Results for 'NATURAL HISTORY'

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  1. A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion.Helen De Cruz & Johan De Smedt - 2015 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
    [from the publisher's website] Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz (...)
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  2. Natural goodness without natural history.Parisa Moosavi - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research:78-100.
    Neo‐Aristotelian ethical naturalism purports to show that moral evaluation of human action and character is an evaluation of natural goodness—a kind of evaluation that applies to living things in virtue of their nature and based on their form of life. The standard neo‐Aristotelian view defines natural goodness by way of generic statements describing the natural history, or the ‘characteristic’ life, of a species. In this paper, I argue that this conception of natural goodness commits the (...)
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  3. The Natural History of Desire.David Spurrett - 2015 - South African Journal of Philosophy 34 (3):304-313.
    Sterelny (2003) develops an idealised natural history of folk-psychological kinds. He argues that belief-like states are natural elaborations of simpler control systems, called detection systems, which map directly from environmental cue to response. Belief-like states exhibit robust tracking (sensitivity to multiple environmental states), and response breadth (occasioning a wider range of behaviours). The development of robust tracking and response-breadth depend partly on properties of the informational environment. In a transparent environment the functional relevance of states of the (...)
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  4. Natural history and variability of organized beings in Kant's philosophy.Bogdana Stamenković - 2022 - Belgrade Philosophical Annual 1 (35):91-107.
    This paper aims to examine Kant’s views on evolution of organized beings and to show that Kant’s antievolutionary conclusions stem from his study of natural history and variability of organisms. Accordingly, I discuss Kant’s study of natural history and consider whether his conclusion about impossibility of knowledge about such history expands on the research of history of organized beings. Moving forward, I examine the notion of variability in Kant’s philosophy, and show that his theory (...)
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  5. Francis Bacon's Natural History and Civil History: A Comparative Survey.Silvia Manzo - 2012 - Early Science and Medicine 17 (1-2):1-2.
    The aim of this paper is to offer a comparative survey of Bacon's theory and practice of natural history and of civil history, particularly centered on their relationship to natural philosophy and human philosophy. I will try to show that the obvious differences concerning their subject matter encompass a number of less obvious methodological and philosophical assumptions which reveal a significant practical and con ceptual convergence of the two fields. Causes or axioms are prescribed as the (...)
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  6. Hume's Natural History of Justice.Mark Collier - 2011 - In C. Taylor & S. Buckle (eds.), Hume and the Enlightenment. Pickering & Chatto. pp. 131-142.
    In Book III, Part 2 of the Treatise, Hume presents a natural history of justice. Self-interest clearly plays a central role in his account; our ancestors invented justice conventions, he maintains, for the sake of reciprocal advantage. But this is not what makes his approach so novel and attractive. Hume recognizes that prudential considerations are not sufficient to explain how human beings – with our propensities towards temporal discounting and free-riding – could have established conventions for social exchange (...)
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  7. Species, rules and meaning: The politics of language and the ends of definitions in 19th century natural history.Gordon R. McOuat - 1996 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 27 (4):473-519.
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  8. The Natural History of Secular Christianity.Michael D. Magee - manuscript
    Human beings are social animals, not solitary ones. Morality is an instinct we have because it helps us socialize, live together harmoniously. This paper reviews how the evolution of morality and other mental functions associated with our survival and sociality gave rise to cultural behavior among the small groups of humans during the Palaeolithic period when the tribe was personified as a supernatural identity and guardian, a totem, an ancestor and ultimately a god. Loyalty to the tribe required loyalty to (...)
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  9. Natural History in Seventy Words: A Contribution to the Cosmology Dialogue.James Goetz - 2005 - Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 57 (2):166.
    In the beginning, the Spirit of God stirred absolute nothingness. The stirring generated waves that turned into physical matter with relative space-time and the other laws of nature. Then God dispersed the matter that eventually formed into galaxies. Roughly ten billion years later, God intervened to bring forth the first cellular life, and God continued to orchestrate mutations and natural selection that culminated with the formation of anatomically modern humans.
