Tuesday, January 21, 2014

All We Need Is a Paradigm by Phin Upham

By Phin Upham

“All We Need Is a Paradigm” is a collection of essays on science, economics, and logic from The Harvard Review of Philosophy. I had the privilege of editing this collection, which was published by Open Court Publishing Company in 2009. This book contains fourteen philosophical essays exploring topics such as physics, mathematics, and music. At the Harvard Review of Philosophy we stress the value of philosophical rigor for exploring the widest range of fields and issues. Perhaps one of the chief strengths of philosophy is that it is useful as a versatile methodology for analysis, that it can be used in conjunction with other disciplines rather than only in isolation from them.
We believe philosophy can be as enriching to the lawyer, the physicist, the craftsman, and the musician as to the professional philosopher. In particular, the authors in this collection employ philosophy to better understand important topics in the hard and social sciences. There is a burgeoning and productive study at the intersections of philosophy and science of evolving scientific paradigms and of the assumptions underlying the ‘laws of nature’. Many of the authors in this collection find philosophy particularly helpful in understanding the principles that underlie the experimental and theoretical ideas in these other fields and in unfolding and resolving the paradoxes that confound traditional approaches. Three major themes come up again and again in the essays and often lead to fruitful philosophical insight—the nature of language, the nature of causality, and the nature of human cognition. This book is on sale at Amazon and on eBay.

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