Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Being by Paul Feyerabend University of Chicago Press) (PAPERBACK) From Homeric gods to galaxies, from love affairs to perspective in painting, Paul Feyerabend reveled in the physical and cultural abundance that surrounds us. He found it equally striking that human senses and human intelligence are able to take in only a fraction of these riches. From this fraction, scientists, artists, all of us construct encompassing abstractions and stereotypes. This basic human trait is at the heart of Conquest of Abundance, the book on which Feyerabend was at work when he died in 1994.

Prepared from drafts of the manuscript left at his death, working notes, and lectures and articles Feyerabend wrote while the larger work was in progress, Conquest of Abundance offers up rich exploration and startling insights with the charm, lucidity, and sense of mischief that are his hallmarks. Feyerabend is fascinated by how we attempt to explain and predict the mysteries of the natural world, and he describes ways in which we abstract experience, explain anomalies, and reduce wonder to formulas and equations. Through his exploration of the positive and negative consequences of these efforts, Feyerabend reveals the "conquest of abundance" as an integral part of the history and character of Western civilization.

"Conquest of Abundance should be a simple book, pleasant to read and easy to understand," he planned in his autobiography. Indeed it is; filled with pleasure at the diversity of things and genuine engagement with philosophers and scientists across the centuries, Conquest of Abundance is a great philosopher's view of a basic yet complex human trait and how it affects our lives.

Michael Polanyi's Philosophy of Science by Tchafu Mwamba (Problems in Contemporary Philosophy, Vol. 49: Edwin Mellen Press) is a book about a profound philosopher, though as a philosopher he is still underestimated by philosophers - possibly because he was by profession a scientist and philosophers are notoriously touchy about incursions from outside into what they see as their (ever-diminishing) personal domain. Perhaps also his refusal, a principled refusal rather than any mere aversion, to engage in the sort of formal games which have been the stock in trade of analytic philosophers for the last more than half a century played a part too.

His name was Michael Polanyi. Born in 1891 in Hungary, he emigrated from there to the United Kingdom in the late nineteen thirties, where he was to enunciate his characteristic philosophy in a stream of published work. As this book compellingly narrates, his relative neglect by the philosophical profession reflects poorly on them rather than him, for his work turned out to be powerfully seminal, to the extent that several of the most influential developments in later twentieth-century philosophy, particularly philosophy of science, embody his central insight that even the most `objective' scientific investigation has an ineliminable `tacit dimension' (a phrase which provides the title of one of his best-known books): we necessarily call on inarticulate and inarticulable elements in our cognizing activity. To quote Polanyi: `our articulate utterances can never altogether supersede but must continue to rely on mute acts of intelligence'.

When Polanyi announced this idea it was virtually anathema to the dominant analytical tradition in Western epistemology, even though it clearly harks back to Kant's own revolutionary idea that human cognition involves a prior synthesizing activity. It was an assumption of the British empiricists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that our factual empirical knowledge is the result of inductive inferences from data given initially by the senses, a view recycled and reinforced by the philosophers and scientists of the Vienna Circle in the nineteen twenties and thirties. Updated and embellished with the help of a good deal of the new logical symbolism invented by Frege and Hilbert it became the mainstream view of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Where it differed was only in the amount of effort expended in trying to formulate in a suitably precise way the rules according to which higher-level empirical knowledge is supported by observation-statements. Polanyi's philosophy was a radical challenge to all this. For him there was no demarcation between observation and theory: theory is just one more medium through which we assimilate and organize experience, part of a more general body of cognitional apparatus, differing from the rest only by being relatively explicit. But most importantly Polanyi denied that we obtain our knowledge by the application of, if not articulate then articulable, universal canons of objective reasoning, either in the `inductive' or the deductive sciences. In every piece of cognizing activity there is always appeal to an ineliminable host of presuppositions, skills both innate and learned which at first may be conscious but become eventually absorbed into the way we simply see things, cultural influences, etc...

