Philip Kitcher

These reflections on Wagner's "Ring" offer an illuminating look at this great opera, focusing on the work's far-reaching and subtle exploration of the search for meaning in

La filosofía de la ciencia entró en una profunda crisis apartir de los años sesenta del siglo XX. Toda una generación de estudiosos de la ciencia arrojó una luz nueva que reveló la inadecuación y la falta de realismo de las teorías lingüísticas vigentes en torno a la racionalidad científica y sus fundamentos. La mejor respuesta de la filosofía de la ciencia a tal circunstancia se encuentra en El avance de la ciencia, obra ambiciosa y lograda, de Philip Kitcher. Habiendo contribuido de modo importante en diversos campos de la filosofía de la ciencia, Kitcher presenta con este amplio y profundo estudio una concepción novedosa, detallada y justa del desarrollo de la ciencia. Kitcher defiende robustamente la noción de que, tras la compleja red de acciones y decisiones que los científicos toman día con día, hay razón para hablar de la racionalidad y del progreso.

In this successor to his pioneering Science, Truth, and Democracy, the author revisits the topic explored in his previous worknamely, the challenges of integrating science, the most successful knowledge-generating system of all time, with the problems of democracy. But in this new work, the author goes far beyond that earlier book in studying places at which the practice of science fails to answer social needs.He considers a variety of examples of pressing concern, ranging from climate change to religiously inspired constraints on biomedical research to the neglect of diseases that kill millions of children annually, analyzing the sources of trouble. He shows the fallacies of thinking that democracy always requires public debate of issues most people cannot comprehend, and argues that properly constituted expertise is essential to genuine democracy.No previous book has treated the place of science in democratic society so comprehensively and systematically, with attention to different aspects of science and to pressing problems of our

Principles of right and wrong guide the lives of almost all human beings, but we often see them as external to ourselves, outside our own control. In a revolutionary approach to the problems of moral philosophy, Philip Kitcher makes a provocative proposal: Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new vision, Kitcher shows how the limited altruistic tendencies of our ancestors enabled a fragile social life, how our forebears learned to regulate their interactions with one another, and how human societies eventually grew into forms of previously unimaginable complexity. The most successful of the many millennia-old experiments in how to live, he contends, survive in our values today. Drawing on natural science, social science, and philosophy to develop an approach he calls "pragmatic naturalism," Kitcher reveals the power of an evolving ethics built around a few core principles-including justice and cooperation-but leaving room for a diversity of communities and modes of self-expression. Ethics emerges as a beautifully human phenomenon-permanently unfinished, collectively refined and distorted generation by generation. Our human values, Kitcher shows, can be understood not as a final system but as a project-the ethical project-in which our species has engaged for most of its history, and which has been central to who we are.

Philip Kitcher conecta el dilema del personaje central de la novela con las cuestiones más relevantes del pensamiento occidental. En la novela de Mann, el escritor Gustav von As­chenbach se siente at