Thinking Things Through: An Introduction to Philosophical Issues and Achievements

(Paperback, second edition)

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The second edition of a unique introductory text, offering an account of the logical tradition in philosophy and its influence on contemporary scientific disciplines.Thinking Things Through offers a broad, historical, and rigorous introduction to the logical tradition in philosophy and its contemporary significance. It is unique among introductory philosophy texts in that it considers both the historical development and modern fruition of a few central questions. It traces the influence of philosophical ideas and arguments on modern logic, statistics, decision theory, computer science, cognitive science, and public policy. The text offers an account of the history of speculation and argument, and the development of theories of deductive and probabilistic reasoning. It considers whether and how new knowledge of the world is possible at all, investigates rational decision making and causality, explores the nature of mind, and considers ethical theories. Suggestions for reading, both historical and contemporary, accompany most chapters. This second edition includes four new chapters, on decision theory and causal relations, moral and political theories, "moral tools" such as game theory and voting theory, and ethical theories and their relation to real-world issues. Examples have been updated throughout, and some new material has been added. It is suitable for use in advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate classes in philosophy, and as an ancillary text for students in computer science and the natural sciences.

Reviews

I have never encountered an introductory text like this one. As far as textbooks go, it is distinctive. It attempts to present a side of philosophy that has been hidden from the view of all but its practitioners. Real philosophy can be formal and rigorous in the very same ways in which mathematics and physical science are formal and rigorous. Glymour's book should make a good many people proud to be philosophers in the twentieth century."- Douglas Stalker, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Delaware
- Douglas Stalker, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Delaware

Author Bio

Clark Glymour is Alumni University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University and Senior Research Scientist at Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. He is the author of The Mind's Arrows- Bayes Nets and Graphical Causal Models in Psychology (MIT Press), Galileo in Pittsburgh, and other books.