Results for 'Nature'

937 found
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  1. 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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  2. 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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  3. 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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  4. 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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  5. What is it like to lack mineness? Depersonalization as a probe for the scope, nature and role of mineness.Alexandre Billon - 2023 - In M. Guillot & M. Garcia-Carpintero (eds.), Self-Experience: Essays on Inner Awareness. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 314-342.
    Patients suffering from depersonalization complain of feeling detached from their body, their mental states, and actions or even from themselves. In this chapter, I argue that depersonalization consists in the lack of a phenomenal feature that marks my experiences as mine, which is usually called “mineness,” and that the study of depersonalization constitutes a neglected yet incomparable probe to assess empirically the scope, role, and even the nature of mineness. Here is how I will proceed. After describing depersonalization (§2) (...)
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  6. Utilitarianism and the Social Nature of Persons.Nikhil Venkatesh - 2023 - Dissertation, University College London
    This thesis defends utilitarianism: the view that as far as morality goes, one ought to choose the option which will result in the most overall well-being. Utilitarianism is widely rejected by philosophers today, largely because of a number of influential objections. In this thesis I deal with three of them. Each is found in Bernard Williams’s ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’ (1973). The first is the Integrity Objection, an intervention that has been influential whilst being subject to a wide variety of (...)
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  7. 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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  8. 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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  9. 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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  10. On the Decisional Nature of Faith.Richard Oxenberg - 2023 - Interreligious Insight 21 (2):40-46.
    On what basis should we embrace a religious belief? In this article I argue that religious faith should be viewed, not as a conclusion we arrive at after reviewing the evidence, but as an existential decision we make through which we define ourselves.
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  11. 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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  12. Semantic capital: its nature, value, and curation.Luciano Floridi - 2018 - Philosophy and Technology 31 (4):481-497.
    There is a wealth of resources— ideas, insights, discoveries, inventions, traditions, cultures, languages, arts, religions, sciences, narratives, stories, poems, customs and norms, music and songs, games and personal experiences, and advertisements—that we produce, curate, consume, transmit, and inherit as humans. This wealth, which I define as semantic capital, gives meaning to, and makes sense of, our own existence and the world surrounding us. It defines who we are and enables humans to develop an individual and social life. This paper discusses (...)
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  13. 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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  14. How an Age-old Photo of Little Chicks Can Awaken Our Conscience for Biodiversity Conservation and Nature Protection.Quan-Hoang Vuong & Minh-Hoang Nguyen - 2023 - Ms Thoughts.
    Humans experience a profound and indescribable emotion when they unearth artifacts from ancient times. Scientific disciplines like paleontology and archaeology reflect our curiosity and desire to understand the natural world’s past and evolutionary history. Physics also invests significant effort in exploring the origin and evolution of the universe. In social life, the study field of humanities also has journals about art history, such as the Art History or Journal of Art History. Through our shared thoughts and efforts to restore humanities (...)
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  15. Being-in-the-World as Being-in-Nature: An Ecological Perspective on Being and Time.Vincent Blok - 2014 - Studia Phaenomenologica 14:215-235.
    Because the status of nature is ambiguous in Being and Time, we explore an ecological perspective on Heidegger’s early main work in this article. Our hypothesis is that the affordance theory of James Gibson enables us to a) to understand being-in-the-world as being-in-nature, b) reconnect man and nature and c) understand the twofold sense of nature in Being and Time. After exploring Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world and Gibson’s concept of being-in-nature, we confront Heidegger’s and Gibson’s (...)
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  16. The social nature of engineering and its implications for risk taking.Allison Ross & Nafsika Athanassoulis - 2010 - Science and Engineering Ethics 16 (1):147-168.
    Making decisions with an, often significant, element of risk seems to be an integral part of many of the projects of the diverse profession of engineering. Whether it be decisions about the design of products, manufacturing processes, public works, or developing technological solutions to environmental, social and global problems, risk taking seems inherent to the profession. Despite this, little attention has been paid to the topic and specifically to how our understanding of engineering as a distinctive profession might affect how (...)
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  17. Basic Final Value and Zimmerman’s The Nature of Intrinsic Value.Timothy Perrine - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (4):979-996.
    This paper critically examines Michael Zimmerman’s account of basic final value in The Nature of Intrinsic Value. Zimmerman’s account has several positive features. Unfortunately, as I argue, given one plausible assumption about value his account derives a contradiction. I argue that rejecting that assumption has several implausible results and that we should instead reject Zimmerman’s account. I then sketch an alternative account of basic final value, showing how it retains some of the positive features of Zimmerman’s account while avoiding (...)
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  18. 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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  19. The Human Glance, the Experience of Environmental Distress and the “Affordance” of Nature: Toward a Phenomenology of the Ecological Crisis.Vincent Blok - 2015 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28 (5):925-938.
    The problem we face today is that there is a huge gap between our ethical judgments about the ecological crisis on the one hand and our ethical behavior according to these judgments on the other. In this article, we ask to what extent a phenomenology of the ecological crisis enables us to bridge this gap and display more ethical or pro-environmental behavior. To answer this question, our point of departure is the affordance theory of the American psychologist and founding father (...)
