The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and PhysicsSimon and Schuster, 2009 M11 3 - 288 páginas In the wake of his enormously popular books The Armchair Economist and More Sex Is Safer Sex, Steven Landsburg uses concepts from mathematics, economics, and physics to address the big questions in philosophy: What is real? What can we know? What is the difference between right and wrong? And how should we live? Widely renowned for his lively explorations of economics, in his fourth book Landsburg branches out into mathematics and physics as well—disciplines that, like economics, the author loves for their beauty, their logical clarity, and their profound and indisputable truth—to take us on a provocative and utterly entertaining journey through the questions that have preoccupied philosophers through the ages. The author begins with the broadest possible categories—Reality and Unreality; Knowledge and Belief; Right and Wrong—and then focuses his exploration on specific concerns: from a mathematical analysis of the arguments for the existence of God; to the real meaning of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Godel Incompleteness Theorem; to the moral choices we face in the marketplace and the voting booth. Stimulating, illuminating, and always surprising, The Big Questions challenges readers to re-evaluate their most fundamental beliefs and reveals the relationship between the loftiest philosophical quests and our everyday lives. |
Contenido
| 1 | |
| 21 | |
BELIEFS | 39 |
Unfinished Business | 45 |
What Do Believers Believe? | 55 |
On What There Obviously Is | 67 |
Diogenes Nightmare | 75 |
KNOWLEDGE | 87 |
The rules of evidence | 123 |
The Limits to Knowledge | 135 |
RIGHT AND WRONG | 151 |
The economists golden rule | 163 |
On Not Being a Jerk | 181 |
The Economist on the Playground | 191 |
THE LIFE OF THE MIND | 215 |
Appendix | 249 |
Otras ediciones - Ver todas
The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from ... Steven E. Landsburg Vista previa limitada - 2010 |
The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from ... Steven E. Landsburg Sin vista previa disponible - 2010 |
The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from ... Steven E Landsburg Sin vista previa disponible - 2009 |
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