Results for ' Nature'

968 found
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  1. Practical success and the nature of truth.Chase Wrenn - 2011 - Synthese 181 (3):451-470.
    Philip Kitcher has argued for a causal correspondence view of truth, as against a deflationary view, on the grounds that the former is better poised than the latter to explain systematically successful patterns of action. Though Kitcher is right to focus on systematically successful action, rather than singular practical successes, he is wrong to conclude that causal correspondence theories are capable of explaining systematic success. Rather, I argue, truth bears no explanatory relation to systematic practical success. Consequently, the causal correspondence (...)
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  2. (1 other version)Spinoza on the Very Nature of Existence.Andrew Youpa - 2011 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 35 (1):310-334.
    The official definitions that appear at the beginning of four of the five parts of the "Ethics" do not include an account of "existence." However Spinoza does provide a definition of “existence” in the scholium to proposition 45 of Part 2. This is an odd place for such an important doctrine, and all the more so given that the account there differs from anything resembling commonsense. In this paper I show that, for Spinoza, to exist is to be eternal. Existence (...)
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  3. Mencius on human nature and courage.Xinyan Jiang - 1997 - Journal of Chinese Philosophy 24 (3):265-289.
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  4. Which is better for the Earth: Nature-based versus human-made solution?Minh-Hoang Nguyen, Viet-Phuong La & Quan-Hoang Vuong - manuscript
    As global warming is gradually pushing the Earth to the climate tipping point, the reduction of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has become more urgent than ever. Many high-tech methods, such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies, have been proposed as crucial tools in the fight against climate change. However, this paper argues that the expensiveness and uncertainty of CCS technologies make them not feasibly deployed. Persistent investment in these technologies also reinforces the outdated eco-deficit mindset that prioritizes monetary (...)
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  5. Governing Without A Fundamental Direction of Time: Minimal Primitivism about Laws of Nature.Eddy Keming Chen & Sheldon Goldstein - 2022 - In Yemima Ben-Menahem (ed.), Rethinking Laws of Nature. Springer. pp. 21-64.
    The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between Humeans, who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter, and non-Humeans, who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place demands on the proper formulations of physical theories. It is sometimes assumed that the governing view requires a fundamental / intrinsic direction of time: to govern, laws must be dynamical, producing later states of the world from earlier ones, in accord with the fundamental direction (...)
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  6. How to situate cognition: Letting nature take its course.Robert A. Wilson & Andy Clark - 2008 - In Murat Aydede & P. Robbins (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 55--77.
    1. The Situation in Cognition 2. Situated Cognition: A Potted Recent History 3. Extensions in Biology, Computation, and Cognition 4. Articulating the Idea of Cognitive Extension 5. Are Some Resources Intrinsically Non-Cognitive? 6. Is Cognition Extended or Only Embedded? 7. Letting Nature Take Its Course.
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  7. A New Theory of Serendipity: Nature, Emergence and Mechanism.Quan-Hoang Vuong (ed.) - 2022 - Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter.
    When you type the word “serendipity” in a word-processor application such as Microsoft Word, the autocorrection engine suggests you choose other words like “luck” or “fate”. This correcting act turns out to be incorrect. However, it points to the reality that serendipity is not a familiar English word and can be misunderstood easily. Serendipity is a very much scientific concept as it has been found useful in numerous scientific discoveries, pharmaceutical innovations, and numerous humankind’s technical and technological advances. Therefore, there (...)
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  8. Teleology and function in non-living nature.Gunnar Babcock - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-20.
    There’s a general assumption that teleology and function do not exist in inanimate nature. Throughout biology, it is generally taken as granted that teleology (or teleonomy) and functions are not only unique to life, but perhaps even a defining quality of life. For many, it’s obvious that rocks, water, and the like, are not teleological, nor could they possibly have stand-alone functions. This idea - that teleology and function are unique to life - is the target of this paper. (...)
