Download or read book The Problem of Naturalism written by Brian Lightbody and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers often use the term “naturalism’ in order to describe their work. It is commonplace to see a metaphysical, epistemological and/or ethical position self-described and described by others as one that is “naturalized.” But what, if anything, does the term naturalized add--or subtract---to the position being articulated? I demonstrate in The Problem of Naturalism: Analytic and Continental Perspectives, that the term naturalism connotes such a broad meaning that it is difficult to demarcate naturalism from philosophy itself. Still, many philosophers have tried to provide non-trivial and non-vacuous definitions of the term. My book, by and large, argues that such attempts are unsuccessful. Instead, I argue that naturalism is an attitude and neither a methodology nor a substantive position. I then articulate the guidelines the naturalist needs to follow, as well as the virtues he or she needs to practice, in order for the term naturalism to do any meaningful work. Much of the book explains and then critiques the various attempts to define naturalism in the Anglo-American secondary literature. Some of the criticisms I raise seem to emanate from the internal logic of the naturalistic position being expressed. However, others have emerged from gleaning the work of such Continental thinkers as: Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger and Foucault. I use these thinkers in order to expose the unjustified implicit and sometimes explicit assumptions that many naturalistic philosophers presume to hold when they attempt to render a clear, distinct and robust naturalist position.
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.
Download or read book Where the Conflict Really Lies written by Alvin Plantinga and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this long-awaited book, pre-eminent analytical philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues that the conflict between science and theistic religion is actually superficial, and that at a deeper level they are in concord.
Download or read book The Question of Methodological Naturalism written by Jason N. Blum and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Question of Methodological Naturalism offers ten essays on the role of naturalism in religious studies, ranging from sophisticated intellectual histories and philosophical analyses to trenchant denunciations and ringing endorsements. All have profound implications for the study of religions.
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."
Download or read book Naturalism in Question written by Mario De Caro and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-05-31 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today most philosophers in the English-speaking world adhere to “naturalist” credos that philosophy is continuous with science, and that the natural sciences provide a complete account of all that exists. This volume presents a group of leading thinkers who criticize scientific naturalism in order to defend a more inclusive or liberal naturalism.
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.
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 The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness written by Susan Schneider and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 847 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated and revised, the highly-anticipated second edition of The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness offers a collection of readings that together represent the most thorough and comprehensive survey of the nature of consciousness available today. Features updates to scientific chapters reflecting the latest research in the field Includes 18 new theoretical, empirical, and methodological chapters covering integrated information theory, renewed interest in panpsychism, and more Covers a wide array of topics that include the origins and extent of consciousness, various consciousness experiences such as meditation and drug-induced states, and the neuroscience of consciousness Presents 54 peer-reviewed chapters written by leading experts in the study of consciousness, from across a variety of academic disciplines
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.
Download or read book Naturalism Defeated written by James K. Beilby and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plantinga's argument is aimed at metaphysical naturalism or roughly the view that no supernatural beings exist. Naturalism is typically conjoined with evolution as an explanation of the existence and diversity of life. Plantinga's claim is that one who holds to the truth of both naturalism and evolution is irrational in doing so. More specifically, because the probability that unguided evolution would have produced reliable cognitive faculties is either low or inscrutable, one who holds both naturalism and evolution acquires a "defeater" for every belief he/she holds, including the beliefs associated with naturalism and evolution.
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.
Download or read book The Big Picture written by Sean Carroll and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times bestseller about humanity's place in the universe—and how we understand it. “Vivid...impressive....Splendidly informative.”—The New York Times “Succeeds spectacularly.”—Science “A tour de force.”—Salon Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on Higgs bosons and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions: Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void? Do human purpose and meaning fit into a scientific worldview? In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level—and then how each connects to the other. Carroll's presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique. Carroll shows how an avalanche of discoveries in the past few hundred years has changed our world and what really matters to us. Our lives are dwarfed like never before by the immensity of space and time, but they are redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning. The Big Picture is an unprecedented scientific worldview, a tour de force that will sit on shelves alongside the works of Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, and E. O. Wilson for years to come.
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.
Download or read book The Problem of Disenchantment written by Egil Asprem and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Weber famously characterized the ongoing process of intellectualization and rationalization that separates the natural world from the divine (by excluding magic and value from the realm of science, and reason and fact from the realm of religion) as the "disenchantment of the world." Egil Asprem argues for a conceptual shift in how we view this key narrative of modernity. Instead of a sociohistorical process of disenchantment that produces increasingly rational minds, Asprem maintains that the continued presence of "magic" and "enchantment" in people's everyday experience of the world created an intellectual problem for those few who were socialized to believe that nature should contain no such incalculable mysteries. Drawing on a wide range of early twentieth-century primary sources from theoretical physics, occultism, embryology, radioactivity, psychical research, and other fields, Asprem casts the intellectual life of high modernity as a synchronic struggle across conspicuously different fields that shared surprisingly similar intellectual problems about value, meaning, and the limits of knowledge.
Download or read book Between Naturalism and Religion written by Jürgen Habermas and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two countervailing trends mark the intellectual tenor of our age – the spread of naturalistic worldviews and religious orthodoxies. Advances in biogenetics, brain research, and robotics are clearing the way for the penetration of an objective scientific self-understanding of persons into everyday life. For philosophy, this trend is associated with the challenge of scientific naturalism. At the same time, we are witnessing an unexpected revitalization of religious traditions and the politicization of religious communities across the world. From a philosophical perspective, this revival of religious energies poses the challenge of a fundamentalist critique of the principles underlying the modern Wests postmetaphysical understanding of itself. The tension between naturalism and religion is the central theme of this major new book by Jürgen Habermas. On the one hand he argues for an appropriate naturalistic understanding of cultural evolution that does justice to the normative character of the human mind. On the other hand, he calls for an appropriate interpretation of the secularizing effects of a process of social and cultural rationalization increasingly denounced by the champions of religious orthodoxies as a historical development peculiar to the West. These reflections on the enduring importance of religion and the limits of secularism under conditions of postmetaphysical reason set the scene for an extended treatment the political significance of religious tolerance and for a fresh contribution to current debates on cosmopolitanism and a constitution for international society.
Download or read book Moral Virtue and Nature written by Stephen R. Brown and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-04-10 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What make someone a good human being? Is there an objective answer to this question, an answer that can be given in naturalistic terms? For ages philosophers have attempted to develop some sort of naturalistic ethics. Against ethical naturalism, however, notable philosophers have contended that such projects are impossible, due to the existence of some sort of 'gap' between facts and values. Others have suggested that teleology, upon which many forms of ethical naturalism depend, is an outdated metaphysical concept. This book argues that a good human being is one who has those traits the possession of which enables someone to achieve those ends natural to beings like us. Thus, the answer to the question of what makes a good human being is given in terms both objective and naturalistic. The author shows that neither 'is-ought' gaps, nor objections concerning teleology pose insurmountable problems for naturalistic virtue ethics. This work is a much needed contribution to the ongoing debate about ethical theory and ethical virtue.
