Thinking Things Through: An Introduction to Philosophical Issues and Achievements

by Clark N. Glymour

Book Overview

"Thinking Things Through "provides a broad, historical, and rigorous introduction to the logical tradition in philosophy and to its contemporary significance. The presentation is centered around three of the most fruitful issues in Western thought: What are proofs, and why do they provide knowledge? How can experience be used to gain knowledge or to alter beliefs in a rational way? What is the nature of mind and of mental events and mental states? In a clear and lively style, Glymour describes these key philosophical problems and traces attempts to solve them, from ancient Greece to the present. "Thinking Things Through" reveals the philosophical sources of modern work in logic, the theory of computation, Bayesian statistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, and it connects these subjects with contemporary problems in epistemology and metaphysics. The text is full of examples and problems, and an instructor's manual is available.Clark Glymour is Alumni Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University and Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262571196
• ISBN13: 9780262571197
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Bradford Book
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An excellent introduction to the history of reasoning...

Glymour sets out to provide a one-volume reference to the history of attempts at formal reasoning, starting with the preSocratics and ending with recent topics in Cognitive Science. The book is thoroughly readable, covers all of the bases, and has superb (and very challenging) study questions assigned to each subsection of the text. The reference lists are good, and the illustrations are simple and make their point well. A good, but very challenging, book.