Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Norms Of Nature
Download Norms Of Nature full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Norms Of Nature ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Norms of Nature by : Paul Sheldon Davies
Download or read book Norms of Nature written by Paul Sheldon Davies and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-01-24 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The components of living systems strike us as functional-as for the sake of certain ends—and as endowed with specific norms of performance. The mammalian eye, for example, has the function of perceiving and processing light, and possession of this property tempts us to claim that token eyes are supposed to perceive and process light. That is, we tend to evaluate the performance of token eyes against the norm described in the attributed functional property. Hence the norms of nature. What, then, are the norms of nature? Whence do they arise? Out of what natural properties or relations are they constituted? In Norms of Nature, Paul Sheldon Davies argues against the prevailing view that natural norms are constituted out of some form of historical success—usually success in natural selection. He defends the view that functions are nothing more than effects that contribute to the exercise of some more general systemic capacity. Natural functions exist insofar as the components of natural systems contribute to the exercise of systemic capacities. This is so irrespective of the system's history. Even if the mammalian eye had never been selected for, it would have the function of perceiving and processing light, because those are the effects that contribute to the exercise of the visual system. The systemic approach to conceptualizing natural norms, claims Davies, is superior to the historical approach in several important ways. Especially significant is that it helps us understand how the attribution of functions within the life sciences coheres with the methods and ontology of the natural sciences generally.
Book Synopsis The Norms of Nature by : Malcolm Schofield
Download or read book The Norms of Nature written by Malcolm Schofield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can moral philosophy alter our moral beliefs or our emotions? Does moral scepticism mean making up our own values, or does it leave us without moral commitments at all? Is it possible to find a basis for ethics in human nature? These are some of the main questions explored in this volume, which is devoted to the ethics of the Hellenistic schools of philosophy. Some of the leading scholars in the field have here taken a look at the bases of the Stoics' and Epicureans' thinking about what the Greeks took to be the central questions of philosophy. Their essays, which originated in a conference held at Bad Homburg in 1983, the third in a series of conferences on Hellenistic philosophy, propose important interpretations of the texts, and pose some fascinating problems about the different roles of argument and reason in ancient and modern moral philosophy. This book will be of interest to moral philosophers and to scholars of Greek philosophy too.
Download or read book Against Nature written by Lorraine Daston and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders. Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enlisted to illustrate and buttress moral orders. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike have appealed to nature to shore up their causes. No amount of philosophical argument or political critique deters the persistent and pervasive temptation to conflate the “is” of natural orders with the “ought” of moral orders. In this short, pithy work of philosophical anthropology, Lorraine Daston asks why we continually seek moral orders in natural orders, despite so much good counsel to the contrary. She outlines three specific forms of natural order in the Western philosophical tradition—specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws—and describes how each of these three natural orders has been used to define and oppose a distinctive form of the unnatural. She argues that each of these forms of the unnatural triggers equally distinctive emotions: horror, terror, and wonder. Daston proposes that human reason practiced in human bodies should command the attention of philosophers, who have traditionally yearned for a transcendent reason, valid for all species, all epochs, even all planets.
Book Synopsis Teleology and the Norms of Nature by : William J. FitzPatrick
Download or read book Teleology and the Norms of Nature written by William J. FitzPatrick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is an examination of teleological attributions i.e. ascriptions of proper functions and natural ends) to the features and behavior of living things with a view to understanding their application to human life.
Download or read book Blame written by D. Justin Coates and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it to blame someone, and when are would-be blamers in a position to do so? What function does blame serve in our lives, and is it a valuable way of relating to one another? The essays in this volume explore answers to these and related questions.
Book Synopsis Norms in the Wild by : Cristina Bicchieri
Download or read book Norms in the Wild written by Cristina Bicchieri and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Large scale behavioral interventions work in some social contexts, but fail in others. The book explains this phenomenon with diverse personal and social behavioral motives, guided by research in economics, psychology, and international consulting done with UNICEF. The book offers tested tools that mobilize mass media, community groups, and autonomous "first movers" (or trendsetters) to alter harmful collective behaviors.
Book Synopsis The Grammar of Society by : Cristina Bicchieri
Download or read book The Grammar of Society written by Cristina Bicchieri and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Grammar of Society, first published in 2006, Cristina Bicchieri examines social norms, such as fairness, cooperation, and reciprocity, in an effort to understand their nature and dynamics, the expectations that they generate, and how they evolve and change. Drawing on several intellectual traditions and methods, including those of social psychology, experimental economics and evolutionary game theory, Bicchieri provides an integrated account of how social norms emerge, why and when we follow them, and the situations where we are most likely to focus on relevant norms. Examining the existence and survival of inefficient norms, she demonstrates how norms evolve in ways that depend upon the psychological dispositions of the individual and how such dispositions may impair social efficiency. By contrast, she also shows how certain psychological propensities may naturally lead individuals to evolve fairness norms that closely resemble those we follow in most modern societies.
Book Synopsis The Trouble with Nature by : Roger N. Lancaster
Download or read book The Trouble with Nature written by Roger N. Lancaster and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-05 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lancaster provides the disproof of evolutionary stories about men, women, and the nature of desire of the heterosexual fables that pervade popular culture, from prime-time sitcoms to scientific theories about the so-called gay gene.
Book Synopsis Explaining Norms by : Geoffrey Brennan
Download or read book Explaining Norms written by Geoffrey Brennan and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the concept of norms by four different philosophers. They discuss how norms emerge, persist, change, and how they serve to explain what we do.
