Download or read book The Normative and the Natural written by Michael P. Wolf and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-31 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a rich pragmatist tradition, this book offers an account of the different kinds of ‘oughts’, or varieties of normativity, that we are subject to contends that there is no conflict between normativity and the world as science describes it. The authors argue that normative claims aim to evaluate, to urge us to do or not do something, and to tell us how a state of affairs ought to be. These claims articulate forms of action-guidance that are different in kind from descriptive claims, with a wholly distinct practical and expressive character. This account suggests that there are no normative facts, and so nothing that needs any troublesome shoehorning into a scientific account of the world. This work explains that nevertheless, normative claims are constrained by the world, and answerable to reason and argumentation, in a way that makes them truth-apt and objective.
Download or read book The Natural and the Normative written by Gary Carl Hatfield and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gary Hatfield examines theories of spatial perception from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and provides a detailed analysis of the works of Kant and Helmholtz, who adopted opposing stances on whether central questions about spatial perception were amenable to natural-scientific treatment. At stake were the proper understanding of the relationships among sensation, perception, and experience, and the proper methodological framework for investigating the mental activities of judgment, understanding, and reason issues which remain at the core of philosophical psychology and cognitive science. Hatfield presents these important issues as living philosophies of science that shape and are shaped by actual research programs, creating a complex and fascinating picture of the entire nineteenth-century battle between nativism and empiricism. His examination of Helmholtz's work in physiological optics and epistemology is a tour de force. Gary Hatfield is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Download or read book Wilfrid Sellars written by James O'Shea and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-02-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars continues to have a significant impact on the contemporary philosophical scene. His writings have influenced major thinkers such as Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, and Dennett, and many of Sellars basic conceptions, such as the logical space of reasons, the myth of the given, and the manifest and scientific images, have become standard philosophical terms. Often, however, recent uses of these terms do not reflect the richness or the true sense of Sellars original ideas. This book gets to the heart of Sellars philosophy and provides students with a comprehensive critical introduction to his lifes work. The book is structured around what Sellars himself regarded as the philosophers overarching task: to achieve a coherent vision of reality that will finally overcome the continuing clashes between the world as common sense takes it to be and the world as science reveals it to be. It provides a clear analysis of Sellars groundbreaking philosophy of mind, his novel theory of consciousness, his defense of scientific realism, and his thoroughgoing naturalism with a normative turn. Providing a lively examination of Sellars work through the central problem of what it means to be a human being in a scientific world, this book will be a valuable resource for all students of philosophy.
Download or read book Metaphysics and Gender The Normative Art of Nature and Its Human Imitations written by Michele Schumacher and published by Emmaus Academic. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergent “science” of transgenderism and related philosophies of gender propose a full-scale inversion of the understanding of God, man, and the created order articulated in classical metaphysics, undermining and parodying both the causality and ontology voiced by Genesis 1:27 (“God created man in His own image, . . . male and female He created them”). Whether through subversive performative identity or by surgical sex change, the divinely made human person is now threatened with abolition and replacement by the self-made man and the man-made woman. In Metaphysics and Gender, Michele M. Schumacher offers a corrective to this distorted and distorting outlook, calling for the recovery of an anthropological vision rooted in recognition of the normative divine “art” of nature and of the likeness—and far greater unlikeness—between divine and human causality. Surveying contemporary transgender trends, Schumacher identifies and excavates their conceptual and ideological foundations in the gender theory of Judith Butler, the existentialist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir, and the atheistic existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. To the erroneous philosophical presuppositions of these thinkers Schumacher contrasts the metaphysically grounded thought of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, advancing their positive account of the good of creation and of the meaning of ethical norms, human freedom and natural inclinations, and embodiment, and mounting a timely and trenchant defense of the divinely created human person.
Download or read book The Nature of Normativity written by Ralph Wedgwood and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-19 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The semantics of normative thought and discourse -- Thinking about what ought to be -- Expressivism -- Causal theories and conceptual analyses -- Conceptual role semantics -- Context and the logic of 'ought' -- The metaphysics of normative facts -- The metaphysical issues -- The normativity of the intentional -- Irreducibility and causal efficacy -- Non-reductive naturalism -- The epistemology of normative belief -- The status of normative intuitions -- Disagreement and the a priori.
Download or read book The Normative Nature of Social Practices and Ethics in Professional Environments written by de Vries, Marc J. and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2019-04-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professionals function in what can be called “social practices.” Norms in the practice set professionals’ responsibilities and rights and classify what is seen as morally proper and improper. Tensions arise when norms emerge that are not coherent with the nature of the practice. For example, when a hospital is assessed on the basis of economic criteria only, staff will feel uncomfortable and find difficulty in functioning properly in that practice. The Normative Nature of Social Practices and Ethics in Professional Environments is an essential research book that helps professionals in a variety of practices understand how normativity in their practice either helps or hampers them to function well and align with what they see as their personal and professional responsibility. Additionally, it explains the normative practical model/approach and how it can be applied to a series of concrete practices, as well as the role of innovative and disruptive technologies in these practices. Featuring a broad range of topics such as governance theory, sustainable development, and engineering, this book is ideally designed for managers, philosophers, sociologists, professionals, academicians, and researchers.
