The term ‘economics of scientific knowledge’ (ESK) was coined as a reaction to the field known from the seventies as ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’. The latter had been defined by the members of the so called ‘Strong Programme’ in contraposition to the classical notion of a ‘sociology of science’, having in mind a distinction between […]
There is only one concept more important in (traditional) metaphysics than the concept of truth: the concept of being, existence, or reality. If we can interpret Aristotle as being the first deflationist philosopher about truth (when he asserts in his Metaphysics , IX, that “it is true to say of what is that is, and […]
We saw in the second entry of this series that predicates like “…is true” have the following linguistic function: applied to an expression that designates a sentence X, they render a new (pro)sentence (“X is true”) that expresses exactly the same as the first proposition. This has lead some philosophers (not a majority, really) to […]
We saw at the end of the first entry of this series that, in spite of the adjective ‘true’ seeming to be semantically redundant in the sense of its role being equivalent to just assert exactly the same assertion to which it is applied, it is nevertheless grammatically non-redundant, in the sense that there are […]
Truth has been, and still is, one of the most important topics in the history of philosophical thought. How to get truth from falsity, how to approach the truth, or the connection between truth, wisdom and the sense of life, all that has been the object of never-ending debates which anyone familiar with philosophy will […]
We shall close with this entry our series (I, II, III) about the origins of Islam, indicating some further interesting facts about the Qur’an. 4) By Muhammad’s time, the Arabic alphabet contained no marks for vowels; furthermore, some groups of consonants were written with exactly the same character (e.g., the symbols for sounds b, t […]
In the last entries of our series on the origins of Islam we shall explore some of the information contained in or directly connected to the Qur’an itself. As I explained in the previous article, the Holy Qur’an is the only important Arabic written document from the VIIth century. Even stone inscriptions in Arabic are […]
In the first article of this series, we saw what Middle-East Christian texts from the 7th century told about the Arabian invaders that abruptly took those wealthy territories that during the previous centuries had been disputed between the Romans and the Persians (first, Palestina, Syria and Mesopotamia; a little later Egypt and Persia itself). In […]
Since the first half of the 19th century, philologists and historians have been examining the extant evidence about the origins of Christianism and Judaism, particularly studying the books of the Bible with the methods applied to any other old document. Though this research faced strong opposition both from most Christian denominations and from some of […]
That knowledge is valuable is just a truism within our ‘knowledge driven economies’, but it is not that (economic) kind of value what I will talk about in connection to knowledge. I want to introduce, instead, a current and vivid debate in an arcane corner of philosophy. It is a debate about the nature of […]