Understanding Naturalism

Author : Jack Ritchie
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317493583
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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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 229 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.

Author : Thomas W. Clark
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780979111105
Total Pages : 103 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Encountering Naturalism written by Thomas W. Clark and published by . This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Sander Verhaegh
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190913150
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Working from Within written by Sander Verhaegh and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018-12-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a "naturalistic" approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy--the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning--philosophers today largely follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. Sander Verhaegh here offers a comprehensive study of Quine's groundbreaking naturalism. Building on Quine's published corpus as well as a wealth of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, Verhaegh aims to reconstruct both the nature and the development of his naturalism. As such, Working from Within aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy, and to provide a better, historically informed, understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. Transcriptions of five unpublished papers, letters, and notes are included in the appendix.

Author : Joseph Rouse
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022629370X
Total Pages : 430 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Articulating the World written by Joseph Rouse and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-11-13 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naturalism as a guiding philosophy for modern science both disavows any appeal to the supernatural or anything else transcendent to nature, and repudiates any philosophical or religious authority over the workings and conclusions of the sciences. A longstanding paradox within naturalism, however, has been the status of scientific knowledge itself, which seems, at first glance, to be something that transcends and is therefore impossible to conceptualize within scientific naturalism itself. In Articulating the World, Joseph Rouse argues that the most pressing challenge for advocates of naturalism today is precisely this: to understand how to make sense of a scientific conception of nature as itself part of nature, scientifically understood. Drawing upon recent developments in evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science, Rouse defends naturalism in response to this challenge by revising both how we understand our scientific conception of the world and how we situate ourselves within it.

Author : Stewart Goetz
Publisher : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0802807682
Total Pages : 141 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Joseph Rouse
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226730080
Total Pages : 414 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Henk W. de Regt
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN 13 : 0822971240
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Scientific Understanding written by Henk W. de Regt and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2014-08-09 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To most scientists, and to those interested in the sciences, understanding is the ultimate aim of scientific endeavor. In spite of this, understanding, and how it is achieved, has received little attention in recent philosophy of science. Scientific Understanding seeks to reverse this trend by providing original and in-depth accounts of the concept of understanding and its essential role in the scientific process. To this end, the chapters in this volume explore and develop three key topics: understanding and explanation, understanding and models, and understanding in scientific practice. Earlier philosophers, such as Carl Hempel, dismissed understanding as subjective and pragmatic. They believed that the essence of science was to be found in scientific theories and explanations. In Scientific Understanding, the contributors maintain that we must also consider the relation between explanations and the scientists who construct and use them. They focus on understanding as the cognitive state that is a goal of explanation and on the understanding of theories and models as a means to this end. The chapters in this book highlight the multifaceted nature of the process of scientific research. The contributors examine current uses of theory, models, simulations, and experiments to evaluate the degree to which these elements contribute to understanding. Their analyses pay due attention to the roles of intelligibility, tacit knowledge, and feelings of understanding. Furthermore, they investigate how understanding is obtained within diverse scientific disciplines and examine how the acquisition of understanding depends on specific contexts, the objects of study, and the stated aims of research.

Author : Bana Bashour
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135082480
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Christian Emden
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107059631
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Christoph Cox
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520921607
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nietzsche written by Christoph Cox and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-12-22 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation offers a resolution of one of the most vexing problems in Nietzsche scholarship. As perhaps the most significant predecessor of more recent attempts to formulate a postmetaphysical epistemology and ontology, Nietzsche is considered by many critics to share this problem with his successors: How can an antifoundationalist philosophy avoid vicious relativism and legitimate its claim to provide a platform for the critique of arguments, practices, and institutions? Christoph Cox argues that Nietzsche successfully navigates between relativism and dogmatism, accepting the naturalistic critique of metaphysics and theology provided by modern science, yet maintaining that a thoroughgoing naturalism must move beyond scientific reductionism. It must accept a central feature of aesthetic understanding: acknowledgment of the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation. This view of Nietzsche's doctrines of perspectivism, becoming, and will to power as products of an overall naturalism balanced by a reciprocal commitment to interpretationism will spur new discussions of epistemology and ontology in contemporary thought.