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  9. The Past Hypothesis and the Nature of Physical Laws.Eddy Keming Chen - 2023 - In Barry Loewer, Brad Weslake & Eric B. Winsberg (eds.), The Probability Map of the Universe: Essays on David Albert’s _Time and Chance_. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 204-248.
    If the Past Hypothesis underlies the arrows of time, what is the status of the Past Hypothesis? In this paper, I examine the role of the Past Hypothesis in the Boltzmannian account and defend the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law of nature. Such a view is known to be compatible with Humeanism about laws, but as I argue it is also supported by a minimal non-Humean "governing'' view. Some worries arise from the non-dynamical and (...)
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  10. Not everything is a contest: sport, nature sport, and friluftsliv.Leslie A. Howe - 2019 - Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 46 (3):437-453.
    Two prevalent assumptions in the philosophy of sport literature are that all sports are games and that all games are contests, meant to determine who is the better at the skills definitive of the sport. If these are correct, it would follow that all sports are contests and that a range of sporting activities, including nature sports, are not in fact sports at all. This paper first confronts the notion that sport and games must seek to resolve skill superiority (...)
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  11. Philosophy Is Not a Science: Margaret Macdonald on the Nature of Philosophical Theories.Peter West - 2024 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 14 (2):527-553.
    Margaret Macdonald was at the institutional heart of analytic philosophy in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. However, her views on the nature of philosophical theories diverge quite considerably from those of many of her contemporaries. In this article, I focus on Macdonald’s provocative 1953 paper, “Linguistic Philosophy and Perception,” in which she argues that the value of philosophical theories is more akin to that of poetry or art than science or mathematics. I do so for two reasons. First, it (...)
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  12. Typicality of Dynamics and the Laws of Nature.Aldo Filomeno - 2023 - In Cristián Soto (ed.), Current Debates in Philosophy of Science: In Honor of Roberto Torretti. Springer Verlag.
    Certain results, most famously in classical statistical mechanics and complex systems, but also in quantum mechanics and high-energy physics, yield a coarse-grained stable statistical pattern in the long run. The explanation of these results shares a common structure: the results hold for a 'typical' dynamics, that is, for most of the underlying dynamics. In this paper I argue that the structure of the explanation of these results might shed some light --a different light-- on philosophical debates on the laws of (...)
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  13. Hermann von Helmholtz’s Mechanism: The Loss of Certainty: A Study on the Transition From Classical to Modern Philosophy of Nature.Gregor Schiemann - 2009 - Springer.
    Two seemingly contradictory tendencies have accompanied the development of the natural sciences in the past 150 years. On the one hand, the natural sciences have been instrumental in effecting a thoroughgoing transformation of social structures and have made a permanent impact on the conceptual world of human beings. This historical period has, on the other hand, also brought to light the merely hypothetical validity of scientific knowledge. As late as the middle of the 19th century the truth-pathos in the natural (...)
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  14. Powers, dispositions and laws of nature.Max Kistler - 2020 - In Anne Sophie Meincke (ed.), Dispositionalism: Perspectives From Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. pp. 171-188.
    Metaphysics should follow science in postulating laws alongside properties. I defend this claim against the claim that natural properties conceived as powers make laws of nature redundant. Natural properties can be construed in a “thin” or a “thick” way. If one attributes a property in the thin sense to an object, this attribution does not conceptually determine which other properties the object possesses. The thin construal is underlying the scientific strategy for understanding nature piecemeal. Science explains phenomena by (...)
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  15. Putting down the revolt: Enactivism as a philosophy of nature.Russell Meyer & Nick Brancazio - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13:948733.
    Enactivists frequently argue their account heralds a revolution in cognitive science: enactivism will unseat cognitivism as the dominant paradigm. We examine the lines of reasoning enactivists employ in stirring revolt, but show that none of these prove compelling reasons for cognitivism to be replaced by enactivism. First, we examine the hard sell of enactivism: enactivism reveals a critical explanatory gap at the heart of cognitivism. We show that enactivism does not meet the requirements to incite a paradigm shift in the (...)