Polanyi's emphasis on the inarticulate and provisional elements in cognition laid the ground for the emergence of later philosophies of science which stressed the role of non-rational, institutional, societal, and even anthropological elements in the supposedly fully objective procedures, and which eventually dislodged the positivistic, quasi-logical view. Their authors, particularly Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos (another Hungarian, and one who knew Polanyi's work thoroughly) and Laudan, can all be seen as developing in their different ways ideas which found their first expression or adumbration in Polanyi's work. As Dr Mwamba points out in his absorbing narrative, in various ways Polanyi's Tacit Framework corresponds to Kuhn's Disciplinary Matrix, to Lakatos's Research Program, and to Laudan's Research Tradition, each of these according to their authors imposing limits on and constraints within the space of possible solutions of scientific problems.

Of all these thinkers, Kuhn is probably the closest to Polanyi.  Kuhn's Polanyian stress on non-rational, Gestalt-like features in scientists' perceptions of the theories they accept became highly influential though his famous book `The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'. Like Polanyi also, Kuhn emphasized the role of the characteristic apprenticeship that scientists undergo, with a corresponding commitment to shared beliefs and practices and their eventual integration into the mature scientist's very way of seeing things. Lakatos frequently mentioned Polanyi in his writings, but as an 'irrationalist' opponent usually more than as an ally. Nevertheless a favorite theme of

Polanyi's emerges as the foundation-stone of Lakatos's methodology of scientific research programs. This is the idea that anomalous observations are not by themselves grounds for rejecting theories. Were they to be, as Polanyi pointed out, and Lakatos repeated in his extensive critique of Popper's ideas, then practically every scientific theory would be abandoned before its virtues could have the opportunity to become apparent. Polanyi would not have endorsed Feyerabend's notorious epistemological anarchism, but he would have recognized familiar elements in Feyerabend's intellectual progress to that position.

Polanyi is one of those thinkers whose contribution is not immediately weighed and packaged. As a mature and reflective scientist he knew more thoroughly and intimately than a professional philosopher could what he was talking about when he discussed the nature of science and scientific knowledge. Because of his own extraordinary powers of perception and reflection his ideas have been and will continue to be seminal, with a strong latency that will continue to be felt through the passage of decades. He is one of the very best of philosophers.

Science Unfettered: A Philosophical Study in Sociohistorical Ontology by James E. McGuire and Barbara Tuchanska, (Series in Continental Thought, 28: Ohio University Press) offers an reformulation of the possible ontological and epistemological foundations of science not in theory but in practice. The rational is deeply embedded in current Continental philosophy and its most congenial stance is to see scientific practice as a form of horometrical inquiry circle of levels of explanation based on degrees of integration. It is based upon a socio-historical perspective.

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 Instead of summarizing our argument, we conclude with a brief discussion of the concept of the hermeneutic circle that has appeared under various forms. This concept is a key discursive device for any attempt at overcoming the subject/object opposition basic to cognitive activity in many fields, in everyday cognition, in science and metaphysics, and typically in epistemology. It manifests itself most visibly in the realist attitude toward the world, and this attitude is a natural, self-evident disposition directing most of our cognitive enterprises. However, when understanding cognition becomes an issue, this attitude is no longer self‑evident; it itself becomes a problem requiring understanding.

 Understanding how it is possible to be within the subject/object opposition and conceive the world, as a system of objects that`exist out there cannot be achieved from inside that opposition. Cognizing based on the realist attitude is always already objectifying, even when it makes itself its own subject matter. That we must somehow suspend our natural realistic attitude does not mean that we can step outside ourselves and see the entire opposition from a nonhuman perspective. It requires thematizing our being within the subject/object opposition from the perspective of this opposition itself by elaborating its own (that is our own) self‑understanding. To elaborate such self-understanding is not to reject one or other of the poles of the subject/object opposition. Nor is it to carve a middle way between its two extremes. As we have indicated earlier, it requires sublation‑namely, the move of simultaneous negation and affirmation of both poles during which both become reconstituted. In other words, the idea of sublation allows us to avoid two reductive moves: the reduction of the subjective to the objective, as is the case in naturalizing approaches to cognition, and the reduction of the objective to the subjective, as is the case with idealistic accounts. Sublation, in its turn, is not for us the Hegelian move of revealing absolute Spirit behind human cognition as performed within the subject/object opposition. In place of Hegel's metaphysical solution, we appeal to the ontology of being and to hermeneutics. Their way of dealing from within with the problem of the subject/object opposition has one feature in common with that of Hegel: the central role that circularity plays. As we stated in chapter 1, the hermeneutic circle is neither a logically vicious circle nor simply a methodological circle composed of anticipatory prejudgments and judgments that actualize them. It is‑for Heidegger and Gadamerthe internal and central structure linking human being and understanding. Before we understand the world, in any conceptual and objectified way, we are already in the world, and our being, in all its forms, itself constitutes the understanding of being. Before we understand history we already belong to history, our consciousness is conditioned and limited by history; but history is not a self‑sufficient, nature-like process, it proceeds in virtue of our (interpretative) activity. In the course of our analysis, which goes beyond the position of Heidegger and Gadamer, we have argued that the hermeneutic circle is dynamically composed of several circles.