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  10. A branch of human natural history.Martin Kusch - 2015 - In Oliver Schlaudt and Lara Huber (ed.), Standardization in Measurement. London: Pickering & Chatto. pp. 11-24.
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  11. Core Experiments, Natural Histories and the Art of experientia literata: the meaning of Baconian Experimentation.Dana Jalobeanu - 2011 - Society and Politics 5 (2).
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  12. The Relevance of Hume's Natural History of Religion for Cognitive Science of Religion.Helen De Cruz - 2015 - Res Philosophica 92 (3):653-674.
    Hume was a cognitive scientist of religion avant la lettre. His Natural History of Religion (1757 [2007]) locates the origins of religion in human nature. This paper explores similarities between some of his ideas and the cognitive science of religion, the multidisciplinary study of the psychological origins of religious beliefs. It also considers Hume’s distinction between two questions about religion: its foundation in reason (the domain of natural theology and philosophy of religion) and its origin in human (...)
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  13. Anger and Punishment: Natural History and Normative Significance.Isaac Wiegman - 2014 - Dissertation, Washington University in St. Louis
    I argue that the evolutionary history of anger has substantive implications for normative ethics. In the process, I develop an evolutionary account of anger and its influence on action. First, I consider a prominent argument by Peter Singer and Joshua Greene. They conclude that evolutionary explanations of human cooperation debunk – or undercut the evidential value of – the moral intuitions supporting duty ethics (as opposed to utilitarian or consequentialist ethics). With this argument they aim to defend consequentialist theories. (...)
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  14. The Aesthetics of Natural History.Tobias Heinze - 2023 - Krisis | Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 43 (1):136-138.
    The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) publishedCritical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role (and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contempo-rary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto. This is one of the sixteen (...)
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  15. "Outside and In: Hegel on natural history".David Kolb - 2011 - Poligrafi 16 (61-62):27-43.
    The relation between nature and spirit in Hegel is not as simple as slogans such as "nature has no history" or a simple interior/exterior dichotonmy would suggest.
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  16. Uniting micro- with macroevolution into an Extended Synthesis: Reintegrating life’s natural history into evolution studies.Nathalie Gontier - 2015 - In Emanuele Serrelli & Nathalie Gontier (eds.), Macroevolution: Explanation, Interpretation and Evidence. Springer. pp. 227-278.
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  17. Review of 'A Natural History of Human Thinking' by Michael Tomasello. [REVIEW]George Tudorie - 2015 - Metapsychology.
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  18. Movement: What Evolution and Gesture Can Teach Us About Its Centrality in Natural History and Its Lifelong Significance.Maxine Sheets-Johnstone - 2019 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 44 (1):239-259.
    Midwest Studies In Philosophy, Volume 44, Issue 1, Page 239-259, December 2019.
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  19.  71
    Time: The Biggest Pattern in Natural History Research. Evolutionary Biology.Nathalie Gontier - 2016 - Evolutionary Biology 4 (43):604-637.
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  20. Natural Kinds, Psychiatric Classification and the History of the DSM.Jonathan Y. Tsou - 2016 - History of Psychiatry 27 (4):406-424.
    This paper addresses philosophical issues concerning whether mental disorders are natural kinds and how the DSM should classify mental disorders. I argue that some mental disorders (e.g., schizophrenia, depression) are natural kinds in the sense that they are natural classes constituted by a set of stable biological mechanisms. I subsequently argue that a theoretical and causal approach to classification would provide a superior method for classifying natural kinds than the purely descriptive approach adopted by the DSM (...)
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  21. The history of the use of ⟦.⟧-notation in natural language semantics.Brian Rabern - 2016 - Semantics and Pragmatics 9 (12).