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  20. 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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  21. 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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  22. What Does it Mean to Mimic Nature? A Typology for Biomimetic Design.Alessio Gerola, Zoë Robaey & Vincent Blok - 2023 - Philosophy and Technology 36 (4):1-20.
    In an effort to produce new and more sustainable technologies, designers have turned to nature in search of inspiration and innovation. Biomimetic design (from the Greek bios, life, mimesis, imitation) is the conscious imitation of biological models to solve today's technical and ecological challenges. Nowadays numerous different approaches exist that take inspiration from nature as a model for design, such as biomimicry, biomimetics, bionics, permaculture, ecological engineering, etc. This variety of practices comes in turn with a wide range (...)
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  23. Grace Contra Nature: The Etiology of Christian Religious Beliefs from the Perspective of Theology and the Cognitive Science of Religion.Stanisław Ruczaj - 2022 - Theology and Science 20 (4):428-444.
    Cognitive science of religion is sometimes portrayed as having no bearing on the theological doctrines of particular religious traditions, such as Christianity. In this paper, I argue that the naturalistic account of the etiology of religious beliefs offered by the cognitive science of religion undermines the important Christian doctrine of the grace of faith, which teaches that the special gift of divine grace is a necessary precondition for coming to faith. This has some far-reaching ramifications for Christian theology. -/- .
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  24. 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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  25. Husserl's Concept of Position-Taking and Second Nature.Alejandro Arango - 2014 - Phenomenology and Mind 6:168-176.
    I argue that Husserl’s concept of position-taking, Stellungnahme, is adequate to understand the idea of second nature as an issue of philosophical anthropology. I claim that the methodological focus must be the living subject that acts and lives among others, and that the notion of second nature must respond to precisely this fundamental active character of subjectivity. The appropriate concept should satisfy two additional desiderata. First, it should be able to develop alongside the biological, psychological, and social individual (...)
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  26. Descartes on Necessity and the Laws of Nature.Nathan Rockwood - 2022 - Journal of Analytic Theology 10:277-292.
    This paper is on Descartes’ account of modality and, in particular, his account of the necessity of the laws of nature. He famously argues that the necessity of the “eternal truths” of logic and mathematics depends on God’s will. Here I suggest he has the same view about the necessity of the laws of nature. Further, I argue, this is a plausible theory of laws. For philosophers often talk about something being nomologically or physically necessary because of the (...)
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  27. Francis Bacon on self-care, divination, and the nature-fortune distinction.Silvia Manzo - 2023 - Early Science and Medicine 2023 (1):120-147.
    In presenting self-preservation as the most general law of nature, set at the summit of the structure of the natural world, Francis Bacon characterized the universal appe- tite for self-preservation as an innate instinct which, in the case of living beings, is primarily associated with the emotion of fear. Bacon’s philosophy offers several tech- niques of self-care to manage the fear of accidents of fortune from which the existence and well-being of the self is under constant threat. This article (...)
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  28. 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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  29. (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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  30. 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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  31. Globalising Love - On the Nature and Scope of Love as a Form of Recognition.Heikki Ikäheimo - 2012 - Res Publica 18 (1):11-24.
    This article begins by tracing two issues to be kept in mind in discussing the theme of love as far back as Aristotle: on the one hand the polysemy of the term philia in Aristotle, and on the other hand the fact that there is a focal or core meaning of philia that provides order to that polysemy. Secondly, it is briefly suggested that the same issues are, mutatis mutandis, central for understanding the discussion of love or Liebe by Hegel, (...)
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  32. Recognition of intrinsic values of sentient beings explains the sense of moral duty towards global nature conservation.Tianxiang Lan, Neil Sinhababu & Luis Roman Carrasco - 2022 - PLoS ONE 10 (17):NA.
    Whether nature is valuable on its own (intrinsic values) or because of the benefits it provides to humans (instrumental values) has been a long-standing debate. The concept of relational values has been proposed as a solution to this supposed dichotomy, but the empirical validation of its intuitiveness remains limited. We experimentally assessed whether intrinsic/relational values of sentient beings/non-sentient beings/ecosystems better explain people’s sense of moral duty towards global nature conservation for the future. Participants from a representative sample of (...)
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  33. The Statistical Nature of Causation.David Papineau - 2022 - The Monist 105 (2):247-275.
    Causation is a macroscopic phenomenon. The temporal asymmetry displayed by causation must somehow emerge along with other asymmetric macroscopic phenomena like entropy increase and the arrow of radiation. I shall approach this issue by considering ‘causal inference’ techniques that allow causal relations to be inferred from sets of observed correlations. I shall show that these techniques are best explained by a reduction of causation to structures of equations with probabilistically independent exogenous terms. This exogenous probabilistic independence imposes a recursive order (...)
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  34. An Enquiry into the Nature of our Relationship with Reality.Tine Wilde - 2021 - Pari Perspectives 10 (Consciousness):pp.122-128.