Download or read book The Normative Web written by Terence Cuneo and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2010-03-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antirealist views about morality claim that moral facts or truths do not exist. Do these views imply that other types of normative facts, such as epistemic ones, do not exist? The Normative Web develops a positive answer to this question. Terence Cuneo argues that the similarities between moral and epistemic facts provide excellent reason to believe that, if moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts do not exist. But epistemic facts, it is argued, do exist: to deny their existence would commit us to an extreme version of epistemological skepticism. Therefore, Cuneo concludes, moral facts exist. And if moral facts exist, then moral realism is true. In so arguing, Cuneo provides not simply a defense of moral realism, but a positive argument for it. Moreover, this argument engages with a wide range of antirealist positions in epistemology such as error theories, expressivist views, and reductionist views of epistemic reasons. If the central argument of The Normative Web is correct, antirealist positions of these varieties come at a very high cost. Given their cost, Cuneo contends, we should find realism about both epistemic and moral facts highly attractive.
Download or read book The Normative Force of the Factual written by Nicoletta Bersier Ladavac and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-26 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the interrelation of facts and norms. How does law originate in the first place? What lies at the roots of this phenomenon? How is it preserved? And how does it come to an end? Questions like these led Georg Jellinek to speak of the “normative force of the factual” in the early 20th century, emphasizing the human tendency to infer rules from recurring events, and to perceive a certain practice not only as a fact but as a norm; a norm which not only allows us to distinguish regularity from irregularity, but at the same time, to treat deviances as transgressions. Today, Jellinek’s concept still provides astonishing insights on the dichotomy of “is” and “ought to be”, the emergence of the normative, the efficacy and the defeasibility of (legal) norms, and the distinct character of what legal theorists refer to as “normativity”. It leads us back to early legal history, it connects anthropology and legal theory, and it demonstrates the interdependence of law and the social sciences. In short: it invites us to fundamentally reassess the interrelation of facts and norms from various perspectives. The contributing authors to this volume have accepted that invitation.
Download or read book Nature and Normativity written by Mark Okrent and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nature and Normativity argues that the problem of the place of norms in nature has been essentially misunderstood when it has been articulated in terms of the relation of human language and thought, on the one hand, and the world described by physics on the other. Rather, if we concentrate on the facts that speaking and thinking are activities of organic agents, then the problem of the place of the normative in nature becomes refocused on three related questions. First, is there a sense in which biological processes and the behavior of organisms can be legitimately subject to normative evaluation? Second, is there some sense in which, in addition to having ordinary causal explanations, organic phenomena can also legitimately be seen to happen because they should happen in that way, in some naturalistically comprehensible sense of ‘should’, or that organic phenomena happen in order to achieve some result, because that result should occur? And third, is it possible to naturalistically understand how human thought and language can be legitimately seen as the normatively evaluable behavior of a particular species of organism, behavior that occurs in order to satisfy some class of norms? This book develops, articulates, and defends positive answers to each of these questions.
Download or read book Confusion of Tongues written by Stephen Finlay and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can normative words like 'good', 'ought', and 'reason' be defined in non-normative terms? Stephen Finlay argues that they can, advancing a new theory of the meaning of this language and providing pragmatic explanations of the specially problematic features of its moral and deliberative uses which comprise the puzzles of metaethics.
Download or read book Normative Jurisprudence written by Robin West and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-22 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Normative Jurisprudence aims to reinvigorate normative legal scholarship that both criticizes positive law and suggests reforms for it, on the basis of stated moral values and legalistic ideals. It looks sequentially and in detail at the three major traditions in jurisprudence – natural law, legal positivism and critical legal studies – that have in the past provided philosophical foundations for just such normative scholarship. Over the last fifty years or so, all of these traditions, although for different reasons, have taken a number of different turns – toward empirical analysis, conceptual analysis or Foucaultian critique – and away from straightforward normative criticism. As a result, normative legal scholarship – scholarship that is aimed at criticism and reform – is now lacking a foundation in jurisprudential thought. The book criticizes those developments and suggests a return, albeit with different and in many ways larger challenges, to this traditional understanding of the purpose of legal scholarship.
