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Art and science are both ways of understanding the world and orientating oneself in it. Scientists and artists are society's visionaries, and this unlikely collaboration between the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and KVS aims to reconnect these different disciplines, sending the strong message that tomorrow’s society will only be built on the basis of dialogue and the search for common ground. Mindblowers is structured around four themes: Resistance, Imagination, Time and Beauty. The 39 contributions from different artists and scientists are diverse and thought- provoking in form and content, ranging from recipes to letters, from articles to a photo-novella... We hope it blows your mind.

Art --- wetenschapsfilosofie

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This book tackles two fundamental problems: How can our human world exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? What role do untestable, metaphysical ideas about the nature of the physical universe play in science? In connection with the first, it is argued that physics is concerned only with a highly selective aspect of all that there is - that aspect that determines how events unfold. Physics ignores human experience and consciousness, first because they are not needed to fulfil the predictive and explanatory tasks of physics, and second because they must be ignored if physics is to develop the beautifully explanatory theories that it does develop. In connection with the second fundamental problem, it is argued that physics, as a result of accepting unified theories only, makes a highly problematic metaphysical assumption about the nature of the physical universe: it is such that some unknown, unified "theory of everything" is true. Precisely because this assumption is so profoundly problematic, it needs to be made explicit within physics, so that it can be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved. The author puts forward a revolutionary philosophy of science called aim-oriented empiricism (AOE), designed to facilitate improvement in the metaphysics of physics, as physics proceeds. The author has devoted many years developing AOE and publishing papers on it. Here he spells out the implications of AOE for the metaphysics of science. The main body of the book expounds and critically assesses many key works in the metaphysics of science published from 2007 to 2018. The book concludes by considering the broader implications of aim-oriented empiricism, for science, for academic inquiry and, even, for the future of humanity.

Philosophy of science --- wetenschapsfilosofie

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This book develops a philosophical account that reveals the major characteristics that make an explanation in the life sciences reductive and distinguish them from non-reductive explanations. Understanding what reductive explanations are enables one to assess the conditions under which reductive explanations are adequate and thus enhances debates about explanatory reductionism. The account of reductive explanation presented in this book has three major characteristics. First, it emerges from a critical reconstruction of the explanatory practice of the life sciences itself. Second, the account is monistic since it specifies one set of criteria that apply to explanations in the life sciences in general. Finally, the account is ontic in that it traces the reductivity of an explanation back to certain relations that exist between objects in the world (such as part-whole relations and level relations), rather than to the logical relations between sentences. Beginning with a disclosure of the meta-philosophical assumptions that underlie the author’s analysis of reductive explanation, the book leads into the debate about reduction(ism) in the philosophy of biology and continues with a discussion on the two perspectives on explanatory reduction that have been proposed in the philosophy of biology so far. The author scrutinizes how the issue of reduction becomes entangled with explanation and analyzes two concepts, the concept of a biological part and the concept of a level of organization. The results of these five chapters constitute the ground on which the author bases her final chapter, developing her ontic account of reductive explanation.

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This anthology is a unique compilation of scientific contributions on the topic of measurement and understanding, showing how terms such as number, measurement, understanding, model, and pattern are used in a wide variety of disciplines. Based on results and experiences from their own projects, 23 researchers comment on the potentials and limitations of their individual methodological approaches as well as success factors of interdisciplinary collaboration. In doing so, they fathom the relative importance of quantification and empirical evidence for each of their disciplines and examine how the methodological approaches shape their existing models and images. Their common goal is to understand the world; however, their methods are highly diverse. The Content Advantages and challenges of interdisciplinary work Examples of interdisciplinary work to measure and understand the world Communication of interdisciplinary work Success factors for interdisciplinary collaboration and conclusions Similarities and differences in the meaning of number and measurement between disciplines The Target groups Faculty and students in all disciplines who are interested in interdisciplinary research The editors and authors The editors and authors of the book are fellows in the WIN Kolleg of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The scientific focus of the individual authors is broad across the spectrum of the sciences. This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.

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This new study provides a refreshing look at the issue of exceptions and shows that much of the problem stems from a failure to recognize at least two kinds of exception-ridden law: ceteris paribus laws and ideal laws. Billy Wheeler offers the first book-length discussion of ideal laws. The key difference between these two kinds of laws concerns the nature of the conditions that need to be satisfied and their epistemological role in the law’s formulation and discovery. He presents a Humean-inspired approach that draws heavily on concepts from the information and computing sciences. Specifically, Wheeler argues that laws are best seen as algorithms for compressing empirical data and that ideal laws are needed as 'lossy compressors' for complex data. Major figures in the metaphysics of science receive special attention such as Ronald Giere, Bas van Fraassen, Nancy Cartwright, David Lewis and Marc Lange. This book is essential reading for philosophers of science and will interest metaphysicians, epistemologists and others interested in applying concepts from computing to traditional philosophical problems.

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