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The Philosophical Naturalists
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Book Synopsis Understanding Naturalism by : Jack Ritchie
Download or read book Understanding Naturalism written by Jack Ritchie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many contemporary Anglo-American philosophers describe themselves as naturalists. But what do they mean by that term? Popular naturalist slogans like, "there is no first philosophy" or "philosophy is continuous with the natural sciences" are far from illuminating. "Understanding Naturalism" provides a clear and readable survey of the main strands in recent naturalist thought. The origin and development of naturalist ideas in epistemology, metaphysics and semantics is explained through the works of Quine, Goldman, Kuhn, Chalmers, Papineau, Millikan and others. The most common objections to the naturalist project - that it involves a change of subject and fails to engage with "real" philosophical problems, that it is self-refuting, and that naturalism cannot deal with normative notions like truth, justification and meaning - are all discussed. "Understanding Naturalism" distinguishes two strands of naturalist thinking - the constructive and the deflationary - and explains how this distinction can invigorate naturalism and the future of philosophical research.
Book Synopsis Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications by : Bana Bashour
Download or read book Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications written by Bana Bashour and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most pervasive and persistent questions in philosophy is the relationship between the natural sciences and traditional philosophical categories such as metaphysics, epistemology and the mind. Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications is a unique and valuable contribution to the literature on this issue. It brings together a remarkable collection of highly regarded experts in the field along with some young theorists providing a fresh perspective. This book is noteworthy for bringing together committed philosophical naturalists (with one notable and provocative exception), thus diverging from the growing trend towards anti-naturalism. The book consists of four sections: the first deals with the metaphysical implications of naturalism, in which two contributors present radically different perspectives. The second attempts to reconcile reasons and forward-looking goals with blind Darwinian natural selection. The third tackles various problems in epistemology, ranging from meaning to natural kinds to concept learning. The final section includes three papers each addressing a specific feature of the human mind: its uniqueness, its representational capacity, and its morality. In this way the book explores the important implications of the post-Darwinian scientific world-view.
Book Synopsis Nietzsche's Naturalism by : Christian Emden
Download or read book Nietzsche's Naturalism written by Christian Emden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Nietzsche's philosophical naturalism both historically and philosophically, establishing a link between his discussions of nature and normativity.
Download or read book Naturalism written by Stewart Goetz and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2008-04-29 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This inaugural Interventions volume introduces readers to the dominant scientifically oriented worldview called naturalism. Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro examine naturalism philosophically, evaluating its strengths and weaknesses. Whereas most other books on naturalism are written for professional philosophers alone, this one is aimed primarily at a college-educated audience interested in learning about this pervasive worldview. Read a related blog post by the authors on EerdWord.
Book Synopsis A Naturalistic Epistemology by : Hilary Kornblith
Download or read book A Naturalistic Epistemology written by Hilary Kornblith and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects thirteen papers by Hilary Kornblith on the theme of naturalistic epistemology. These papers present Kornblith's own version of a naturalistic epistemology, together with critical discussion of alternative approaches, including work on foundationalism, the coherence theory of justification, internalism and externalism, social epistemology, the role of intuitions in philosophical theorizing, epistemic normativity, and the ways in whichphilosophical theories may be informed by empirical considerations.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology by : Herman Cappelen
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology written by Herman Cappelen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology (including logical empiricism, phenomenology, and ordinary language philosophy). The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience.
Book Synopsis How Scientific Practices Matter by : Joseph Rouse
Download or read book How Scientific Practices Matter written by Joseph Rouse and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we understand the world as a whole instead of separate natural and human realms? Joseph T. Rouse proposes an approach to this classic problem based on radical new conceptions of both philosophical naturalism and scientific practice. Rouse begins with a detailed critique of modern thought on naturalism, from Neurath and Heidegger to Charles Taylor, Thomas Kuhn, and W. V. O. Quine. He identifies two constraints central to a philosophically robust naturalism: it must impose no arbitrarily philosophical restrictions on science, and it must shun even the most subtle appeals to mysterious or supernatural forces. Thus a naturalistic approach requires philosophers to show that their preferred conception of nature is what scientific inquiry discloses, and that their conception of scientific understanding is itself intelligible as part of the natural world. Finally, Rouse draws on feminist science studies and other recent work on causality and discourse to demonstrate the crucial role that closer attention to scientific practice can play in reclaiming naturalism. A bold and ambitious book, How Scientific Practices Matter seeks to provide a viable—yet nontraditional—defense of a naturalistic conception of philosophy and science. Its daring proposals will spark much discussion and debate among philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science.