Understanding our involvement in the subject/object opposition from the hermeneutic‑ontological perspective allows us to avoid a difficulty stated by Kolakowski: if we want to understand ourselves as belonging to "an already given situation," we must "understand the presence of the world as precisely an existent"‑that is, as existing in an unconditioned way. "The category of existence in the unconditioned sense cannot, of course, be the work of successive abstractions, as was imagined by empiricists confident in the natural validity of the Aristotelian hierarchy of predicates; for it is clear that stages of abstraction are stages in the scope of sets, but in no way do we reach a position where the act of existence reveals itself."' In other words, the unconditioned existence of the world cannot be given to us as the result of a search for conditions of conditions because this search is either endless or must be broken by the postulate of the existence of a nonconditional condition. The possibility of an experience in which "the act of existence reveals itself" requires, therefore, the suspension of the objectivist, realist way of using concepts. Yet, it is not clear whether, even after this suspension, an unconditional existence can give itself to us in a discursive (conceptual) cognitive act. The solution of Heidegger and Gadamer is different. Neither the world nor ourselves can be given to us as an ultimate unconditioned existence; both are given simultaneously as mutually conditioned; our existence is our‑being‑in‑the‑world and the existence of the world is the being‑of‑our‑world. In other words,`neither is the existing‑by‑itself but is always the existing in relativization. This is why the presence of the world for us is never absolute and direct but always partial and relative. Moreover, presence is dialectically connected with absence. The world presents itself as this or that system of beings, as their reference frame, as a whole of being, and so forth, and it presents itself to us according to how we perceive it in our everyday life, or how we experience it in a mythical or religious experience, or how we conceptualize and manipulate it in scientific investigation, or speculate about it in philosophy. There can be no absolute, non-arbitrary way of separating the presence of the world from our modes of conceptualizing it.

The first ontological circle that reveals itself when the analysis of being goes beyond the individualism of Heidegger's ontology is the circle of participation and embracement. When seen from an individual perspective, it links each of us with communities that embrace us, in which we are shaped, influenced by others, and within which we interact with them. When seen from the perspective of communities, it links them with individuals who participate in them, constitute, and maintain them. A particular form of the actualization of this ontological circle is a socio‑hermeneutic circle that connects individual understanding and social knowledge behind which there are other subjects. As we cannot understand ourselves other than in a socially conditioned way, so communities cannot build their self‑understanding other than through the individual activity of their members. This is because, in general, "the self‑knowledge of a human individual exists only in the process of communication and mutual understanding."'

The socio‑hermeneutic circle has its source in an ontological circle of the sociability and intentionality of individual consciousness. Our consciousness is intentional; it is the consciousness‑of‑something, neither by itself nor by virtue of the world that "gives itself to us," but in virtue of what we initially learn from others about the existence and internal structure of the world. On the other hand, without intentionality the sociability of consciousness could not be constituted: to learn from other people we must recognize their consciousness as different from ours and such that we can direct our own consciousness toward theirs.

The ways of being of each of us, seen as participation in various communities, also have a circular structure; they are constituted within an ontic circle of individuality and conformity. This circle is founded on human natality and manifests itself as an interplay between human personality, with all its idiosyncrasies underlying creativity, and the relative uniformity of members of a given community, who have been shaped in a certain way. The fact that our being is always being together is also conditioned by a circle‑namely, by an ontological circle of plurality and being‑together. As plurality is the necessary ontological condition of our being‑together, so human plurality requires our reciprocal recognition of individual independence, without which we would not be individualized and could not interact. The circle of individuality and conformity as well as the circle of plurality and being together are embedded in practice; they are realized in practice and the internal ontological structure of human practice conditions them: human practice is itself circular.

