What is happening to public debate in Western cultures? Is our public sphere disintegrating? In the face of popular tabloid newspapers, new forms of reality television and an increasing lack of respect for traditional authorities, many critics are concerned that our society no longer has a rational, informed and unified space where everyone can communicate about the issues that affect us all. In this book Alan McKee answers these questions by providing an introduction to the concept of the pu...

This 1983 book is a lively and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of natural science, organized around the central theme of scientific realism. It has two parts. 'Representing' deals with the different philosophical accounts of scientific objectivity and the reality of scientific entities.

The views of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Putnam, van Fraassen, and others, are all considered. 'Intervening' presents the first sustained treatment of experimental science for many years and uses...

This engaging 2005 introduction offers a critical approach to discourse, written by an expert uniquely placed to cover the subject for a variety of disciplines. Organised along thematic lines, the book begins with an outline of the basic principles, moving on to examine the methods and theory of CDA (critical discourse analysis). It covers topics such as text and context, language and inequality, choice and determination, history and process, ideology and identity.

Blommaert focuses on how la...

Philosophy of biology is one of the most exciting new areas in philosophy and is attracting much attention from working scientists. This Companion, edited by two of the founders of the field, includes essays by senior scholars and up-and-coming younger scholars who collectively examine the main areas of the subject.

Risks and uncertainties play a role in virtually all of our decisions. Quantitative models have so far been either too unrealistic or too complex. This graduate textbook presents modern models that are both realistic and tractable. All mathematical tools are related to real-life processes, ensuring accessibility to a wide audience.

A Student Grammar of Turkish is a concise introduction to Turkish grammar, designed specifically for English-speaking students and professionals. Written with the needs of the learner very much in mind, it sets out the grammar of the language in a clear and jargon-free style.

Delivering fundamental insights into the most popular methods of molecular analysis, this text is an invaluable resource for students and researchers. It encompasses an extensive range of spectroscopic and spectrometric techniques used for molecular analysis in the life sciences, especially in the elucidation of the structure and function of biological molecules. Covering the range of up-to-date methodologies from everyday mass spectrometry and centrifugation to the more probing X-ray crystal...

This Element offers a brief overview of Buddhist thought and modern scholarly approaches to its diverse forms of moral reflection. It then explores two of the most prominent philosophers from the main strands of the Indian Buddhist tradition - Buddhaghosa and Santideva - in a comparative fashion.

Working memory is currently a 'hot' topic in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Because of their radically different scopes and emphases, however, comparing different models and theories and understanding how they relate to one another has been a difficult task. This volume offers a much-needed forum for systematically comparing and contrasting existing models of working memory.

It does so by asking each contributor to address the same comprehensive set of important theoretical questions ...

Social theory is the theoretical core of the social sciences, clearly distinguishable from political theory and cultural analysis. This book offers a unique overview of the development of social theory from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the present day. Spanning the literature in English, French and German, it provides an excellent background to the most important social theorists and theories in contemporary sociological thought, with crisp summaries of the main books, arguments...