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  16. The biased nature of philosophical beliefs in the light of peer disagreement.László Bernáth & János Tőzsér - 2021 - Metaphilosophy 52 (3-4):363-378.
    This essay presents an argument, which it calls the Bias Argument, with the dismaying conclusion that (almost) everyone should significantly reduce her confidence in (too many) philosophical beliefs. More precisely, the argument attempts to show that the most precious philosophical beliefs are biased, as the pervasive and permanent disagreement among the leading experts in philosophy cannot be explained by the differences between their evidence bases and competences. After a short introduction, the premises of the Bias Argument are spelled out in (...)
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  17. The strong arm of the law: a unified account of necessary and contingent laws of nature.Salim Hirèche, Niels Linnemann, Robert Michels & Lisa Vogt - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10211-10252.
    A common feature of all standard theories of the laws of nature is that they are "absolutist": They take laws to be either all metaphysically necessary or all contingent. Science, however, gives us reason to think that there are laws of both kinds, suggesting that standard theories should make way for "non-absolutist" alternatives: theories which accommodate laws of both modal statuses. In this paper, we set out three explanatory challenges for any candidate non-absolutist theory and discuss the prospects of (...)
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  18. Excusing Corporate Wrongdoing and the State of Nature.Kenneth Silver & Paul Garofalo - forthcoming - Academy of Management Review.
    Most business ethicists maintain that corporate actors are subject to a variety of moral obligations. However, there is a persistent and underappreciated concern that the competitive pressures of the market somehow provide corporate actors with a far-reaching excuse from meeting these obligations. Here, we assess this concern. Blending resources from the history of philosophy and strategic management, we demonstrate the assumptions required for and limits of this excuse. Applying the idea of ‘the state of nature’ from Thomas Hobbes, we (...)
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  19. Axel Honneth, Reification, and "Nature".Marco Angella - 2019 - Radical Philosophy Review 22 (1):1-30.
    I begin by briefly reconstructing Honneth’s concept of reification. His paradigm gives the reification of the non-human environment a marginal position in comparison to the reification of human beings, thereby detracting from its explanatory and critical potential. In order to avoid this outcome, I subsequently present a paradigm of subject identity formation in which not only affectively-based intersubjective interactions but also affectively-based interactions with the non-human environment are, in both a “genetic” and a “conceptual” sense, essential to establish an objective (...)
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  20. How Might a Stoic Eat in Accordance with Nature and “Environmental Facts”?Kai Whiting, William O. Stephens, Edward Simpson & Leonidas Konstantakos - 2020 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 33 (3):369-389.
    This paper explores how to deliberate about food choices from a Stoic perspective informed by the value of environmental sustainability. This perspective is reconstructed from both ancient and contemporary sources of Stoic philosophy. An account of what the Stoic goal of “living in agreement with Nature” would amount to in dietary practice is presented. Given ecological facts about food production, an argument is made that Stoic virtue made manifest as wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance compel Stoic practitioners to select (...)
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  21. The modal status of the laws of nature. Tahko’s hybrid view and the kinematical/dynamical distinction.Salim Hireche, Niels Linnemann, Robert Michels & Lisa Vogt - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1):1-15.
    In a recent paper, Tuomas Tahko has argued for a hybrid view of the laws of nature, according to which some physical laws are metaphysically necessary, while others are metaphysically contingent. In this paper, we show that his criterion for distinguishing between these two kinds of laws — which crucially relies on the essences of natural kinds — is on its own unsatisfactory. We then propose an alternative way of drawing the metaphysically necessary/contingent distinction for laws of physics based (...)
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  22. Intuitions and Assumptions in the Debate over Laws of Nature.Walter Ott & Lydia Patton - 2018 - In Walter R. Ott & Lydia Patton (eds.), Laws of Nature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 1-17.
