestures toward "science" and "objectivity" but were linked to the ways in which knowledge was created and taught in laboratories and seminar rooms. Isaac places special emphasis on the practical, local manifestations of their complex theoretical ideas. In the case of Percy Williams Bridgman, Talcott Parsons, B. F. Skinner, W. V. O. Quine, and Thomas Kuhn, the institutional milieu in which they constructed their models of scientific practice was Harvard University. Isaac delineates the role the "Harvard complex" played in fostering connections between epistemological discourse and the practice of science. Operating alongside but apart from traditional departments were special seminars, interfaculty discussion groups, and non-professionalized societies and teaching programs that shaped thinking in sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, science studies, and management science. In tracing this culture of inquiry in the human sciences, Isaac offers intellectual history at its most expansive.
Author: Michael Strevens Publisher: Liveright Publishing ISBN: 1631491385 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
“The Knowledge Machine is the most stunningly illuminating book of the last several decades regarding the all-important scientific enterprise.” —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex A paradigm-shifting work, The Knowledge Machine revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science. • Why is science so powerful? • Why did it take so long—two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics—for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe? In a groundbreaking work that blends science, philosophy, and history, leading philosopher of science Michael Strevens answers these challenging questions, showing how science came about only once thinkers stumbled upon the astonishing idea that scientific breakthroughs could be accomplished by breaking the rules of logical argument. Like such classic works as Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine grapples with the meaning and origins of science, using a plethora of vivid historical examples to demonstrate that scientists willfully ignore religion, theoretical beauty, and even philosophy to embrace a constricted code of argument whose very narrowness channels unprecedented energy into empirical observation and experimentation. Strevens calls this scientific code the iron rule of explanation, and reveals the way in which the rule, precisely because it is unreasonably close-minded, overcomes individual prejudices to lead humanity inexorably toward the secrets of nature. “With a mixture of philosophical and historical argument, and written in an engrossing style” (Alan Ryan), The Knowledge Machine provides captivating portraits of some of the greatest luminaries in science’s history, including Isaac Newton, the chief architect of modern science and its foundational theories of motion and gravitation; William Whewell, perhaps the greatest philosopher-scientist of the early nineteenth century; and Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark. Today, Strevens argues, in the face of threats from a changing climate and global pandemics, the idiosyncratic but highly effective scientific knowledge machine must be protected from politicians, commercial interests, and even scientists themselves who seek to open it up, to make it less narrow and more rational—and thus to undermine its devotedly empirical search for truth. Rich with illuminating and often delightfully quirky illustrations, The Knowledge Machine, written in a winningly accessible style that belies the import of its revisionist and groundbreaking concepts, radically reframes much of what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world.
Author: Desus & Mero Publisher: Random House ISBN: 0525512330 Category : Humor Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Desus & Mero are smarter and funnier than everyone writing books.”—Shea Serrano “I will never write anything as hilarious as they have. I give up.”—Malcolm Gladwell “These motherf***ers make me laugh until I choke.”—Jia Tolentino NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR A wild, hilarious guide to life from the hosts of the hit late-night show Desus & Mero and the Bodega Boys podcast Who could have predicted that, after a fateful meeting in a Bronx summer school in the 1990s, Desus & Mero would turn their friendship into an empire of talking to each other. And it’s no surprise—tuning in to them is like listening to the funniest, smartest people you know dissect a topic and then light it on fire. Now they’ve written the most essential guide to life of this century*, in which all the important questions are asked: How do I talk to my kids about drugs if I do them, too? What are the ethics of ghosting in a relationship? How do I bet on sports? How should I behave in jail? How much is too much to spend on sneakers? Is porn really that bad for me? As they put it: “We want to share all we’ve learned, after years in the Bronx streets, with you: the people. So with a lifetime spent building up a plethora of information from trials and tribulations and a handful of misdemeanors, we decided to write this book—a sequel to the Bible, or maybe to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,depending on how big a nerd you are. Let this book be your North Star.” *NO REFUNDS
Author: Violet Moller Publisher: Picador ISBN: 9781509829620 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