Book Synopsis Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective by : Lynne Rudder Baker
Download or read book Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective written by Lynne Rudder Baker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science and its philosophical companion, Naturalism, represent reality in wholly nonpersonal terms. How, if at all, can a nonpersonal scheme accommodate the first-person perspective that we all enjoy? In this volume, Lynne Rudder Baker explores that question by considering both reductive and eliminative approaches to the first-person perspective. After finding both approaches wanting, she mounts an original constructive argument to show that a non-Cartesian first-person perspective belongs in the basic inventory of what exists. That is, the world that contains us persons is irreducibly personal. After arguing for the irreducibilty and ineliminability of the first-person perspective, Baker develops a theory of this perspective. The first-person perspective has two stages, rudimentary and robust. Human infants and nonhuman animals with consciousness and intentionality have rudimentary first-person perspectives. In learning a language, a person acquires a robust first-person perspective: the capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself, in the first person. By developing an account of personal identity, Baker argues that her theory is coherent, and she shows various ways in which first-person perspectives contribute to reality.
Book Synopsis Second Philosophy by : Penelope Maddy
Download or read book Second Philosophy written by Penelope Maddy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-19 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many philosophers these days consider themselves naturalists, but it's doubtful any two of them intend the same position by the term. In this book, Penelope Maddy describes and practises a particularly austere form of naturalism called 'Second Philosophy'. Without a definitive criterion for what counts as 'science' and what doesn't, Second Philosophy can't be specified directly - 'trust only the methods of science!' or some such thing - so Maddy proceeds instead by illustratingthe behaviours of an idealized inquirer she calls the 'Second Philosopher'. This Second Philosopher begins from perceptual common sense and progresses from there to systematic observation, active experimentation, theory formation and testing, working all the while to assess, correct and improve hermethods as she goes. Second Philosophy is then the result of the Second Philosopher's investigations.Maddy delineates the Second Philosopher's approach by tracing her reactions to various familiar skeptical and transcendental views (Descartes, Kant, Carnap, late Putnam, van Fraassen), comparing her methods to those of other self-described naturalists (especially Quine), and examining a prominent contemporary debate (between disquotationalists and correspondence theorists in the theory of truth) to extract a properly second-philosophical line of thought. She then undertakes to practise SecondPhilosophy in her reflections on the ground of logical truth, the methodology, ontology and epistemology of mathematics, and the general prospects for metaphysics naturalized.
Book Synopsis Naturalism and Normativity by : Mario De Caro
Download or read book Naturalism and Normativity written by Mario De Caro and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Normativity concerns what we ought to think or do and the evaluations we make. For example, we say that we ought to think consistently, we ought to keep our promises, or that Mozart is a better composer than Salieri. Yet what philosophical moral can we draw from the apparent absence of normativity in the scientific image of the world? For scientific naturalists, the moral is that the normative must be reduced to the nonnormative, while for nonnaturalists, the moral is that there must be a transcendent realm of norms. Naturalism and Normativity engages with both sides of this debate. Essays explore philosophical options for understanding normativity in the space between scientific naturalism and Platonic supernaturalism. They articulate a liberal conception of philosophy that is neither reducible to the sciences nor completely independent of them yet one that maintains the right to call itself naturalism. Contributors think in new ways about the relations among the scientific worldview, our experience of norms and values, and our movements in the space of reason. Detailed discussions include the relationship between philosophy and science, physicalism and ontological pluralism, the realm of the ordinary, objectivity and subjectivity, truth and justification, and the liberal naturalisms of Donald Davidson, John Dewey, John McDowell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Book Synopsis Normativity and Naturalism in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences by : Mark Risjord
Download or read book Normativity and Naturalism in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences written by Mark Risjord and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-22 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Normativity and Naturalism in the Social Sciences engages with a central debate within the philosophy of social science: whether social scientific explanation necessitates an appeal to norms, and if so, whether appeals to normativity can be rendered "scientific." This collection brings together contributions from a diverse group of philosophers who explore a broad but thematically unified set of questions, many of which stem from an ongoing debate between Stephen Turner and Joseph Rouse (both contributors to this volume) on the role of naturalism in the philosophy of the social sciences. Informed by recent developments in both philosophy and the social sciences, this volume will set the benchmark for contemporary discussions about normativity and naturalism. This collection will be relevant to philosophers of social science, philosophers in interested in the rule following and metaphysics of normativity, and theoretically oriented social scientists.
Book Synopsis Philosophical Naturalism by : Peter A. French
Download or read book Philosophical Naturalism written by Peter A. French and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years naturalism has become a focal point in the discussions of many contemporary philosophers. Philosophical Naturalism in the series Midwest Studies in Philosophy offers a broad sampling of previously unpublished essays that represent the current status of discussions of naturalism.