    The conception of a ‘law of nature’ is a human product. It was created to play a role in natural philosophy, in the Cartesian tradition. In light of this, philosophers and scientists must sort out what they mean by a law of nature before evaluating rival theories and approaches. If one’s conception of the laws of nature is yoked to metaphysical notions of truth and explanation, that connection must be made explicit and defended. If, on the other (...)
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  23. Different Kinds of Perfect: The Pursuit of Excellence in Nature-Based Sports.Leslie A. Howe - 2012 - Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 6 (3):353-368.
    Excellence in sport performance is normally taken to be a matter of superior performance of physical movements or quantitative outcomes of movements. This paper considers whether a wider conception can be afforded by certain kinds of nature based sport. The interplay between technical skill and aesthetic experience in nature based sports is explored, and the extent to which it contributes to a distinction between different sport-based approaches to natural environments. The potential for aesthetic appreciation of environmental engagement is (...)
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  24. (1 other version)The End and Rebirth of Nature? From Politics of Nature to Synthetic Biology.Massimiliano Simons - 2016 - Philosophica: International Journal for the History of Philosophy 47:109-124.
    In this article, two different claims about nature are discussed. On the one hand, environmental philosophy has forced us to reflect on our position within nature. We are not the masters of nature as was claimed before. On the other hand there are the recent developments within synthetic biology. It claims that, now at last, we can be the masters of nature we have never been before. The question is then raised how these two claims must (...)
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  25. Defending the Traditional Interpretations of Kant’s Formula of a Law of Nature.Samuel J. M. Kahn - 2019 - Theoria 66 (158):76-102.
    In this paper I defend the traditional interpretations of Kant’s Formula of a Law of Nature from recent attacks leveled by Faviola Rivera-Castro, James Furner, Ido Geiger, Pauline Kleingeld and Sven Nyholm. After a short introduction, the paper is divided into four main sections. In the first, I set out the basics of the three traditional interpretations, the Logical Contradiction Interpretation, the Practical Contradiction Interpretation and the Teleological Contradiction Interpretation. In the second, I examine the work of Geiger, Kleingeld (...)
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  26. The Kantian Idea of Mechanistic Nature.Mathis Koschel - forthcoming - In Christian Georg Martin & Florian Ganzinger (eds.), The Concept of Nature in Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. de Gruyter/Brill.
    I address a longstanding problem in Kant scholarship: how is Kant’s use of the term ‘mechanism’ to be understood? It seems that Kant uses that term in a variety of ways, from a narrow sense (“motion communicated between matter”) to a very wide sense (“any causation that is not noumenal”). I argue that Kant has a unified conception of mechanism, where the wider senses are to be understood in light of a conception of nature according to which all of (...)
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  27. Berkeley’s Best System: An Alternative Approach to Laws of Nature.Walter Ott - 2019 - Journal of Modern Philosophy 1 (1):4.
    Contemporary Humeans treat laws of nature as statements of exceptionless regularities that function as the axioms of the best deductive system. Such ‘Best System Accounts’ marry realism about laws with a denial of necessary connections among events. I argue that Hume’s predecessor, George Berkeley, offers a more sophisticated conception of laws, equally consistent with the absence of powers or necessary connections among events in the natural world. On this view, laws are not statements of regularities but the most general (...)
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  28.  92
    Picture a book—A philosophy performance exhibition visual essay on “What’s Left of Human Nature.”.Maria Kronfeldner, Patrik Nikovitz & Nastassia Stein - 2024 - Zenodo.
    This is a report on a philosophy performance that happened as part of the 2024 Long Night of Research in Austria. Maria Kronfeldner staged the content of her book “What’s left of Human Nature: A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept,” (2018, MIT Press) by filling the wall in the gallery of CEU’s Library Café with pictures and text, performatively communicating the process of philosophical inquiry – the ordering of the material that one has found, the (...)