"The foundations of modern knowledge--philosophy, math, astronomy, geography--were laid by the Greeks, whose ideas were written on scrolls and stored in libraries across the Mediterranean and beyond. But as the vast Roman Empire disintegrated, so did appreciation of these precious texts. Christianity cast a shadow over so-called pagan thought, books were burned, and the library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of classical knowledge, was destroyed. Yet some texts did survive and The Map of Knowledge explores the role played by seven cities around the Mediterranean--rare centers of knowledge in a dark world, where scholars supported by enlightened heads of state collected, translated and shared manuscripts. In 8th century Baghdad, Arab discoveries augmented Greek learning. Exchange within the thriving Muslim world brought that knowledge to Cordoba, Spain. Toledo became a famous center of translation from Arabic into Latin, a portal through which Greek and Arab ideas reached Western Europe. Salerno, on the Italian coast, was the great center of medical studies, and Sicily, ancient colony of the Greeks, was one of the few places in the West to retain contact with Greek culture and language. Scholars in these cities helped classical ideas make their way to Venice in the 15th century, where printers thrived and the Renaissance took root. The Map of Knowledge follows three key texts--Euclid's Elements, Ptolemy's The Almagest, and Galen's writings on medicine--on a perilous journey driven by insatiable curiosity about the world"--Pages [2-3] of cover.
Author: Jonathan Rauch Publisher: Brookings Institution Press ISBN: 0815738870 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on facts “In what could be the timeliest book of the year, Rauch aims to arm his readers to engage with reason in an age of illiberalism.” —Newsweek A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America's ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood. In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn't even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: “cancel culture.” At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their sanctimony. In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge”—our social system for turning disagreement into truth. By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do—and how they can do it. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.
Author: Martha Grimes Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press ISBN: 0802146252 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 403
Book Description
As the New York Times–bestselling series continues, a double murder in front of an exclusive club takes a London detective on a wild ride. Robbie Parsons is one of London’s finest, a black cab driver who knows every street, every theater, every landmark in the city by heart. In his backseat is a man with a gun in his hand—a man who brazenly committed a crime in front of the Artemis Club, a rarefied art gallery-cum-casino, then jumped in and ordered Parsons to drive. As the criminal eventually escapes to Nairobi, Detective Superintendent Richard Jury comes across the case in the Saturday paper. Two days previously, Jury had met and instantly connected with one of the victims of the crime, a professor of astrophysics at Columbia and an expert gambler. Feeling personally affronted, Jury soon enlists Melrose Plant, Marshall Trueblood, and his whole gang of merry characters to contend with a case that takes unexpected turns into Tanzanian gem mines, a closed casino in Reno, Nevada, and a pub that only London’s black cabbies, those who have “the knowledge,” can find. The Knowledge is prime fare from “one of the most fascinating mystery writers today” (Houston Chronicle). “Grimes’ twenty-fourth mystery starring Richard Jury gets off to a breakneck start. . . . Besides the fast action, it’s fascinating to see how Robbie uses a London’s cabdriver’s deep familiarity with the streets to keep himself alive. . . . Jury’s devoted readership will find much to enjoy.” —Booklist “Solid. . . . Readers will appreciate the elements that have made this a long-running bestselling series, notably a complicated case and distinctive characters.” —Publishers Weekly “Martha Grimes’ Richard Jury returns in a new mystery that is every bit as clever and suspenseful as her others. The plot is intriguing and unusual, featuring the usual cast of characters Grimes fans have come to know and love, as well as a set of streetwise, worldly children that could have come straight out of a Dickens novel.” —Patricia Uttaro, Rochester Public Library
Author: Lewis Dartnell Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0143127047 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch? If our technological society collapsed tomorrow what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible? Human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. It has built on itself for centuries, becoming vast and increasingly specialized. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latest—or even the most basic—technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, or even how to produce food for yourself? Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You can’t hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it. But Dartnell doesn’t just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them all—the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world.
Author: Joel Isaac
Author: Joel Isaac
Author: Michael Strevens
Author: Debbie Bliss
Author: Desus & Mero
Author: 
Author: 
Author: Violet Moller
Author: Jonathan Rauch
Author: Martha Grimes
Author: Lewis Dartnell