Invariances (PHILOSOPHY, ETHICS, EPISTEMOLOGY)

Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. New. 2003. Hardcover. 0674012453 .*** FREE UPGRADE to Courier/Priority Shipping Upon Request *** - *** IN STOCK AND IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE FOR SHIPMENT - 432 pages. IMPORTANT: An extremely clean copy with no marks to the interior pages, no writing or underlining. Pages are intact and tight to the spine. From a review by Steve Fuller which appeared in ISR: Interdisciplinary Science Reviews: "Nozick's fundamental insight into the relationship between science and philosophy concerns their shared interest in explanation. For Nozick, `an explanation shows something to be less contingent than it otherwise appears' (p. 153). The intuitive appeal of this definition rests on a fairly commonsensical notion of what it means to 'understand' something, namely, we see how its existence or occurrence makes sense in light of other things we know. Notice that this notion straddles two extreme views of what philosophers call `the modal structure of reality', more popularly known as `the logic of possible worlds'. One extreme view is that everything had to be as it is, a logic of pure necessity; the other extreme is that everything could have been other than it is, a logic of pure contingency. Neither extreme permits understanding, and historically both have been associated with a fatalistic attitude towards life. In his famous Romanes Lecture of 1893, T. H. Huxley shrewdly observed that although the ancient Greek atomists and the Hindu sages possessed ontologies rather like those of modern science, they failed to make progress because they were left prostrate by a sense of, respectively, the contingency and the necessity of things. Science advances only by dwelling between these modal extremes. Nozick's metaphysics aims to map this middle realm...A hundred years ago, when Newtonian mechanics still dominated science, necessity posed the greater modal threat. (Indeed, necessitarianism lingers to this day in the oxymoron `genetic determinism. ) However, Nozick's fixation on contingency reflects a notable shift in the modality of chief concern to philosophical and scientific understanding. Thus, scientific theories that stress the contingency of the actual world...eventually throw up figures like Stuart Kauffman and Lee Smolin, who seek constraints on the range of possible worlds that could have been realised. For them, if God throws dice, they must be biased - and in our favour. For his own part, Nozick has never shied away from addressing `why there is something rather than nothing' and `the meaning of life'.7 If there is a big lesson lurking in this book, it is that reality is explainable only if the cosmic deity (literally or metaphorically) operates with roughly the same degree of freedom as humans do in their respective spheres of action. Science is possible because God and man are modal, though clearly not material, equals - and hence understanding turns out to be a form of communication, or as one of Nozick's Harvard precursors, C. S. Peirce, put it, 'signification'." -- with a bonus offer--; .