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  29. Wild Wise Weird: A Timeless Satire on Humanity and Nature.Dan Li 李丹 - unknown
    Wild Wise Weird emerges as a distinctive work that merges humor, satire, and social critique into a collection of 42 fables featuring birds, especially the character Mr. Kingfisher, as guides to explore themes of wisdom, human behavior, and environmental awareness. Set in a whimsical bird village, the book offers readers a satirical reflection on society, encouraging contemplation on contemporary issues such as environmental sustainability and human-nature relationships. With wit and depth, Vuong’s storytelling demonstrates remarkable versatility, making Wild Wise Weird (...)
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  30.  76
    Can science help discover the nature of well-being?Antonin Broi - 2025 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 47 (1):1-20.
    In recent years the study of well-being has attracted considerable attention, fostering hope that the scientific community will ultimately succeed in discovering its very nature, thereby emulating successful scientific projects in other disciplines. However, there have been recurring worries about how to measure and define well-being. In this context, Hersch (Br J Philos Sci 73:1045–1065, 2022) has recently argued that we could progressively alleviate these worries through an iterative dialogue between theory and measurement, by seeing them as stemming from (...)
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  31. Happiness is from the soul: The nature and origins of our happiness concept.Fan Yang - 2021 - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 150 (2):276-288.
    What is happiness? Is happiness about feeling good or about being good? Across five studies, we explored the nature and origins of our happiness concept developmentally and crosslinguistically. We found that surprisingly, children as young as age 4 viewed morally bad people as less happy than morally good people, even if the characters all have positive subjective states (Study 1). Moral character did not affect attributions of physical traits (Study 2), and was more powerfully weighted than subjective states in (...)
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  32. The Pendular Nature of Human Experience: Philosophy, Art, and Liberalism.R. Azize - 2023 - Cosmos + Taxis 11 (3 + 4):34-47.
    If we are to escape reification—a sort of cogni- tive neutrality of basic, gnosic apprehension of the world plus a fundamental disrespect of the other as free agent—we should recognize our mode of existence as always already one of existential engagement with and within experience, aiming at articulating and expressing this engagement. One way of fully inhabiting this, let’s call it the proper human stance, is through recognizing a pendular space between the basic attitudes of acknowledging lived, shared interests and (...)
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  33. ResponsesVirtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge.Linda Zagzebski - 2000 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (1):207.
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  34. Hermann Cohen on Kant, Sensations, and Nature in Science.Charlotte Baumann - 2019 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (4):647-674.
    The neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen is famously anti-empiricist in that he denies that sensations can make a definable contribution to knowledge. However, in the second edition of Kant’s Theory of Experience (1885), Cohen considers a proposition that contrasts with both his other work and that of his followers: a Kantian who studies scientific claims to truth—and the grounds on which they are made—cannot limit himself to studying mathematics and logical principles, but needs to also investigate underlying presuppositions about the empirical element (...)
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  35. Conscientious objections, the nature of medicine, and the need for reformability.Eric J. Kim & Kyle Ferguson - 2022 - Bioethics 36 (1):63-70.
    Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 1, Page 63-70, January 2022.
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  36. The Idea of the Systematic Unity of Nature as a Transcendental Illusion.Mark Pickering - 2011 - Kantian Review 16 (3):429-448.
    The Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant's first Critique is notorious for two reasons. First, it appears to contradict itself in saying that the idea of the systematic unity of nature is and is not transcendental. Second, in the passages in which Kant appears to espouse the former alternative, he appears to be making a significant amendment to his account of the conditions of the possibility of experience in the Transcendental Analytic. I propose a solution to both of (...)
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  37. Is There a Role for ‘Human Nature’ in Debates About Human Enhancement?Daniel Groll & Micah Lott - 2015 - Philosophy 90 (4):623-651.
