The Roots of Reason: Philosophical Essays on Rationality, Evolution, and Probability
David Papineau presents a controversial view of human reason, portraying it as a normal part of the natural world, and drawing on the empirical sciences to illuminate its workings. In these six interconnected essays he discusses both theoretical and practical rationality, and shows how evolutionary theory, decision theory, and quantum mechanics offer fresh approaches to some long-standing problems.
Author and Narrator: Transdisciplinary Contributions to a Narratological (Linguae & Litterae)
The distinction between author and narrator is one of the cornerstones of narrative theory. In the past two decades, however, scope, implications and consequences of this distinction have become the subjects of debate. This volume offers contributions to these debates from different vantage points: literary studies, linguistics, philosophy, and media studies. It thus manifests the status of narrative theory as a transdisciplinary project.
Who is more important: the reader, or the writer? Originally published in French in 1966, Pierre Macherey’s first and most famous work, A Theory of Literary Production dared to challenge perceived wisdom, and quickly established him as a pivotal figure in literary theory. The reissue of this work as a Routledge Classic brings some radical ideas to a new audience, and argues persuasively for a totally new way of reading. As such, it is an essential work for anyone interested in the development of literary theory.
In The Geometry of Meaning, Peter Gardenfors proposes a theory of semantics that bridges cognitive science and linguistics and shows how theories of cognitive processes, in particular concept formation, can be exploited in a general semantic model. He argues that our minds organize the information involved in communicative acts in a format that can be modeled in geometric or topological terms -- in what he terms conceptual spaces, extending the theory he presented in an earlier book by that name. Many semantic theories consider the meanings of words as relatively stable and independent of the communicative context.
Education is a field sometimes beset by theories-of-the-day and with easy panaceas that overpromise the degree to which they can alleviate pressing educational problems. The two-volume Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy introduces readers to theories that have stood the test of time and those that have provided the historical foundation for the best of contemporary educational theory and practice. Drawing together a team of international scholars, this invaluable reference examines the global landscape of all the key theories and the theorists behind them and presents them in the context needed to understand their strengths and weaknesses.