There are three ontic-ontological circles that link: first, practice and its ontic structural web, the network of factual social relations, sociocultural institutions, systems, and so on; second, practice and meaningfulness that are mutually interrelated in an analogous way; and, third, practice and the world, which it constantly converts into reality and objectifies and which reciprocally influences it.

History is also ontologically circular, since it simultaneously situates human practice as our self‑making and is a product of that practice. The most fundamental circular structure of history is the ontological circle of human individuality and plurality. Plurality, which manifests itself ontically as the succession of human generations, situates individual human beings within history; individuality is, on the other hand, a condition of plurality. Individuality and plurality are the basis of two further ontological circles constitutive for historicity. They connect temporalizing with temporality and historizing with historicity. As the historizing of practice and its world is the source of the historicity of our individual being, so our individual temporalizing is the source of the temporality of practice and its world. Through these circles the concepts of historicity and temporality join the ontological and ontic levels of our self‑understanding within an ontic-ontological circle. Within this circle, any search for ontological structures and conditions must be supplemented by the reconstitution of the ontic dimension of our being in a hermeneutical historical narrative, since these ontological structures and conditions are always historically situated.

Finally, any form of cognition should be considered as involved in three hermeneutic circles that link its normative, historical, and ontological aspects. In particular cognitive creativity and objectivity reveal themselves within these hermeneutic circles. The normative‑hermeneutic circle links values, the institutional locus of authority, and scientists who undertake responsibility for their cognitive acts. The historical-hermeneutic circle links novelties, the creative process of cognition, and the external context, which allows us to recognize novelties. Also objectivity, as a function of certain forms of cognition, for instance, of scientific research, exists within the historical‑hermeneutic circle. The hermeneutic‑ontological circle embraces scientific research and other spheres of practice and their worlds. Within this circle, the scientific deconstruction of external human reality and the projection of scientific reality outside science takes place.

Localizing science within these circles‑in particular, within the last three hermeneutic circles‑enables us to consider scientific research in a way that does not presuppose the subject/object distinction and, consequently, is neither idealistic nor realistic. This is because we reject two fundamental assumptions shared, paradoxically, by idealists, such as Berkeley or Kant, and (most) realists, in particular, those who accept the picture of reality as causally impacting on our cognitive capacities. First, we do not treat cognition as an activity performed by an individual cognizer, who ultimately (from a radical epistemological viewpoint) can be considered as entirely isolated from any social milieu; and second, we do not isolate (scientific) cognition from other human activities, both individual and collective. This means that we do not presuppose any opposition, or even any distance between participation in cognition and the activity of being. Only on the basis of the first assumption can we consider learning and cooperating with other people in order to establish knowledge as an unnecessary element of cognition. Only on the basis of the second assumption can the subject, whose only activity is cognition, and an object (the world), which is prior and entirely independent of this activity, be the initial conditions of a theory of cognition. If both assumptions are rejected and the consequences of their rejection elaborated, the idealist position is overcome; its fundamental problem of guaranteeing the intersubjectivity of knowledge cannot appear because the very process of cognition is social interaction. The realist position, on the other hand, can be recognized as establishing illusory solutions to its own problems. First of all, the objective, external validity of knowledge does not require any justification; we are in the world before we begin to cognize it in an objectifying fashion. It is not the world that is absolutely prior to our cognition; it is our objectifying cognition that conceptualizes the world as existing independently of this very conceptualization. Second, objectifying cognition certainly presupposes a realist attitude, but this attitude cannot be justified by appealing to the causal impact of the world upon our senses. There is no non-arbitrary way of cashing out the causal relationship that is presupposed. Even if the world exercises such an impact, it does not supply realists with an epistemological justification; it was already argued by Fichte that the representational character of our perceptions does not follow from the fact that they are effects of external causes. The relation of representing belongs to epistemological or semantic discourse, whereas the relation of causality belongs to ontic discourse. The realist attitude is not, however, simply a direct result of the nature of our senses (our receptivity) or a fundamental epistemological structure of our subjectivity. It is a matter of engagement and normative commitment, the nature of which can be grasped with the help of hermeneutic considerations, since it exists within the normative-hermeneutic circle rather than through any objectifying or naturalizing prism.

