Explanation and Understanding (International Library of Philosophy) - Hardcover

Explanation and understanding (International library of philosophy and scientific method)

Hardcover. Zustand: Very Good. 8vo (22 cm), XX, 230 pp. Publisher's cloth and dust jacket (dj clipped and slightly rubbed). First edition of a major work in the philosophy of science and action that sets out to analyze the concepts of cause and intentionality and their role in explanation across the natural and human sciences. Von Wright organizes the book around the fundamental tension between two great traditions in the philosophy of scientific method: the Aristotelian, with its emphasis on teleological explanation in terms of purpose and intentionality, and the Galilean, which takes causal explanation as primary--tracing how these competing traditions have manifested through positivism, idealism, Marxism, hermeneutics, and contemporary linguistic analysis, with detailed engagement with Hempel's theory of scientific explanation, cybernetics, the analytic philosophy of action, and the revival of hermeneutics. The book's four parts move from this historical survey of two traditions, through a detailed analysis of causal explanation (covering the logic of conditionals, counterfactuals, and the asymmetry of cause), to intentionality and teleological explanation (behavior and action, practical inference, the logical connection argument), and finally to explanation in history and the social sciences--where von Wright engages with quasi-causal explanation, determinism, feedback mechanisms, and the limits of teleological explanation, concluding that the explanation of human action cannot be reduced to simple causality and that the humanistic disciplines of history and sociology require irreducibly intentionalistic categories. Artikel-Nr. 009616

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