    In contemporary natural languages semantics one will often see the use of special brackets to enclose a linguistic expression, e.g. ⟦carrot⟧. These brackets---so-called denotation brackets or semantic evaluation brackets---stand for a function that maps a linguistic expression to its "denotation" or semantic value (perhaps relative to a model or other parameters). Even though this notation has been used in one form or another since the early development of natural language semantics in the 1960s and 1970s, Montague himself didn't (...)
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  22. The History and Prehistory of Natural-Language Semantics.Daniel W. Harris - 2017 - In Sandra Lapointe & Christopher Pincock (eds.), Innovations in the History of Analytical Philosophy. Palgrave-MacMillan. pp. 149--194.
    Contemporary natural-language semantics began with the assumption that the meaning of a sentence could be modeled by a single truth condition, or by an entity with a truth-condition. But with the recent explosion of dynamic semantics and pragmatics and of work on non- truth-conditional dimensions of linguistic meaning, we are now in the midst of a shift away from a truth-condition-centric view and toward the idea that a sentence’s meaning must be spelled out in terms of its various roles (...)
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  23. Human History in the Age of the Anthropocene: A Defence of the Nature/Culture Distinction.Giuseppina D'Oro - 2021 - Iai News.
    A legacy of Enlightenment thought was to see the human as separate from nature. Human history was neatly distinguished from natural history. The age of Anthropocene has now put all that into question. This human exceptionalism is seen by some as responsible for the devastating impact humans have had on the planet. But if we give up on the nature / culture distinction and see human activity as just another type of natural process, we risk losing (...)
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  24. Natural Cybernetics and Mathematical History: The Principle of Least Choice in History.Vasil Penchev - 2020 - Cultural Anthropology (Elsevier: SSRN) 5 (23):1-44.
    The paper follows the track of a previous paper “Natural cybernetics of time” in relation to history in a research of the ways to be mathematized regardless of being a descriptive humanitarian science withal investigating unique events and thus rejecting any repeatability. The pathway of classical experimental science to be mathematized gradually and smoothly by more and more relevant mathematical models seems to be inapplicable. Anyway quantum mechanics suggests another pathway for mathematization; considering the historical reality as dual (...)
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  25. The Nature of Rights and the History of Empire.Duncan Ivison - 2006 - In David Armitage (ed.), British Political Thought in History, Literature, and Theory 1500-1800. Cambridge University Press. pp. 91-2011.
    My aim in this chapter is to take the complexity of our histories of rights as seriously as the nature of rights themselves. Let me say immediately that the point is not to satisfy our sense of moral superiority by smugly pointing out the prejudices found in arguments made over three hundred years ago. We have more than our own share of problems and prejudices to deal with. Rather, in coming to grips with this history, and especially how early-modern (...)
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  26. History, Nature, and the 'Genetic Fallacy' in The Antichrist's Revaluation of Values.Tom Stern - 2019 - In Daniel Conway (ed.), Nietzsche and the Antichrist: Religion, Politics, and Culture in Late Modernity. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 21-42.
    The central question in this paper is the following: how does Nietzsche use history in his critique of morality? The answer, in sum: interestingly, not how you (i.e. most Nietzsche scholars) think, and not well enough. My focus is on The Antichrist, not his Genealogy of Morality, which is more commonly used to answer this question. And I look, in particular, at Nietzsche’s use of good, contemporary scholarship on the origins of Judaism. The chapter also examines the so-called 'genetic (...)
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  27. A History of Science Approach to the Nature of Science.Nahum Kipnis - 2000 - In W. McComas (ed.), The Nature of Science in Science Education: Rationales and Strategies. pp. 177-196.
    I subordinated the discussion of historical and philosophical issues of science to learning scientific concepts, superimposing them so as to make them inseparable. The topics of units are the same as in regular science courses, such as "electrical conductors and nonconductors," and the goal is the same: to formulate the laws of phenomena. The difference is in the ways the unit is taught. I have found that understanding of a concept improves if it is "rediscovered" with active participation on the (...)