    In discussions about the ethics of enhancement, it is often claimed that the concept of ‘human nature’ has no helpful role to play. There are two ideas behind this thought. The first is that nature, human nature included, is a mixed bag. Some parts of our nature are good for us and some are bad for us. The ‘mixed bag’ idea leads naturally to the second idea, namely that the fact that something is part of our (...)
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  38. Soul‐Switching and the Immateriality of Human Nature: On an Argument Reported by Razi.Pirooz Fatoorchi - 2021 - Theoria 87 (5):1067-1082.
    This article deals with an argument reported by Razi (d. 1210) that attempted to undermine the immaterialist position about human nature. After some introductory remarks and explanation of the conceptual background, the article analyses the structure of the argument, with special attention to the idea of soul-switching.’ Some comparisons are made between the argument reported by Razi and a number of arguments from modern and contemporary eras of philosophy. One section is devoted to the critique of the argument and (...)
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  39. The Human Vocation and the Question of the Earth: Karoline von Günderrode’s Philosophy of Nature.Dalia Nassar - 2022 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 104 (1):108-130.
    Contra widespread readings of Karoline von Günderrode’s 1805 “Idea of the Earth ” as a creative adaptation of Schelling’s philosophy of nature, this article proposes that “Idea of the Earth” furnishes a moral account of the human relation to the natural world, one which does not map onto any of the more well-known romantic or idealist accounts of the human-nature relation. Specifically, I argue that “Idea of the Earth” responds to the great Enlightenment question concerning the human vocation, (...)
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  40.  57
    Is Emptiness Non-Empty? Jizang’s Conception of Buddha-Nature.Jenny Hung - 2025 - Religions 16 (2):184.
    Jizang (549–623) is regarded as a prominent figure in Sanlun Buddhism (三論宗) and a revitalizer of Nāgārjuna’s Mādhyamaka tradition in China. In this essay, I argue that Jizang’s concept of non-empty Buddha-nature is compatible with the idea of universal emptiness. My argument unfolds in three steps. First, I argue that, for Jizang, Buddha-nature is the Middle Way (zhongdao 中道), which signifies a spiritual state that avoids the extremes of both emptiness and non-emptiness. Next, I explore how and why (...)
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  41. The Consequence Argument and the Possibility of the Laws of Nature Being Violated.Pedro Merlussi - 2024 - Philosophia 52 (2):289-303.
    Brian Cutter objected to the consequence argument due to its dependence on the principle that miracle workers are metaphysically impossible. A miracle worker is someone who has the ability to act in a way such that the laws of nature would be violated. While there is something to the thought that agents like us do not have this ability, Cutter claims that there is no compelling reason to regard miracle workers as metaphysically impossible. However, the paper contends that miracle (...)
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  42. Brentano's Concept of Mind: Underlying Nature, Reference-Fixing, and the Mark of the Mental.Uriah Kriegel - 2017 - In Sandra Lapointe & Christopher Pincock (eds.), Innovations in the History of Analytical Philosophy. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 197-228.
    Perhaps the philosophical thesis most commonly associated with Brentano is that intentionality is the mark of the mental. But in fact Brentano often and centrally uses also what he calls ‘inner perception’ to demarcate the mental. In this paper, I offer a new interpretation of Brentano’s conception of the interrelations between mentality, intentionality, and inner perception. According to this interpretation, Brentano took the concept of mind to be a natural-kind concept, with intentionality constituting the underlying nature of the mental (...)
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  43. Quantum Mechanics in a Time-Asymmetric Universe: On the Nature of the Initial Quantum State.Eddy Keming Chen - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (4):1155–1183.
    In a quantum universe with a strong arrow of time, we postulate a low-entropy boundary condition to account for the temporal asymmetry. In this paper, I show that the Past Hypothesis also contains enough information to simplify the quantum ontology and define a unique initial condition in such a world. First, I introduce Density Matrix Realism, the thesis that the quantum universe is described by a fundamental density matrix that represents something objective. This stands in sharp contrast to Wave Function (...)