Download or read book Being Realistic about Reasons written by T. M. Scanlon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is what we have reason to do a matter of fact? If so, what kind of truth is involved, how can we know it, and how do reasons motivate and explain action? In this concise and lucid book T.M. Scanlon offers answers, with a qualified defence of normative cognitivism - the view that there are normative truths about reasons for action.
Download or read book Normative Subjects written by Meir Dan-Cohen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining constructivist and hermeneutical themes, this book explores normative aspects of human self creation seen as a matter of fixing and elaborating the values and norms that shape human identity, individually and collectively.
Download or read book The Normative Foundations of European Competition Law written by Oles Andriychuk and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-25 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does competitive process constitute an autonomous societal value or is it a means for achieving more meritorious goals: welfare, growth, integration, and innovation? The hypothesis of The Normative Foundations of European Competition Law is that the former is the case. This insightful book analyses the phenomenon of competition from philosophical, legal and economic perspectives demonstrating exactly why competitive process should not be viewed only as an instrument. It consolidates various normative theories of freedom, market and competition, and explains how exactly they can be operationalized effectively in the matrix of the EU competition policy.
Download or read book Explaining the Normative written by Stephen P. Turner and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Normativity is what gives reasons their force, makes words meaningful, and makes rules and laws binding. It is present whenever we use such terms as ‘correct,' ‘ought,' ‘must,' and the language of obligation, responsibility, and logical compulsion. Yet normativists, the philosophers committed to this idea, admit that the idea of a non-causal normative realm and a body of normative objects is spooky. Explaining the Normative is the first systematic, historically grounded critique of normativism. It identifies the standard normativist pattern of argument, and shows how this pattern depends on circularities, assumptions about the unique correctness of preferred descriptions, problematic transcendental arguments, and regress arguments that end in mysteries. The book considers in detail a paradigm case: legal normativity as constructed by Hans Kelsen. This case exemplifies the problems with normativist arguments. But it also shows how normativism was constructed as an alternative to ordinary social science explanation. The normativist argument is that social science explanations themselves are forced to rely on normative conceptsÑminimally, on normative rationality and on a normative view of ‘concepts' themselves. Empathic understanding of the reasoning and meanings of others, however, can solve the regress problems about meaning and rationality that are central to the appeal of normativism. This account has no need for a parallel normative world, and has a surprising and revealing lineage in the history of philosophy, as well as a basis in neuroscience.
Download or read book The Normative Claim of Law written by Stefano Bertea and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on a specific component of the normative dimension of law, namely, the normative claim of law. By 'normative claim' we mean the claim that inherent in the law is an ability to guide action by generating practical reasons having a special status. The thesis that law lays the normative claim has become a subject of controversy: it has its defenders, as well as many scholars of different orientations who have acknowledged the normative claim of law without making a point of defending it head-on. It has also come under attack from other contemporary legal theorists, and around the normative claim a lively debate has sprung up. This debate makes up the main subject of this book, which is in essence an attempt to account for the normative claim and see how its recognition moulds our understanding of the law itself. This involves (a) specifying the exact content, boundaries, quality, and essential traits of the normative claim, (b) explaining how the law can make a claim so specified, and (c) justifying why this should happen in the first place. The argument is set out in two stages, corresponding to the two parts in which the book is divided. In the first part, the author introduces and discusses the meaning, status, and fundamental traits of the normative claim of law; in the second he explores some foundational questions and determines the grounds of the normative claim of law by framing an account that elaborates on some contemporary discussions of Kant's conception of humanity as the source of the normativity of practical reason.
Download or read book The Normativity of Nature written by Hannah Ginsborg and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why read Kant's Critique of Judgment? For most readers, the importance of the work lies in its contributions to aesthetics and, to a lesser extent, the philosophy of biology. Hannah Ginsborg, by contrast, sees the Critique of Judgment as a central contribution to the understanding of human cognition generally. The fourteen essays collected here advance a common interpretive project: that of bringing out the philosophical significance of the notion of judgment which figures in the third Critique and showing its importance both to Kant's own theoretical philosophy and to contemporary views of human thought and cognition. For us to possess the capacity of judgment, on the interpretation defended here, is for our natural perceptual and imaginative responses to involve a claim to their own normativity with respect to the objects which cause them. It is in virtue of this capacity that we are able not merely to respond discriminatively to objects, as animals do, but to bring objects under concepts. The Critique of Judgment, on this reading, rejects the traditional dichotomy between the natural and the normative: our natural psychological responses to the spatio-temporal objects which affect our senses are both causally determined by those objects, and normatively appropriate to them. The essays in this book aim collectively to develop and illuminate this understanding of judgment in its own right, and to use it to address specific interpretive issues in Kant's aesthetics, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of biology; they are also concerned to bring out the relevance of this conception of judgment to contemporary debates regarding concept-acquisition, the content of perception, and skepticism about rules and meaning.