That the realist commitment is natural in everyday life and in science, since for both the world is external and prior, does not mean that the idea of an independent and prior reality can and should be extended on purely ontological considerations. The concept of reality that is absolutely independent of the entirety of human practice and prior to it does not make sense if we agree that neither can we be nor can we understand our being in any way other than from within the world, and that the world can neither be nor can it be understood by us differently than it is as our world. However, the fact that we undertake a realist commitment when we cognize within the subject/object opposition reveals the hermeneutic‑ontological circle. It links being and our understanding of being: as our understanding requires (our) being so (our) being requires understanding. In traditional terms, the existence of the hermeneutic‑ontological circle means that epistemology and ontology condition each other: metaphysics presupposes certain epistemological claims, and epistemology presupposes ontological prejudgments. Neither is absolutely fundamental and ungrounded.

This result, which can be recognized from the perspective of our fundamental ontology of being that we identify with human practice, allows us to answer a question posed by Kolakowski:

If it is a chimerical hope for man to shed his own skin; if the world is given only as a world endowed with meaning, and meaning is the outcome of man's practical project; if man is unable to understand himself by placing himself in a premeaningful, prehuman world . . . the metaphysical inquiry and the epistemological inquiry are annulled at a stroke. Is this therefore the end of philosophy?

The Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction by Alexander Rosenberg (Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy: Routledge) Science is perhaps the sole distinctively western institution adopted by all cultures that have come in contact with it. And yet its scope, nature, and methods have been contested throughout its history. Philosophy of Science identifies the profound philosophical problems that science raises through an examination of enduring questions about its nature, methods, and justification. Science is perhaps the sole distinctively western institution adopted by all cultures that have come in contact with it. And yet its scope, nature and methods have been contested throughout its history. Natural science has both raised the most fundamental questions for philosophers and shaped philosophers' theories about the nature of reality and the extent of our knowledge of it.

The Philosophy of Science identifies the profound philosophical problems that science raises through an examination of enduring questions about its nature, methods and justification. Coming to grips with the nature of explanation, laws, causation, theory, models, evidence, reductionism, probability, teleology, realism and instrumentalism in science turns out to be a matter of facing the same questions that Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant and their successors have grappled with.

This accessible and user‑friendly text will be of value to students seeking an introduction to the philosophy of science as a central branch of philosophy and to students of science. It contains the following textbook features:

chapter overviews and summaries
a wide variety of clear supportive examples drawn from science
study questions
glossary and annotated further reading.
"A first‑rate, challenging text that emphasizes the philosophy in the philosophy of science. 

Rosenberg offers a superb introduction to the epistemological and metaphysical issues at stake in modern science."-Professor Martin Curd, Purdue University, Indiana

"Philosophy students will like the way the issues in philosophy of science are connected to the basic concerns of epistemology and philosophy of language."-Professor Peter Kosso, Northern Arizona University

"An engaging and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of science . ... I was especially pleased to see the discussions of probability, the semantic view of theories, and science studies." -Peter Lipton, Cambridge University

 Heidegger's Philosophy of Science by Trish Glazebrook (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, No. 12: Fordham University Press) (PAPERBACK) This book concerns itself with Heidegger's philosophy of science, an issue that is not sufficiently addressed in the literature. While a great deal of attention is paid to Heidegger's later critique of technology by philosophers and people interested in his environmental views, no one has systematically studied how he understood "science." Many readers will be surprised to learn, through this book, that Heidegger developed the essentials of a fairly sophisticated philosophy of science, one that in many ways invites comparison with the work of Thomas Kuhn. Although some articles have been published on this topic in the past, Glazebrook works on this philosophy of science from the early writings of Heidegger in detail. She provides the reader with a comprehensive and careful account of his thought on a matter that is of great interest to philosophers and outside the continental tradition.

E.D. Klemke, PH.D., professor of philosophy at Iowa State University, is the editor of Contemporary Analytic and Linguistic Philosophies. Robert Hollinger, PH.D. is a professor of philosophy at Iowa State. David Wyss Rudge PH.D. is an assistant professor of philosophy of biology at Iowa State. A. David KLINE, PH.D. is provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.