World Views And The Problem Of Synthesis

This book considers philosophy to be more than mere reflection. Through philosophy, humankind can give meaning to the world. In part, this book re-evaluates the philosophy of Leo Apostel, who dedicated his life to the investigation of the use of philosophy in everyday life. But it is also a presentation of international research carried out along the lines of the worldviews project. The contributions address not only professional philosophers, but also students, teachers, academics and everyone interested in the relationship between philosophy and the world.

This book considers philosophy to be more than mere reflection. Through philosophy, humankind can give meaning to the world. In part, this book re-evaluates the philosophy of Leo Apostel, who dedicated his life to the investigation of the use of philosophy in everyday life. But it is also a presentation of international research carried out along the lines of the worldviews project. The contributions address not only professional philosophers, but also students, teachers, academics and everyone interested in the relationship between philosophy and the world.

This publication features an interdisciplinary group of contributors which questions aspects of today's worldviews and science that are often taken for granted and tacitly determine the boundaries of what is generally conceived of as the 'world' and 'science'. Some authors stress that existing demarcations are obsolete and often prevent new insights. Others show how they influence the way people perceive themselves and believe the world ontologically to be, determining people's actions and the social fabric. There are yet others who point out how a redemarcation may stimulate the development of knowledge acquisition and social well-being. Examples of how bridging knowledge between different fields leads to new crucial insights, while identifying the pattern of too strict a demarcation preventing such insights, are also analyzed in this volume. Contents:Worldviews, Science and Us, Global Perspectives (D Aerts et al.)Arguments in Favour of Inclusive Science (I Maso)Inclusive Worldviews: Interdisciplinary Research from a Radical Constructivist Perspective (A Riegler)The Chatton–Ockham Strategy — An Alternative to the Simplicity Principle (A Smaling)The Intrinsic Multiplicity of Science: Its Internal and External Confrontations — An Essay (J Broekaert)To Know or Not to Know, One Way or Another (R Oldeman)A Naturalistic and Critical View of Social Sciences and the Humanities (H Pinxten & N Note)Sciences and Knowledge Practices: Their Culture-Specific Wellsprings (R Devisch)On High and Low Styles in Philosophy, or, Towards a Rehabilitation of the Ideal (K van der Wal)Towards a Re-Delineation of the Human Self-Understanding within the Western Worldview: Its Social and Ethical Implications (N Note et al.)Towards a New Democracy: Consensus Through Quantum Parliament (D Aerts)Necessity of Combining Mutually Incompatible Perspectives in the Construction of a Global View: Quantum Probability and Signal Analysis (S Aerts et al.) Readership: Graduate students and academics in philosophy, social sciences, political sciences, physics and education. Keywords:Worldviews;Science;Society;Demarcation;Human Self;Interdisciplinarity;Transdisciplinarity;Inclusive Science;Fragmentation;IntegrationKey Features:Its highly original but for actual and future global society very important subject matterIts truly interdisciplinary characterThis book can stimulate the discussion on the foundations of science for each scientific discipline apartThe content of the book contributes in a essential way to the growth and integration of actual human worldviews

Image-based rendering, as an area of overlap between computer graphics and computer vision, uses computer vision techniques to aid in sythesizing new views of scenes. Image-based rendering methods are having a substantial impact on the field of computer graphics, and also play an important role in the related field of multimedia systems, for applications such as teleconferencing, remote instruction and surgery, virtual reality and entertainment. The book develops a novel way of formalizing the view synthesis problem under the full perspective model, yielding a clean, linear warping equation. It shows new techniques for dealing with visibility issues such as partial occlusion and "holes". Furthermore, the author thoroughly re-evaluates the requirements that view synthesis places on stereo algorithms and introduces two novel stereo algorithms specifically tailored to the application of view synthesis.

In this incisive analysis of academic psychology, Gregg Henriques examines the fragmented nature of the discipline and explains why the field has had enormous difficulty specifying its subject matter and how this has limited its ability to advance our knowledge of the human condition. He traces the origins of the problem of psychology to a deep and profound gap in our knowledge systems that emerged in the context of the scientific Enlightenment. To address this problem, this book introduces a new vision for scientific psychology called mental behaviorism. The approach is anchored to a comprehensive metapsychological framework that integrates insights from physics and cosmic evolution, neuroscience, the cognitive and behavioral sciences, developmental and complex adaptive systems theory, attachment theory, phenomenology, and social constructionist perspectives and is well grounded in the philosophy of science. Building on more than twenty years of work in theoretical psychology and drawing on a wide range of literature, Professor Henriques shows how this new approach to scientific knowledge fills in the gaps of our current understanding of psychology and can allow us to develop a more holistic and sophisticated way to understand animal and human mental behavioral patterns. This work will especially appeal to students and scholars of general psychology and theoretical psychology, as well as to historians and philosophers of science.

Though the scientific community largely agrees that climate change is underway, debates about this issue remain fiercely polarized. These conversations have become a rhetorical contest, one where opposing sides try to achieve victory through playing on fear, distrust, and intolerance. At its heart, this split no longer concerns carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, or climate modeling; rather, it is the product of contrasting, deeply entrenched worldviews. This brief examines what causes people to reject or accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Synthesizing evidence from sociology, psychology, and political science, Andrew J. Hoffman lays bare the opposing cultural lenses through which science is interpreted. He then extracts lessons from major cultural shifts in the past to engender a better understanding of the problem and motivate the public to take action. How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate makes a powerful case for a more scientifically literate public, a more socially engaged scientific community, and a more thoughtful mode of public discourse.