A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature
Title | A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature PDF eBook |
Author | A. Smith |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 455 |
Release | 2013-07-18 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 1137331976 |
Utilizing François Laruelle's "non-philosophical" method, Smith constructs a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology by challenging environmental philosophy and theology, claiming that and engagement with scientific ecology can radically change the standard metaphysics of nature, as well as ethical problems related to "the natural".
Philosophy of Nature
Title | Philosophy of Nature PDF eBook |
Author | Paul K. Feyerabend |
Publisher | John Wiley & Sons |
Pages | 406 |
Release | 2016-09-26 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0745694764 |
Philosopher, physicist, and anarchist Paul Feyerabend was one of the most unconventional scholars of his time. His book Against Method has become a modern classic. Yet it is not well known that Feyerabend spent many years working on a philosophy of nature that was intended to comprise three volumes covering the period from the earliest traces of stone age cave paintings to the atomic physics of the 20th century – a project that, as he conveyed in a letter to Imre Lakatos, almost drove him nuts: “Damn the ,Naturphilosophie.” The book’s manuscript was long believed to have been lost. Recently, however, a typescript constituting the first volume of the project was unexpectedly discovered at the University of Konstanz. In this volume Feyerabend explores the significance of myths for the early period of natural philosophy, as well as the transition from Homer’s “aggregate universe” to Parmenides’ uniform ontology. He focuses on the rise of rationalism in Greek antiquity, which he considers a disastrous development, and the associated separation of man from nature. Thus Feyerabend explores the prehistory of science in his familiar polemical and extraordinarily learned manner. The volume contains numerous pictures and drawings by Feyerabend himself. It also contains hitherto unpublished biographical material that will help to round up our overall image of one of the most influential radical philosophers of the twentieth century.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Title | Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature PDF eBook |
Author | Richard Rorty |
Publisher | Wiley-Blackwell |
Pages | 401 |
Release | 1980 |
Genre | Analysis (Philosophy). |
ISBN | 9780631128380 |
Rethinking Order
Title | Rethinking Order PDF eBook |
Author | Nancy Cartwright |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Pages | 207 |
Release | 2016-06-30 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1474244084 |
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.
Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Natural Philosophy
Title | Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Natural Philosophy PDF eBook |
Author | Stephen J. Finn |
Publisher | A&C Black |
Pages | 206 |
Release | 2004-06-04 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1847143318 |
In 1625, Charles I inherited not only his father's crown, but also his desire to run the country without interference from Parliament. But many members of Parliament opposed the King on issues of taxation, religion and the royal prerogative. It was in this historical context that Hobbes presented a political philosophy that, at least in his opinion, achieved the status of a science, in a nation that was 'boiling hot with questions concerning the rights of dominion and the obedience due from subjects'. In this important new book, Stephen J. Finn argues that, contrary to the traditional interpretation, Hobbes's political views influence his theoretical and natural philosophy and not the other way about. Such an interpretation, it is argued, provides a better appreciation of Hobbes's writings, both philosophical and political.
Theory and Practice in Aristotle's Natural Science
Title | Theory and Practice in Aristotle's Natural Science PDF eBook |
Author | David Ebrey |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 271 |
Release | 2015-06-11 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 110705513X |
This collection of groundbreaking new essays show how Aristotle's natural science illuminates fundamental topics in his philosophy.
Politics of Nature
Title | Politics of Nature PDF eBook |
Author | Bruno Latour |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Pages | 320 |
Release | 2009-07-01 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0674039963 |
A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division—which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.