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  1. Naming without necessity.Nigel Sabbarton-Leary - 2010 - Dissertation, University of Birmingham
    In this thesis I argue that we should break with the dominant Kripkean tradition concerning natural kind terms and theoretical identity. I claim that there is just no interesting connection between the metaphysics and semantics of natural kind terms, and demonstrate this by constructing a version of descriptivism that is combined with the same metaphysics – that is, a nontrivial version of essentialism – found in Kripke, but which effectively avoids all of the standard criticisms. With my version of descriptivism (...)
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  • Locke on the Ontology of Persons.Jessica Gordon-Roth - 2015 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 53 (1):97-123.
    The importance of John Locke's discussion of persons is undeniable. Locke never explicitly tells us whether he thinks persons are substances or modes, however. We are thus left in the dark about a fundamental aspect of Locke's view. Many commentators have recently claimed that Lockean persons are modes. In this paper I swim against the current tide in the secondary literature and argue that Lockean persons are substances. Specifically I argue that what Locke says about substance, power, and agency commits (...)
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  • (1 other version)The disenchanted world and beyond: toward an ecological perspective on science.Michael Ben-Chaim - 1998 - History of the Human Sciences 11 (1):101-127.
    Positivism and, especially, Max Weber's vision of the modern disen chantment of the world are incoherent because they separate human culture from the environment in which human agents pursue their life- projects. The same problem is manifested, more blatantly, in current social studies of science, which take the project of disenchantment further by disenchanting science itself. A different image of science is traced to classical empiricism, whose paradigm of learning is belief and, more specifically, the practical nature of the believer's (...)
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  • Locke on Real Essences, Intelligibility, and Natural Kinds.Jan-Erik Jones - 2010 - Journal of Philosophical Research 35:147-172.
    In this paper I criticize arguments by Pauline Phemister and Matthew Stuart that John Locke's position in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding allows for natural kinds based on similarities among real essences. On my reading of Locke, not only are similarities among real essences irrelevant to species, but natural kind theories based on them are unintelligible.
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  • Toward 'Perfect Collections of Properties': Locke on the Constitution of Substantial Sorts.Lionel Shapiro - 1999 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (4):551-593.
    Locke's claims about the "inadequacy" of substance-ideas can only be understood once it is recognized that the "sort" represented by such an idea is not wholly determined by the idea's descriptive content. The key to his compromise between classificatory conventionalism and essentialism is his injunction to "perfect" the abstract ideas that serve as "nominal essences." This injunction promotes the pursuit of collections of perceptible qualities that approach ever closer to singling out things that possess some shared explanatory-level constitution. It is (...)
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  • Natural kinds and freaks of nature.Evan Fales - 1982 - Philosophy of Science 49 (1):67-90.
    Essentialism--understood as the doctrine that there are natural kinds--can be sustained with respect to the most fundamental physical entities of the world, as I elsewhere argue. In this paper I take up the question of the existence of natural kinds among complex structures built out of these elementary ones. I consider a number of objections to essentialism, in particular Locke's puzzle about the existence of borderline cases. A number of recent attempts to justify biological taxonomy are critically examined. I conclude (...)
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  • Locke's equivocal category of substance.David Https://Orcidorg Wörner - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 28 (4):1044-1057.
    John Locke famously claimed that our idea of substance is but a confused idea of “something we know not what.” However, he also thought that the idea of substance is a fundamental part of our ideas of ourselves and the objects surrounding us—of objects we do know. Interpreting this apparently ambivalent stance has long been a major challenge for Locke scholarship. In this article, I argue that the leading interpretations of Locke's conception of substance have failed to resolve this tension (...)
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  • Locke and the laws of nature.Patrick J. Connolly - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (10):2551-2564.
    Many commentators have argued that Locke understood laws of nature as causally efficacious. On this view the laws are causally responsible for the production of natural phenomena. This paper argues that this interpretation faces serious difficulties. First, I argue that it will be very difficult to specify the ontological status of these laws. Proponents of the view suggest that these laws are divine volitions. But I argue that this will be difficult or impossible to square with Locke’s nominalism. Second, I (...)
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  • (1 other version)Explaining the Success of Science.Rose-Mary Sargent - 1988 - PSA Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1988 (1):55-63.
