Thinking Things Through: An Introduction to Philosophical Issues and Achievements

by Clark N. Glymour

Thinking Things Through provides a broad, historical, and rigorous introduction to the logical tradition in philosophy and to its contemporary significance. The presentation is centered around three of the most fruitful issues in Western What are proofs, and why do they provide knowledge? How can experience be used to gain knowledge or to alter beliefs in a rational way? What is the nature of mind and of mental events and mental states? In a clear and lively style, Glymour describes these key philosophical problems and traces attempts to solve them, from ancient Greece to the present.Thinking Things Through reveals the philosophical sources of modern work in logic, the theory of computation, Bayesian statistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, and it connects these subjects with contemporary problems in epistemology and metaphysics. The text is full of examples and problems, and an instructor's manual is available.Clark Glymour is Alumni Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University and Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

Genres: Philosophy

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Clark Glymour is Alumni University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University and Senior Research Scientist at Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. He is the author of The Mind's Arrows: Bayes Nets and Graphical Causal Models in Psychology (MIT Press), Galileo in Pittsburgh, and other books.

Reviews

[Mishehu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm puzzled by the middling ratings and total lack of reviews of this book. It's an excellent -- and at times very demanding -- survey of topics in logic and philosophy of mind, as well as their part in the history of philosophy. I found it rigorous and compelling throughout. It was like an undergraduate philosophy seminar in book form. I rate it highly.