Download or read book The Orders of Nature written by Lawrence Cahoone and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2015 John N. Findlay Award in Metaphysics presented by the Metaphysical Society of America Reviving and modernizing the tradition of post Darwinian naturalism, The Orders of Nature draws on philosophy and the natural sciences to present a naturalistic theory of reality. Conceiving of nature as systems, processes, and structures that exhibit diverse properties that can be hierarchically arranged, Lawrence Cahoone sketches a systematic metaphysics based on the following orders of nature: physical, material, biological, mental, and cultural. Using recent work in the science of complexity, hierarchical systems theory, and nonfoundational approaches to metaphysics, Cahoone analyzes these orders with explanations of the underlying science, covering a range of topics that includes general relativity and quantum field theory; chemistry and inorganic complexity; biology and telenomic explanation, or "purpose"; the theory of mind and mental causation as an animal phenomenon; and the human mind's unique cultural abilities. The book concludes with an exploration of what answers such a theory of naturalism can provide to questions about values and God.
Download or read book Religion and the Order of Nature written by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-26 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current ecological crisis is a matter of urgent global concern, with solutions being sought on many fronts. In this book, Seyyed Hossein Nasr argues that the devastation of our world has been exacerbated, if not actually caused, by the reductionist view of nature that has been advanced by modern secular science. What is needed, he believes, is the recovery of the truth to which the great, enduring religions all attest; namely that nature is sacred. Nasr traces the historical process through which Western civilization moved away from the idea of nature as sacred and embraced a world view which sees humans as alienated from nature and nature itself as a machine to be dominated and manipulated by humans. His goal is to negate the totalitarian claims of modern science and to re-open the way to the religious view of the order of nature, developed over centuries in the cosmologies and sacred sciences of the great traditions. Each tradition, Nasr shows, has a wealth of knowledge and experience concerning the order of nature. The resuscitation of this knowledge, he argues, would allow religions all over the globe to enrich each other and cooperate to heal the wounds inflicted upon the Earth.
Download or read book The Order of Nature written by Josh Scheinert and published by . This book was released on 2017-10-23 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to live a life that's illegal, to be born into a community where you don't belong? Set in The Gambia where homosexuality is a crime, The Order of Nature follows Andrew and Thomas's relationship. Their secret is safe at first, but eventually, they are exposed and arrested, charged for committing acts against the order of nature.
Download or read book The Divine Order the Human Order and the Order of Nature written by Eric Watkins and published by . This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains ten new essays focused on the exploration and articulation of a narrative that considers the notion of order within medieval and modern philosophy—its various kinds (natural, moral, divine, and human), the different ways in which each is conceived, and the diverse dependency relations that are thought to obtain among them. Descartes, with the help of others, brought about an important shift in what was understood by the order of nature by placing laws of nature at the foundation of his natural philosophy. Vigorous debate then ensued about the proper formulation of the laws of nature and the moral law, about whether such laws can be justified, and if so, how-through some aspect of the divine order or through human beings-and about what consequences these laws have for human beings and the moral and divine orders. That is, philosophers of the period were thinking through what the order of nature consists in and how to understand its relations to the divine, human, and moral orders. No two major philosophers in the modern period took exactly the same stance on these issues, but these issues are clearly central to their thought. The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature is devoted to investigating their positions from a vantage point that has the potential to combine metaphysical, epistemological, scientific, and moral considerations into a single narrative.
Download or read book Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150 1750 written by Lorraine Daston and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998-05 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses how European scientists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonders, monsters, curiosities, marvels, and other phenomena to envision the natural world.
Download or read book The Order of Nature An Essay written by Lawrence Joseph Henderson and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature written by Donald Rutherford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major contribution to Leibniz scholarship will prove invaluable to historians of philosophy, theology, and science.
Download or read book Finding Order In Nature written by Paul Lawrence Farber and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2003-04-30 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Engaging . . . a concise work that gives the general reader a solid understanding . . . an excellent introduction to the history of natural history.” —Library Journal Since emerging as a discipline in the middle of the eighteenth century, natural history has been at the heart of the life sciences. It gave rise to the major organizing theory of life—evolution—and continues to be a vital science with impressive practical value. Central to advanced work in ecology, agriculture, medicine, and environmental science, natural history also attracts enormous popular interest. In Finding Order in Nature Paul Farber traces the development of the naturalist tradition since the Enlightenment and considers its relationship to other research areas in the life sciences. Written for the general reader and student alike, the volume explores the adventures of early naturalists, the ideas that lay behind classification systems, the development of museums and zoos, and the range of motives that led collectors to collect. Farber also explores the importance of sociocultural contexts, institutional settings, and government funding in the story of this durable discipline. “The history of natural history can rarely have been as succinctly told as in Paul Lawrence Farber’s 129-page Finding Order in Nature. From the intellectual revolutions of Linnaeus and Darwin through the Victorian obsessions with classifying and collecting, to the conservationists led by E. O. Wilson, it is an odyssey beautifully told.” —New Scientist “Farber does an impressive job of demonstrating how practitioners like Linnaeus, Buffon, Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier advanced the field and set the stage for the development of science as we know it today.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book The Nature of Order The phenomenon of life written by Christopher Alexander and published by Nature of Order. This book was released on 2002 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Book Oneof this four-volume work, Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and establishes this understanding of living structures as an intellectual basis for a new architecture. He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make. These properties are seen over and over in nature and in the cities and streets of the past, but they have almost disappeared in the impersonal developments and buildings of the last hundred years. This book shows that living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.