Book Synopsis World Without Design by : Michael Cannon Rea
Download or read book World Without Design written by Michael Cannon Rea and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Philosophical naturalism has dominated the Western academy for well over a century. According to Michael Rea, however, there is an important sense in which naturalism's status as orthodoxy is without rational foundation, and the costs of embracing it are surprisingly high. The goal of World without Design is to defend these two claims, with special attention to the second." "The first part of the book aims to provide a fair and historically informed characterization of naturalism. The second part argues for the striking thesis that naturalists are committed to rejecting realism about material objects, materialism, and perhaps realism about other minds. Rea concludes by examining two alternative research programs: intuitionism and supernaturalism, and argues for the conclusion that, under certain circumstances, intuitionism is self-defeating."
Book Synopsis Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism by : Eugen Fischer
Download or read book Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism written by Eugen Fischer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experimental philosophy is one of the most exciting and controversial philosophical movements today. This book explores how it is reshaping thought about philosophical method. Experimental philosophy imports experimental methods and findings from psychology into philosophy. These fresh resources can be used to develop and defend both armchair methods and naturalist approaches, on an empirical basis. This outstanding collection brings together leading proponents of this new meta-philosophical naturalism, from within and beyond experimental philosophy. They explore how the empirical study of philosophically relevant intuition and cognition transforms traditional philosophical approaches and facilitates fresh ones. Part One examines important uses of traditional "armchair" methods which are not threatened by experimental work and develops empirically informed accounts of such methods that can potentially stand up to experimental scrutiny. Part Two analyses different uses and rationales of experimental methods in several areas of philosophy and addresses the key methodological challenges to experimental philosophy: Do its experiments target the intuitions that matter in philosophy? And how can they support conclusions about the rights and wrongs of philosophical views? Essential reading for students of experimental philosophy and metaphilosophy, Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism will also interest students and researchers in related areas such as epistemology and the philosophies of language, perception, mind and action, science and psychology.
Book Synopsis Pragmatism and Naturalism by : Matthew C. Bagger
Download or read book Pragmatism and Naturalism written by Matthew C. Bagger and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most contemporary philosophers would call themselves naturalists, yet there is little consensus on what naturalism entails. Long signifying the notion that science should inform philosophy, debates over naturalism often hinge on how broadly or narrowly the terms nature and science are defined. The founding figures of American Pragmatism—C. S. Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), and John Dewey (1859–1952)—developed a distinctive variety of naturalism by rejecting reductive materialism and instead emphasizing social practices. Owing to this philosophical lineage, pragmatism has made original and insightful contributions to the study of religion as well as to political theory. In Pragmatism and Naturalism, distinguished scholars examine pragmatism’s distinctive form of nonreductive naturalism and consider its merits for the study of religion, democratic theory, and as a general philosophical orientation. Nancy Frankenberry, Philip Kitcher, Wayne Proudfoot, Jeffrey Stout, and others evaluate the contribution pragmatism can make to a viable naturalism, explore what distinguishes pragmatic naturalism from other naturalisms on offer, and address the pertinence of pragmatic naturalism to methodological issues in the study of religion. In parts dedicated to historical pragmatists, pragmatism in the philosophy and the study of religion, and pragmatism and democracy, they display the enduring power and contemporary relevance of pragmatic naturalism.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science by : Paul Humphreys
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science written by Paul Humphreys and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-04 with total page 945 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides both an overview of state-of-the-art scholarship in philosophy of science, as well as a guide to new directions in the discipline. Section I contains broad overviews of the main lines of research and the state of established knowledge in six principal areas of the discipline, including computational, physical, biological, psychological and social sciences, as well as general philosophy of science. Section II covers what are considered to be the traditional topics in the philosophy of science, such as causation, probability, models, ethics and values, and explanation. Section III identifies new areas of investigation that show promise of becoming important areas of research, including the philosophy of astronomy and astrophysics, data, complexity theory, neuroscience, simulations, post-Kuhnian philosophy, post-empiricist epistemology, and emergence. Most chapters are accessible to scientifically educated non-philosophers as well as to professional philosophers, and the contributors - all leading researchers in their field -- bring diverse perspectives from the North American, European, and Australasian research communities. This volume is an essential resource for scholars and students.
Book Synopsis The Image in Mind by : Charles Taliaferro
Download or read book The Image in Mind written by Charles Taliaferro and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-06-06 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosophical inquiry into the strengths and weaknesses of theism and naturalism in accounting for the emergence of consciousness, the visual imagination and aesthetic values. The authors begin by offering an account of modern scientific practice which gives a central place to the visual imagination and aesthetic values. They then move to test the explanatory power of naturalism and theism in accounting for consciousness and the very visual imagination and aesthetic values that lie behind and define modern science. Taliaferro and Evans argue that evolutionary biology alone is insufficient to account for consciousness, the visual imagination and aesthetic values. Insofar as naturalism is compelled to go beyond evolutionary biology, it does not fare as well as theism in terms of explanatory power.