Book Synopsis Rules, Norms, and Decisions by : Friedrich V. Kratochwil
Download or read book Rules, Norms, and Decisions written by Friedrich V. Kratochwil and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-04-26 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assesses the impact of norms on decision-making. It argues that norms influence choices not by being causes for actions, but by providing reasons. Consequently it approaches the problem via an investigation of the reasoning process in which norms play a decisive role. Kratochwil argues that, depending upon the strictness the guidance norms provide in arriving at a decision, different styles of reasoning with norms can be distinguished. While the focus in this book is largely analytical, the argument is developed through the interpretation of the classic thinkers in international law (Grotius, Vattel, Pufendorf, Rousseau, Hume, Habermas).
Book Synopsis Respect for Nature by : Paul W. Taylor
Download or read book Respect for Nature written by Paul W. Taylor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What rational justification is there for conceiving of all living things as possessing inherent worth? In Respect for Nature, Paul Taylor draws on biology, moral philosophy, and environmental science to defend a biocentric environmental ethic in which all life has value. Without making claims for the moral rights of plants and animals, he offers a reasoned alternative to the prevailing anthropocentric view--that the natural environment and its wildlife are valued only as objects for human use or enjoyment. Respect for Nature provides both a full account of the biological conditions for life--human or otherwise--and a comprehensive view of the complex relationship between human beings and the whole of nature. This classic book remains a valuable resource for philosophers, biologists, and environmentalists alike--along with all those who care about the future of life on Earth. A new foreword by Dale Jamieson looks at how the original 1986 edition of Respect for Nature has shaped the study of environmental ethics, and shows why the work remains relevant to debates today.
Book Synopsis Before Nature by : Francesca Rochberg
Download or read book Before Nature written by Francesca Rochberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the modern West, we take for granted that what we call the “natural world” confronts us all and always has—but Before Nature explores that almost unimaginable time when there was no such conception of “nature”—no word, reference, or sense for it. Before the concept of nature formed over the long history of European philosophy and science, our ancestors in ancient Assyria and Babylonia developed an inquiry into the world in a way that is kindred to our modern science. With Before Nature, Francesca Rochberg explores that Assyro-Babylonian knowledge tradition and shows how it relates to the entire history of science. From a modern, Western perspective, a world not conceived somehow within the framework of physical nature is difficult—if not impossible—to imagine. Yet, as Rochberg lays out, ancient investigations of regularity and irregularity, norms and anomalies clearly established an axis of knowledge between the knower and an intelligible, ordered world. Rochberg is the first scholar to make a case for how exactly we can understand cuneiform knowledge, observation, prediction, and explanation in relation to science—without recourse to later ideas of nature. Systematically examining the whole of Mesopotamian science with a distinctive historical and methodological approach, Before Nature will open up surprising new pathways for studying the history of science.
Download or read book Against Nature written by Steven Vogel and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against Nature examines the history of the concept of nature in the tradition of Critical Theory, with chapters on Lukacs, Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas. It argues that the tradition has been marked by significant difficulties with respect to that concept; that these problems are relevant to contemporary environmental philosophy as well; and that a solution to them requires taking seriously--and literally--the idea of nature as socially constructed.
Book Synopsis Exploring Human Nature by : Jana Lemke
Download or read book Exploring Human Nature written by Jana Lemke and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work presents a reflexive mixed methods study of young adults' experiences of solo time in the wilderness and the impact on these individuals' attitudes and values in the face of global change.
Book Synopsis Crime Against Nature by : Gwenn Seemel
Download or read book Crime Against Nature written by Gwenn Seemel and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Birth of Ethics by : Philip Pettit
Download or read book The Birth of Ethics written by Philip Pettit and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine a human society, perhaps in pre-history, in which people were generally of a psychological kind with us, had the use of natural language to communicate with one another, but did not have any properly moral concepts in which to exhort one another to meet certain standards and to lodge related claims and complaints. According to The Birth of Ethics, the members of that society would have faced a set of pressures, and made a series of adjustments in response, sufficient to put them within reach of ethical concepts. Without any planning, they would have more or less inevitably evolved a way of using such concepts to articulate desirable patterns of behavior and to hold themselves and one another responsible to those standards. Sooner or later, they would have entered ethical space. While this central claim is developed as a thesis in conjectural history or genealogy, the aim of the exercise is philosophical. Assuming that it explains the emergence of concepts and practices that are more or less equivalent to ours, the story offers us an account of the nature and role of morality. It directs us to the function that ethics plays in human life and alerts us to the character in virtue of which it can serve that function. The emerging view of morality has implications for the standard range of questions in meta-ethics and moral psychology, and enables us to understand why there are divisions in normative ethics like that between consequentialist and Kantian approaches.
Book Synopsis Necessary Existence by : Alexander R. Pruss
Download or read book Necessary Existence written by Alexander R. Pruss and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Necessary Existence breaks ground on one of the deepest questions anyone ever asks: why is there anything? The classic answer is in terms of a necessary foundation. Yet, why think that is the correct answer? Pruss and Rasmussen present an original defense of the hypothesis that there is a concrete necessary being capable of providing a foundation for the existence of things. They offer six main arguments, divided into six chapters. The first argument is an up-to-date presentation and assessment of a traditional causal-based argument from contingency. The next five arguments are new "possibility-based" arguments that make use of twentieth-century advances in modal logic. The arguments present possible pathways to an intriguing and far-reaching conclusion. The final chapter answers the most challenging objections to the existence of necessary things.
