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.

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 Naturalism and Normativity written by Christopher Janaway and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume comprises ten original essays on Nietzsche, one of the western canon's most controversial ethical thinkers. An international team of experts clarify Nietzsche's own views, both critical and positive, ethical and meta-ethical, and connect his philosophical concerns to contemporary debates in and about ethics, normativity, and value.

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 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 357 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 Wilfrid Sellars written by James O'Shea and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-02-13 with total page 238 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 Explaining the Normative written by Stephen P. Turner and published by Polity. This book was released on 2010-05-10 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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, preferred descriptions, problematic transcendental arguments, and regress arguments ending in mysteries."--Jacket.

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 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 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 Meaning Without Representation written by Steven Gross and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges the idea that representation of how the world is should play a fundamental explanatory role in any explanation of language. Examines deflationary accounts of truth, the role of language in expressing mental states, and the normative and the natural as they relate to issues of representation.

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 Normativity and Naturalism written by Peter Schaber and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the centre of the metaethical debate that took off from G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) was his critique of ethical naturalism. While Moore's own arguments against ethical naturalism find little acceptance these days, an alternative ground for thinking that ethical properties and facts could not be natural has gained prominence: No natural account can be given of normativity. This collection contains original essays from both sides of the debate. Representing a wide range of metaethical views, the authors develop diverse accounts of normativity and discuss what it means for a concept to be natural. Contributions are by Norbert Anwander, David Copp, Neil Roughley, Peter Schaber, Thomas Schmidt, Tatjana Tarkian, and Theo van Willigenburg.

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 Naturalism Realism and Normativity written by Hilary Putnam and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hilary Putnam’s ever-evolving philosophical oeuvre has been called “the history of recent philosophy in outline”—an intellectual achievement, nearly seventy years in the making, that has shaped disciplinary fields from epistemology to ethics, metaphysics to the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of mathematics to the philosophy of mind. Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity offers new avenues into the thought of one of the most influential minds in contemporary analytic philosophy. The essays collected here cover a range of interconnected topics including naturalism, commonsense and scientific realism, ethics, perception, language and linguistics, and skepticism. Aptly illustrating Putnam’s willingness to revisit and revise past arguments, they contain important new insights and freshly illuminate formulations that will be familiar to students of his work: his rejection of the idea that an absolute conception of the world is obtainable; his criticism of a nihilistic view of ethics that claims to be scientifically based; his pathbreaking distinction between sensations and apperceptions; and his use of externalist semantics to invalidate certain forms of skepticism. Above all, Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity reflects Putnam’s thinking on how to articulate a theory of naturalism which acknowledges that normative phenomena form an ineluctable part of human experience, thereby reconciling scientific and humanistic views of the world that have long appeared incompatible.

Download or read book Understanding People written by Alan Millar and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2004-07-08 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan Millar examines our understanding of why people think and act as they do. His key theme is that normative considerations form an indispensable part of the explanatory framework in terms of which we seek to understand each other. Millar defends a conception according to which normativity is linked to reasons. On this basis he examines the structure of certain normative commitments incurred by having propositional attitudes. Controversially, he argues that ascriptions of beliefs and intentions in and of themselves attribute normative commitments and that this has implications for the psychology of believing and intending. Indeed, all propositional attitudes of the sort we ascribe to people have a normative dimension, since possessing the concepts that the attitudes implicate is of its very nature commitment-incurring. The ramifications of these views for our understanding of people is explored. Millar offers illuminating discussions of reasons for belief and reasons for action; the explanation of beliefs and actions in terms of the subject's reasons; the idea that simulation has a key role in understanding people; and the limits of explanation in terms of propositional attitudes. He compares and contrasts the commitments incurred by propositional attitudes with those incurred by participating in practices, arguing that the former should not be assimilated to the latter. Understanding People will be of great interest to most philosophers of mind, as well as to those working on practical and theoretical reasoning.

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.