Einstein Meets Magritte, an Interdisciplinary Reflection

by Aerts, Diederik; Broekaert, Jan; Mathijs, Ernest

• ISBN13: 9780792357575
• ISBN10: 0792357574
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-07-01
• Publisher: Kluwer Academic Pub

Summary

Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection presents insights of the renowned key speakers of the interdisciplinary Einstein meets Magritte conference (1995, Brussels Free University). The contributions elaborate on fundamental questions of science, with regard to the contemporary world, and push beyond the borders of traditional approaches. All of the articles in this volume address this fundamental theme, but somewhere along the road the volume expanded to become much more than a mere expression of the conference's dynamics. The articles not only deal with several scientific disciplines, they also confront these fields with the full spectrum of contemporary life, and become new science. As such, this volume presents a state-of-the-art reflection of science in the world today, in all its diversity. The contributions are accessible to a large audience of scientists, students, educators, and everyone who wants to keep up with science today.

Table of Contents

General Introduction	vii
Diederik Aerts
Editorial Introduction: Somewhere over the Rainbow	xv
Diederik Aerts
Jan Broekaert
Ernest Mathijs
Einstein Meets Magritte: The Scholar, the Muse and the Barfly	1	(10)
Diederik Aerts
Basically, It's Purely Academic	11	(18)
John Ziman
The Manifest Image and the Scientific Image	29	(24)
Bas C. van Fraassen
Microdynamics of Incommensurability: Philosophy of Science Meets Science Studies	53	(26)
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Subjects, Objects, Data and Values	79	(20)
Robert M. Pirsig
Einstein and Magritte, A Study of Creativity	99	(8)
Ilya Prigogine
Quanta and Relativity: Two Failed Revolutions	107	(6)
Constantin Piron
The Redundancy of Spacetime: Relativity from Cusa to Einstein	113	(16)
Rom Harre
The Stuff the World Is Made of: Physics and Reality	129	(56)
Diederik Aerts
Dasein's Brain: Phenomenology Meets Cognitive Science	185	(14)
Francisco J. Varela
What Creativity in Science and Art Tell Us about How the Brain Must Work	199	(20)
William H. Calvin
The Hermeneutic Versus the Scientific Conception of Psychoanalysis: An Unsuccessful Effort to Chart a Via Media for the Human Sciences	219	(22)
Adolf Grunbaum
Immortality, Biology, Computers	241	(14)
Zygmunt Bauman
The End of Certainty in Economics	255	(12)
W. Brian Arthur
Index	267