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  28. Obligation in Rousseau: making natural law history?Michaela Rehm - 2012 - Jahrbuch für Recht Und Ethik/Annual Review of Law and Ethics 20:139-154.
    Is Rousseau an advocate of natural law or not? The purpose of Rehm’s paper is to suggest a positive answer to this controversially discussed question. On the one hand, Rousseau presents a critical history of traditional natural law theory which in his view is based on flawed suppositions: not upon natural, but on artificial qualities of man, and even rationality and sociability are counted among the latter. On the other hand he presents the self-confident manifesto for (...)
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  29. Darwin Rocks Hegel: Does Nature Have A History?David Kolb - 2008 - Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 57:97-117.
    In the popular press and the halls of politics, controversies over evolution are increasingly strident these days. Hegel is relevant in this connection, even though he rejected the theories of evolution he knew about, because he wanted rational understanding but without claims to intelligent design. He is reported to have said that nature has no history, but a closer examination will show that his ideaqs are more nuanced and that there is more room for darwinian ideas than one might (...)
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  30. On the Nature of the Gods, or “Epistemological Polytheism” as History Comprehension Method.Alex V. Halapsis - 2015 - The European Philosophical and Historical Discourse 1 (1):53-59.
    The article is devoted to the issue of history comprehension of the ancient societies in the context of their religious identity. Religion is one of the fundamental elements of civilization idea (“ontological project”); it constructs “universe” that is distinguished by the “laws of nature”, specific only for it. To make “communication” with ancient people maximally authentic, the researcher should not only recognize their right to look at the “world” in its own way, but also accept its “laws”, that means (...)
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  31.  12
    Natural Kind Essentialism.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2024 - In Kathrin Koslicki & Michael J. Raven (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 156-168.
    Natural kind essentialism is a specification of the intuitive idea that there are some mind-independent or objective categories in nature. These categories are thought to be characterised by a shared essence, which may involve intrinsic or extrinsic properties, mechanisms, or causal history. While the ontological basis of natural kinds has its roots in antiquity and especially Aristotle, the contemporary notion of a “natural kind” in philosophical discussion is often traced to William Whewell’s and John Stuart Mill’s (...)
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  32. A quantitative history of Japanese archaeology and natural science.Hisashi Nakao - 2018 - Japanese Journal of Archaeology 6 (1):3-22.
    This study examines the relationship between Japanese archaeology and natural science through a quantitative analysis of the two most authoritative archaeological journals and two other relevant journals in Japan. First, although previous studies have emphasized the impact of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tokyo on the scientific aspects of Japanese archaeology, results of the present study suggest that its impact has been more limited than previously assumed. Second, while previous studies claimed that research funding by the (...)
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  33. Consilience and Natural Kind Reasoning (in Newton's Argument for Universal Gravitation) in An Intimate Relation. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science.W. Harper - 1989 - Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 116:115-152.
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  34. Causality and Critical Theory: Nature's Order in Adorno, Cartwright and Bhaskar.Craig Reeves - 2009 - Journal of Critical Realism 8 (3):316-342.
    In this paper I argue that Theodor W. Adorno 's philosophy of freedom needs an ontological picture of the world. Adorno does not make his view of natural order explicit, but I suggest it could be neither the chaotic nor the strictly determined ontological images common to idealism and positivism, and that it would have to make intelligible the possibility both of human freedom and of critical social science. I consider two possible candidates, Nancy Cartwright 's ‘patchwork of laws’, (...)
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  35. Review of Reading Natural Philosophy: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science and Mathematics. [REVIEW]Chris Smeenk - 2005 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 36 (1):194-199.
    Book Review for Reading Natural Philosophy: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science and Mathematics, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2002. Edited by David Malament. This volume includes thirteen original essays by Howard Stein, spanning a range of topics that Stein has written about with characteristic passion and insight. This review focuses on the essays devoted to history and philosophy of physics.