Download or read book Rethinking Order written by Nancy Cartwright and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a radical new picture of natural order. The Newtonian idea of a cosmos ruled by universal and exceptionless laws has been superseded; replaced by a conception of nature as a realm of diverse powers, potencies, and dispositions, a 'dappled world'. There is order in nature, but it is more local, diverse, piecemeal, open, and emergent than Newton imagined. In each chapter expert authors expound the historical context of the idea of laws of nature, and explore the diverse sorts of order actually presupposed by work in physics, biology, and the social sciences. They consider how human freedom might be understood, and explore how Newton's idea of a 'universal designer' might be revised, in this new context. They argue that there is not one unified totalizing program of science, aiming at the completion of one closed causal system. We live in an ordered universe, but we need to rethink the classical idea of the 'laws of nature' in a more dynamic and creatively diverse way.
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.
Download or read book The Order of Nature in Aristotle s Physics written by Helen S. Lang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-24 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book enters into the point of view of the ancient world in order to explain how they saw the world, and to show what arguments were used by Aristotle to support this view. Lang demonstrates a new method for reading the texts of Aristotle by revealing a continuous line of argument running from the Physics to De Caelo, and analyzes a group of arguments that are almost always treated in isolation from one another to reveal their elegance and coherence. She establishes the case that we must rethink our approach to Aristotle's physical science and Aristotelian texts.
Download or read book On the Order of Nature written by Parmenides Parmenides and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-16 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With PARMENIDES began what is called, in more specific terms, true Philosophy.The Eleatic, and his Poem, constitute a beacon whose light illumined Plato and even Aristotle, and consequently all the philosophers that followed.Parmenides laid down several fundamental philosophical principles:1. The Being as foundation of all the existent2. The principle of identity, Being is identical to itself3. The principle of non-contradiction4. The principle of a-temporality or eternal present5. An initiatory philosophical vision of an experimental orderThis vision was taken up by Plato and others down to Plotinus and beyond, while staying in the Classical Greek tradition.For Parmenides the primary aim is the research for the ultimate Truth, and he is: he who has introduced the mortals to the straight path of wisdom, and: "...here immediately through the gate the maidens steered the chariot and the mares straight onto the road.: The Goddess kindly welcomed me and took my right hand in hers and addressing me she uttered so: Oh young companion, led by the mares and immortal charioteers, you come to our home: rejoice, for no adverse Moira sent you to travel this path which is far from the way traveled by men but Temis and Dike."The transition from one state of consciousness to another higher one, in a completely objectivistic society, is a revolutionary event, and also of this consists Parmenides greatness and his importance for contemporary li
Download or read book The Order of Time written by Carlo Rovelli and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of TIME’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade "Meet the new Stephen Hawking . . . The Order of Time is a dazzling book." --The Sunday Times From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What It Seems, Helgoland, and Anaximander comes a concise, elegant exploration of time. Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to "flow"? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe. Already a bestseller in Italy, and written with the poetic vitality that made Seven Brief Lessons on Physics so appealing, The Order of Time offers a profoundly intelligent, culturally rich, novel appreciation of the mysteries of time.
Download or read book Order Out of Chaos written by Ilya Prigogine and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering book that shows how the two great themes of classic science, order and chaos, are being reconciled in a new and unexpected synthesis Order Out of Chaos is a sweeping critique of the discordant landscape of modern scientific knowledge. In this landmark book, Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine and acclaimed philosopher Isabelle Stengers offer an exciting and accessible account of the philosophical implications of thermodynamics. Prigogine and Stengers bring contradictory philosophies of time and chance into a novel and ambitious synthesis. Since its first publication in France in 1978, this book has sparked debate among physicists, philosophers, literary critics and historians.
Download or read book The Order of Things written by Michel Foucault and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-18 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When one defines "order" as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things, possibly one of the most significant, yet most overlooked, works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by his later work on power and discourse, nonetheless it was The Order of Things that established Foucault's reputation as an intellectual giant. Pirouetting around the outer edge of language, Foucault unsettles the surface of literary writing. In describing the limitations of our usual taxonomies, he opens the door onto a whole new system of thought, one ripe with what he calls "exotic charm". Intellectual pyrotechnics from the master of critical thinking, this book is crucial reading for those who wish to gain insight into that odd beast called Postmodernism, and a must for any fan of Foucault.
Download or read book The Nature of Order written by Christopher Alexander and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
