Reason in Nature

Reason in Nature PDF Author: Matthew Boyle
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674241045
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Against the dominant view of reductive naturalism, John McDowell argues that human life should be seen as transformed by reason so that human minds, while not supernatural, are sui generis. This collection assembles eleven critical essays that highlight the enduring significance and wide ramifications of McDowell’s unorthodox position.

Reason in Nature

Reason in Nature PDF Author: Matthew Boyle
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674241045
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Against the dominant view of reductive naturalism, John McDowell argues that human life should be seen as transformed by reason so that human minds, while not supernatural, are sui generis. This collection assembles eleven critical essays that highlight the enduring significance and wide ramifications of McDowell’s unorthodox position.

Reason and Nature

Reason and Nature PDF Author: Morris R. Cohen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780841419964
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description


Reason and Nature

Reason and Nature PDF Author: José Luis Bermúdez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199256839
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In a series of essays nine philosophers and two psychologists address three main themes: the status of norms of rationality; the precise form taken by them; and the role of norms in belief and actions.

Nature as Reason

Nature as Reason PDF Author: Jean Porter
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802849069
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
This noteworthy book develops a new theory of the natural law that takes its orientation from the account of the natural law developed by Thomas Aquinas, as interpreted and supplemented in the context of scholastic theology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Though this history might seem irrelevant to twenty-first-century life, Jean Porter shows that the scholastic approach to the natural law still has much to contribute to the contemporary discussion of Christian ethics. Aquinas and his interlocutors provide a way of thinking about the natural law that is distinctively theological while at the same time remaining open to other intellectual perspectives, including those of science. In the course of her work, Porter examines the scholastics' assumptions and beliefs about nature, Aquinas's account of happiness, and the overarching claim that reason can generate moral norms. Ultimately, Porter argues that a Thomistic theory of the natural law is well suited to provide a starting point for developing a more nuanced account of the relationship between specific beliefs and practices. While Aquinas's approach to the natural law may not provide a system of ethical norms that is both universally compelling and detailed enough to be practical, it does offer something that is arguably more valuable -- namely, a way of reflecting theologically on the phenomenon of human morality.

Against Nature

Against Nature PDF Author: Lorraine Daston
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262353814
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
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.

The Nature of Nature

The Nature of Nature PDF Author: Enric Sala
Publisher: Disney Electronic Content
ISBN: 1426221029
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In this inspiring manifesto, an internationally renowned ecologist makes a clear case for why protecting nature is our best health insurance, and why it makes economic sense.

Crimes of Reason

Crimes of Reason PDF Author: Stephen E. Braude
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442235764
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Crimes of Reason brings together expanded and updated versions of some of Braude’s best previously published essays, along with new essays written specifically for this book. Although the essays deal with a variety of topics, they all hover around a set of interrelated general themes. These are: the poverty of mechanistic theories in the behavioral and life sciences, the nature of psychological explanation and (at least within the halls of the Academy) the unappreciated strategies required to understand behavior, the nature of dissociation, and the nature and limits of human abilities. Braude’s targets include memory trace theory, inner-cause theories of human behavior generally, Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields, widespread but simplistic views on the nature of human abilities, multiple personality and moral responsibility, the efficacy of prayer, and the shoddy tactics often used to discredit research on dissociation and parapsychology. Although the topics are often abstract and the issues deep, their treatment in this book is accessible, and the tone of the book is both light and occasionally combative.

Environmental Philosophy

Environmental Philosophy PDF Author: Christopher Belshaw
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317490045
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This introduction to the philosophy of the environment examines current debates on how we should think about the natural world and our place within it. The subject is examined from a determinedly analytic philosophical perspective, focusing on questions of value, but taking in attendant issues in epistemology and metaphysics as well. The book begins by considering the nature, extent and origin of the environmental problems with which we need to be concerned. Chapters go on to consider familiar strategies for dealing with environmental problems, and then consider what sort of things are of direct moral concern, examining in turn at animals, non-sentient life-forms, natural but non-living things and deep ecology. The final part of the book investigates notions of value, natural beauty and the place of human beings in the scheme of things.

The Better Angels of Our Nature

The Better Angels of Our Nature PDF Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143122010
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 834

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Book Description
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.

Appearances of the Good

Appearances of the Good PDF Author: Sergio Tenenbaum
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139461753
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Book Description
'We desire all and only those things we conceive to be good; we avoid what we conceive to be bad.' This slogan was once the standard view of the relationship between desire or motivation and rational evaluation. Many critics have rejected this scholastic formula as either trivial or wrong. It appears to be trivial if we just define the good as 'what we want', and wrong if we consider apparent conflicts between what we seem to want and what we seem to think is good. In Appearances of the Good, Sergio Tenenbaum argues that the old slogan is both significant and right, even in cases of apparent conflict between our desires and our evaluative judgements. Maintaining that the good is the formal end of practical inquiry in much the same way as truth is the formal end of theoretical inquiry, he provides a fully unified account of motivation and evaluation.