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  36. Natural Agency: An Essay on the Causal Theory of Action.John Bishop - 1989 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    From a moral point of view we think of ourselves as capable of responsible actions. From a scientific point of view we think of ourselves as animals whose behaviour, however highly evolved, conforms to natural scientific laws. Natural Agency argues that these different perspectives can be reconciled, despite the scepticism of many philosophers who have argued that 'free will' is impossible under 'scientific determinism'. This scepticism is best overcome, according to the author, by defending a causal theory of (...)
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  37. Radical History and the Politics of Art.Gabriel Rockhill - 2014 - New York: Columbia University Press.
    The primary objective of this book is to open space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. It seeks to combat one of the fundamental assumptions that has plagued many of the previous debates on this issue: that art and politics are distinct entities definable in terms of common properties, and that they have privileged points of intersection, which can be determined once and for all in terms of an established formula. This common sense assumption is rooted in a (...)
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  38. The Natural Foundations of Religion.Mark Collier - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (5):665-680.
    In the Natural history of religion, Hume attempts to understand the origin of our folk belief in gods and spirits. These investigations are not, however, purely descriptive. Hume demonstrates that ontological commitment to supernatural agents depends on motivated reasoning and illusions of control. These beliefs cannot, then, be reflectively endorsed. This proposal must be taken seriously because it receives support from recent work on our psychological responses to uncertainty. It also compares quite favorably with its main competitors in (...)
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  39. The history and philosophy of taxonomy as an information science.Catherine Kendig & Joeri Witteveen - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (3):1-9.
    We undeniably live in an information age—as, indeed, did those who lived before us. After all, as the cultural historian Robert Darnton pointed out: ‘every age was an age of information, each in its own way’ (Darnton 2000: 1). Darnton was referring to the news media, but his insight surely also applies to the sciences. The practices of acquiring, storing, labeling, organizing, retrieving, mobilizing, and integrating data about the natural world has always been an enabling aspect of scientific work. (...)
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  40.  96
    Human Nature.Grant Ramsey - 2023 - Cambridge University Press.
    Human nature is frequently evoked to characterize our species and describe how it differs from others. But how should we understand this concept? What is the nature of a species? Some take our nature to be an essence and argue that because humans lack an essence, they also lack a nature. Others argue for non-essentialist ways of understanding human nature, which usually aim to provide criteria for sorting human traits into one of two bins, the one belonging to our nature (...)
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  41. Natural Philosophy and the Sciences: Challenging Science’s Tunnel Vision.Arran Gare - 2018 - Philosophies 3 (4):33.
    Prior to the nineteenth century, those who are now regarded as scientists were referred to as natural philosophers. With empiricism, science was claimed to be a superior form of knowledge to philosophy, and natural philosophy was marginalized. This claim for science was challenged by defenders of natural philosophy, and this debate has continued up to the present. The vast majority of mainstream scientists are comfortable in the belief that through applying the scientific method, knowledge will continue to (...)
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  42. Nature et Surnaturel: Philosophies de la Nature et Métaphysique aux XVIe-XVIIIe siècles.Vlad Alexandrescu & Robert Theis (eds.) - 2010 - Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.
    Depuis Kant, les philosophes ont appris à parler, avec prudence, du surnaturel et de sa relation avec la nature. En général le surnaturel n’est même pas reconnu comme faisant partie de la philosophie. La situation n’aurait pu être plus différente aux XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles, lorsque les philosophes comprenaient la relation entre Dieu et le monde comme l’un des problèmes les plus importants que la philosophie fût censé résoudre. Les solutions étaient bien sûr extrêmement diverses : Spinoza niera même que l’on puisse (...)
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  43. Aristotle's natural deduction system.John Corcoran - 1974 - In Ancient Logic and its Modern Interpretations. Boston: Reidel. pp. 85--131.