    Ever since Hilary Putnam claimed that a realist philosophy is “the only philosophy that doesn’t make the success of science a miracle,” explanations for the success of science have proliferated in the philosophical literature (Putnam 1975, p. 73). Realists argue that the success of science, as exhibited by our ability to accurately predict and explain a wide range of phenomena, indicates that our theories have identified some of the underlying causal structures of the world (e.g., Boyd 1985, Ellis 1985, McMullin (...)
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  • A Defense of Locke and The Representative Theory of Perception.Martha Brandt Bolton - 1978 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (sup1):101-120.
    This paper is a defense of the “representative theory of perception” in general, and Locke's views about perception in particular. It is intended only as a limited defense, but one against those objections which recently have been taken thoroughly to discredit both the general theory and Locke's particular position. The chief of these objections is that the representative theory leads inevitably to skepticism about the existence of objective material things. George Pitcher finds this objection to the representative theory completely persuasive (...)
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  • The Empiricism of Locke and Newton.G. A. J. Rogers - 1978 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures 12:1-30.
    The relationship between John Locke and Isaac Newton, his co-founder of, in the apt phrase of one recent writer, ‘the Moderate Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century, has many dimensions. There is their friendship, which began only after each had written his major work, and which had its stormy interlude. There is the difficult question of their mutual impact. In what ways did each draw intellectually on the other? That there was some debt of each to the other is almost certain, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Locke on Language.E. J. Ashworth - 1984 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (1):45 - 73.
    Locke's main semantic thesis is that words stand for, or signify, ideas. He says this over and over again, though the phraseology he employs varies. In Book III chapter 2 alone we find the following statements of the thesis: ‘ … Words … come to be made use of by Men, as the Signs of their Ideas’ [III.2.1; 405:10-11); The use then of Words, is to be sensible Marks of Ideas; and the Ideas they stand for, are their proper and (...)
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  • Are the Notions 'A Priori Truth' and 'Necessary Truth' Extensionally Equivalent?Edward Erwin - 1974 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (4):591 - 602.
    There is a widely held view that the expressions ‘necessary truth’, ‘a priori truth’ and ‘analytic truth’ either express the same concept or, at least, refer to all and only the same items. Philosophers who hold this view, and who are sometimes described as ‘empiricists’, often draw the conclusion that the truths of logic and mathematics, if necessary, are also a priori and are, in some important sense, empty or not about the world. The subject matter of these disciplines, then, (...)
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  • Kant’s Categories of Quantity and Quality, Reconsidered: From the Point of View of the History of Logic and Natural Science.Yasuhiko Tomida - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (5):2707-2731.
    According to Kant, the division of the categories “is not the result of a search after pure concepts undertaken at haphazard,” but is derived from the “complete” classification of judgments developed by traditional logic. However, the sorts of judgments that he enumerates in his table of judgments are not all ones that traditional logic has dealt with; consequently, we must say that he chose the sorts of judgments in question with a certain intention. Besides, we know that his choice of (...)
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  • De Volder’s Cartesian Physics and Experimental Pedagogy.Tammy Nyden - 2013 - In Mihnea Dobre Tammy Nyden (ed.), Cartesian Empiricisms. Dordrecht: Springer.
    In 1675, Burchard de Volder (1643–1709) was the first professor to introduce the demonstration of experiment into a university physics course and built the Leiden Physics Theatre to accommodate this new pedagogy. When he requested the funds from the university to build the facility, he claimed that the performance of experiments would demonstrate the “truth and certainty” of the postulates of theoretical physics. Such a claim is interesting given de Volder’s lifelong commitment to Cartesian scientia. This chapter will examine de (...)
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  • Robert Boyle and Natural Kinds.Han Thomas Adriaenssen & Lodi Nauta - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (3):554-573.
    This paper studies Robert Boyle's account of kinds and classification. A number of commentators have argued that, for Boyle, classifications are inevitably the product of conventions. Others have challenged this reading, arguing that, according to Boyle, the corpuscular makeup of bodies gives rise to hard-edged natural kinds and classes. We argue that Boyle's position is more complicated than the available realist and conventionalist readings acknowledge. We argue that, according to Boyle, the individuation of kinds was to some degree the result (...)
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  • Locke’s account of certain and instructive knowledge.Emily Carson - 2002 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10 (3):359 – 378.
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