Though classroom instructional strategies should clearly be based on
sound science and research, knowing when to use them and with whom is
more of an art. In The Art and Science of Teaching: A Comprehensive Framework for Effective Instruction,
author Robert J. Marzano presents a model for ensuring quality teaching
that balances the necessity of research-based data with the equally
vital need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of individual
students.
David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is the
definitive statement of the greatest philosopher in the English
language. His arguments in support of reasoning from experience, and
against the "sophistry and illusion"of religiously inspired
philosophical fantasies, caused controversy in the eighteenth century and are strikingly relevant today, when faith and science continue to clash.
The Enquiry considers the origin and processes of human thought,
reaching the stark conclusion that we can have no ultimate
understanding of the physical world, or indeed our own minds. In either
sphere we must depend on instinctive learning from experience,
recognizing our animal nature and the limits of reason. Hume's calm
and open-minded skepticism thus aims to provide a new basis for
science, liberating us from the "superstition" of false metaphysics and relegion. His Enquiry remains one of the best introductions to the study of philosophy, and his edition places it in its historical
and philosophical context.
Stephen Mulhall offers a new way of interpreting one of the most famous and contested texts in modern philosophy: remarks on "private language" in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. He sheds new light on a central controversy concerning Wittgenstein's early work by showing its relevance to a proper understanding of the later work.
Mark Wilson presents a highly original and broad-ranging
investigation of the way we get to grips with the world conceptually,
and the way that philosophical problems commonly arise from this. He
combines traditional philosophical concerns about human conceptual
thinking with illuminating data
derived from a large variety of
fields including physics and applied mathematics, cognitive psychology,
and linguistics. Wandering Significance offers abundant new insights
and perspectives for philosophers of language, mind, and science, and
will also reward the interest of psychologists,
linguists, and anyone curious about the mysterious ways in which useful language obtains its practical applicability.
John McDowell's "minimal empiricism" is one of the most influential and widely discussed doctrines in contemporary philosophy. Richard Gaskin subjects it to careful examination and criticism, arguing that it has unacceptable consequences, and in particular that it mistakenly rules out
something we all know to be the case: that infants and non-human animals experience a world. Gaskin traces the errors in McDowell's empiricism to their source, and presents his own, still more minimal, version of empiricism, suggesting that a correct philosophy of language requires us to recognize a sense in which the world we experience speaks its own language.