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  44. (1 other version)Faultless responsibility: on the nature and allocation of moral responsibility for distributed moral actions.Luciano Floridi - 2016 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 374:20160112.
    The concept of distributed moral responsibility (DMR) has a long history. When it is understood as being entirely reducible to the sum of (some) human, individual and already morally loaded actions, then the allocation of DMR, and hence of praise and reward or blame and punishment, may be pragmatically difficult, but not conceptually problematic. However, in distributed environments, it is increasingly possible that a network of agents, some human, some artificial (e.g. a program) and some hybrid (e.g. a group of (...)
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  45. (1 other version)Kant on epigenesis, monogenesis and human nature: The biological premises of anthropology.Alix A. Cohen - 2006 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (4):675-693.
    The aim of this paper is to show that for Kant, a combination of epigenesis and monogenesis is the condition of possibility of anthropology as he conceives of it and that moreover, this has crucial implications for the biological dimension of his account of human nature. More precisely, I begin by arguing that Kant’s conception of mankind as a natural species is based on two premises: firstly the biological unity of the human species (monogenesis of the human races); and (...)
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  46. Armstrong on Probabilistic Laws of Nature.Jonathan D. Jacobs & Robert J. Hartman - 2017 - Philosophical Papers 46 (3):373-387.
    D. M. Armstrong famously claims that deterministic laws of nature are contingent relations between universals and that his account can also be straightforwardly extended to irreducibly probabilistic laws of nature. For the most part, philosophers have neglected to scrutinize Armstrong’s account of probabilistic laws. This is surprising precisely because his own claims about probabilistic laws make it unclear just what he takes them to be. We offer three interpretations of what Armstrong-style probabilistic laws are, and argue that all (...)
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  47. (1 other version)Information ethics, its nature and scope.Luciano Floridi - 2006 - Acm Sigcas Computers and Society 36 (2):21-36.
    In recent years, “Information Ethics” (IE) has come to mean different things to different researchers working in a variety of disciplines, including computer ethics, business ethics, medical ethics, computer science, the philosophy of information, social epistemology and library and information science. Using an ontocentric approach, this paper seeks to define the parameters of IE and thereby increase our understanding of the moral challenges associated with Information Communication Technologies.
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  48. Kant, Linnaeus, and the economy of nature.Aaron Wells - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 83:101294.
    Ecology arguably has roots in eighteenth-century natural histories, such as Linnaeus's economy of nature, which pressed a case for holistic and final-causal explanations of organisms in terms of what we'd now call their environment. After sketching Kant's arguments for the indispensability of final-causal explanation merely in the case of individual organisms, and considering the Linnaean alternative, this paper examines Kant's critical response to Linnaean ideas. I argue that Kant does not explicitly reject Linnaeus's holism. But he maintains that the (...)
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  49. (1 other version)A Developmental Systems Account of Human Nature.Karola Stotz & Paul Griffiths - 2018 - In Elizabeth Hannon & Tim Lewens (eds.), Why We Disagree About Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 00-00.
    It is now widely accepted that a scientifically credible conception of human nature must reject the folkbiological idea of a fixed, inner essence that makes us human. We argue here that to understand human nature is to understand the plastic process of human development and the diversity it produces. Drawing on the framework of developmental systems theory and the idea of developmental niche construction we argue that human nature is not embodied in only one input to development, (...)
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  50. Kant’s Regulative Metaphysics of God and the Systematic Lawfulness of Nature.Noam Hoffer - 2019 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 57 (2):217-239.
    In the ‘Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic’ of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant contends that the idea of God has a positive regulative role in the systematization of empirical knowledge. But why is this regulative role assigned to this specific idea? Kant’s account is rather opaque and this question has also not received much attention in the literature. In this paper I argue that an adequate understanding of the regulative role of the idea of God depends on the specific (...)
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