    This presentation of Aristotle's natural deduction system supplements earlier presentations and gives more historical evidence. Some fine-tunings resulted from conversations with Timothy Smiley, Charles Kahn, Josiah Gould, John Kearns,John Glanvillle, and William Parry.The criticism of Aristotle's theory of propositions found at the end of this 1974 presentation was retracted in Corcoran's 2009 HPL article "Aristotle's demonstrative logic".
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  44. Naturalisms.Amanda Bryant - 2020 - Think 19 (56):35-50.
    The word ‘naturalism’ has a bewildering array of uses in philosophy. Roughly speaking, it connotes pro-scientific attitudes and approaches. This article introduces the subject of naturalism by sketching a history of pro-scientific attitudes and approaches in philosophy, from their origins in the early modern period through to the present day. It then distinguishes a number of distinct families of naturalism: metaphysical, logico-linguistic, epistemological, and methodological. The resulting taxonomy encompasses a plurality of loosely related views rather than a number of (...)
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  45. Hermeneutics and Nature.Dalia Nassar - 2019 - In Michael Förster & Kristin Gjesdal (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics. Cambridge: Cambridge. pp. 37-74.
    This paper contributes to the on-going research into the ways in which the humanities transformed the natural sciences in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries. By investigating the relationship between hermeneutics -- as developed by Herder -- and natural history, it shows how the methods used for the study of literary and artistic works played a crucial role in the emergence of key natural-scientific fields, including geography and ecology.
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  46. The Nature and Implementation of Representation in Biological Systems.Mike Collins - 2009 - Dissertation, City University of New York
    I defend a theory of mental representation that satisfies naturalistic constraints. Briefly, we begin by distinguishing (i) what makes something a representation from (ii) given that a thing is a representation, what determines what it represents. Representations are states of biological organisms, so we should expect a unified theoretical framework for explaining both what it is to be a representation as well as what it is to be a heart or a kidney. I follow Millikan in explaining (i) in terms (...)
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  47. Natural selection, plasticity, and the rationale for largest-scale trends.Hugh Desmond - 2018 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 68:25-33.
    Many have argued that there is no reason why natural selection should cause directional increases in measures such as body size or complexity across evolutionary history as a whole. In this paper I argue that this conclusion does not hold for selection for adaptations to environmental variability, and that, given the inevitability of environmental variability, trends in adaptations to variability are an expected feature of evolution by natural selection. As a concrete instance of this causal structure, I (...)
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  48. The Nature of Darwin’s Support for the Theory of Natural Selection.Elisabeth A. Lloyd - 1983 - Philosophy of Science 50 (1):112-129.
    When natural selection theory was presented, much active philosophical debate, in which Darwin himself participated, centered on its hypothetical nature, its explanatory power, and Darwin's methodology. Upon first examination, Darwin's support of his theory seems to consist of a set of claims pertaining to various aspects of explanatory success. I analyze the support of his method and theory given in the Origin of Species and private correspondence, and conclude that an interpretation focusing on the explanatory strengths of natural (...)
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  49. Being Sympathetic to Bad-History Wrongdoers.Craig K. Agule - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (1):147-169.
    For many philosophers, bad-history wrongdoers are primarily interesting because of what their cases might tell us about the interaction of moral responsibility and history. However, philosophers focusing on blameworthiness have overlooked important questions about blame itself. These bad-history cases are complicated because blame and sympathy are both fitting. When we are careful to consider the rich natures of those two reactions, we see that they conflict in several important ways. We should see bad-history cases as cases (...)
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  50. The Nature and Explanatory Ambitions of Metaethics.Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett - 2017 - In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 1-28.
    This volume introduces a wide range of important views, questions, and controversies in and about contemporary metaethics. It is natural to ask: What, if anything, connects this extraordinary range of discussions? This introductory chapter aims to answer this question by giving an account of metaethics that shows it to be a unified theoretical activ- ity. According to this account, metaethics is a theoretical activity characterized by an explanatory goal. This goal is to explain how actual ethical thought and talk—and (...)
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