Reviews for Challenges to Empiricism

The average rating for Challenges to Empiricism based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-09-06 00:00:00 Linda Rosewood Seeing the title and having been on an unchallenged empiricism bend for awhile, I picked this out of a pile, and I'm glad I did. Most of the articles could probably be found elsewhere by now, but this collection is stellar. (Someone familiar with the field who looks at the list will probably not be surprised by this.) Though I cannot say I'm entirely dissuaded from empiricism, this book definitely complicated the matter for me. The book divides into three sections, and I got something a bit different out of each one. The first coves ontology and seems to have what one might call the "classic" articles on empiricism from 20th century analytic philosophy. Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" complicates empiricism off the bat. Prior to reading Carnap I was rather convinced of ontological idealism, but with the translation work between ontological theories, it's less clear that there's even a debate there. The other articles in the section continue by poking interesting questions at what power empiricism can and should have to inform or deflate ontological questions. The next section on science had the big takeaway, for me at least, that great conjectures start as unempirical claims. Or, to paraphrase Feyerabend, they start as metaphysics and are refined into concrete science. The final section on linguistics covered a hole in my understanding of philosophy of mind. I learned that behaviorism fell when Chomsky showed that language is too complex for behaviorism to explain. Goodman and Quine give behaviorism some good tools in its defense, but Fodor gives a quite concrete example of a limit to behaviorism as a methodology. By the end, any prima facie belief in anything like an easy observational language should be well-shaken. There's no attempts to completely annihilate empiricism, but (once-)popular aspects of it prove to be quite costly.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-19 00:00:00 Marco Hartog In the last decade alone, how many have perceived the "ordinary" has drastically shifted. September 11th, if it can be evoked without vulgar sentimentality, brought a fresh worldview to many around the globe, most significantly to Americans and those living in the occupied Middle East. In literary circles, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking has caused more than a few thoughtful readers to consider that what we believe is pedestrian, everyday, and commonplace may instantly vanish. Even a high school student forced to read Kafka's The Metamorphosis has realized that in an instant, life can be radically altered. "Ordinary" is simply not as we believe it to be, and exists on a spectrum of experience we often fail to consider. Gail Weiss's deeply engaging Refiguring the Ordinary comes on the heels of a remarkable decade and at a time when authenticity seems to be quite a buzzword in a world of MySpace'a space you can personalize, show off the essence of who you are'and YouTube, which begs of you to "broadcast yourself." It's easy to understand the power of your own authenticity when we've all long been told that we'as feminists, women, oppressed minorities'have a right to our own voices and stories, that we are the ones who can best speak our truth to power. But what if authenticity itself is merely existentialism gone wrong, subjective judgments that still have little bearing on reality? How are we to be the judges of our own pure interpretations? 'Refiguring the Ordinary repositions the ideas of existentialism and begins at a departure from the binary of the self and other in Western philosophy, arguing that perhaps this dichotomy is a lie. Weiss relies on a wide range of philosophers, from the rather anti-feminist Heidegger to Sartre to radical thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, one of the greatest living feminist philosophers of our time. Weiss's insistence to include a variety of perspectives is both a compliment to the intelligence of her assumed audience and a demonstration of her commitment to an inclusive academic investigation into the ordinary. Of particular interest to scholars and philosopher-activists alike is her entire section, multiple chapters, dedicated to deconstructing racist, classist, sexist, and otherwise oppressive behaviors often acted out of habit, cemented over time and difficult to name and alter, especially without the help of others. While a philosophy book that will surely end up in university courses, Weiss's pronouncements about the self, the other, and how we construct reality will no doubt contribute to feminist philosophical theory in a greater way. When taken with healthy doses of history as a foundation to understanding her work, Weiss's explanation and subsequent reshaping of the ordinary becomes quite digestible and even a bit delicious. This isn't a book for everyday leisure reading, but it is certainly recommended for any combination of curious philosopher, cross-disciplinary psychologist, radical feminist, and communication theorist among us. Review by Brittany Shoot