    What do we mean by ‘reality’? Merging philosophical insights with contemporary art, Tine Wilde lets us consider and contemplate who and what we ‘really’ are. Working on artists’ book Zero Point, the article presents a brief overview of her thoughts, relating a spatial-geometrical perspective to the quest for self-knowledge, and subsequently extrapolating the findings to the notion of unknown knowledge.
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  35. An Armstrongian defense of dispositional monist accounts of laws of nature.Mousa Mohammadian - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (3):1-15.
    Bird reveals an important problem at the heart of Armstrong’s theory of laws of nature: to explain how a law necessitates its corresponding regularity, Armstrong is committed to a vicious regress. In his very brief response, Armstrong gestures towards an argument that, as he admits, is more of a “speculation.” Later, Barker and Smart argue that a very similar problem threatens Bird’s dispositional monist theory of laws of nature and he is committed to a similar vicious regress. In (...)
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  36. (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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  37. (1 other version)The Lamp of Reason and the Mirror of Nature.Preston Stovall - 2019 - In Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer & Krzysztof P. Skowronski (eds.), Beyond Rorty. Lexington Books. pp. 215-234.
    At the close of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Richard Rorty lays out a contrast between what he calls 'systematic' and 'edifying' philosophical anthropologies. Whereas the systematic philosopher aims to speak for the ages, the edifying philosopher addresses herself to issues of her day, often by way of shattering conventional idols. Rorty sees these two approaches as mutually exclusive. The aim of this paper is to defend a conception of philosophy as both systematic and edifying in the relevant (...)
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  38. The information society and its philosophy: introduction to the special issue on the philosophy o information, its nature, and future developments.Luciano Floridi - 2009 - The Information Society 23 (5):153–158.
    The article introduces the special issue dedicated to “The Philosophy of Information, Its Nature, and Future Developments.” It outlines the origins of the information society and then briefly discusses the definition of the philosophy of information, the possibility of reconciling nature and technology, the informational turn as a fourth revolution (after Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud), and the metaphysics of the infosphere.
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  39. Integration of Theism into Hobbes’s State of Nature.Asif Mahtab Utsha - 2022 - Philosophy and Progress 68 (3-4):77-118.
    Political philosophers often draw their conclusions on how political systems ought to be by first investigating human nature and then proposing recommendations extrapolating from those investigations. They attempt to do this by creating a hypothetical ‘state of nature’ where human beings would be unaffected by social, political, and cultural paradigms and can act freely in pursuit of their instincts, thereby revealing their true nature. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes followed this method of investigation and found that human beings (...)
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  40. (1 other version)Aquinas’s Shiny Happy People: Perfect Happiness and the Limits of Human Nature.Christina Van Dyke - 2014 - In Christina VanDyke (ed.), Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. pp. 269-291.
    In Aquinas's account of the beatific vision, human beings are joined to God in a never-ending act of contemplation of the divine essence: a state which utterly fulfills the human drive for knowledge and satisfies every desire of the human heart. In this paper, I argue that this state represents less a fulfillment of human nature, however, than a transcendence of that nature. Furthermore, what’s transcended is not incidental on a metaphysical, epistemological, or moral level.
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  41. (1 other version)The latent nature of global information warfare.Luciano Floridi - 2014 - Philosophy and Technology 27 (3):317–319.
    Information has always been at the core of conflicts. When Napoleon planned to invade Italy, he duly upgraded the first telegraph network in the world, the French “semaphore”. He famously remarked that “an army marches on its stomach,” but he also knew that the same army acted on information. As Von Clausewitz once stated “by the word ‘information’ we denote all the knowledge which we have of the enemy and his country; therefore, in fact, the foundation of all our ideas (...)
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  42. (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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  43. 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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  44. (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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  45. 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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  46. The right to ignore: An epistemic defense of the nature/culture divide.Maria Kronfeldner - 2017 - In Joyce Richard (ed.), Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 210-224.
    This paper addresses whether the often-bemoaned loss of unity of knowledge about humans, which results from the disciplinary fragmentation of science, is something to be overcome. The fragmentation of being human rests on a couple of distinctions, such as the nature-culture divide. Since antiquity the distinction between nature (roughly, what we inherit biologically) and culture (roughly, what is acquired by social interaction) has been a commonplace in science and society. Recently, the nature/culture divide has come under attack (...)
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  47. The CEMI field theory: Seven clues to the nature of consciousness.Johnjoe McFadden - 2006 - In Jack A. Tuszynski (ed.), The Emerging Physics of Consciousness. Springer Verlag. pp. 387--406.
    In this chapter I examine seven clues to the nature of consciousness and explore what they reveal about the underlying physical substrate of consciousness. The consciousness clues are: it impacts upon the world; it is a property of living brains but no other structure; brain activity may be conscious or unconscious; the conscious mind appears to be serial; learning requires consciousness but recall doesn’t; conscious information is bound; and consciousness correlates with synchronous firing of neurons. I discuss field theories (...)
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  48. (1 other version)What Is Nature?Hub Zwart - 2014 - Teaching Philosophy 37 (3):379-398.
    There are basically two ways of teaching philosophy to science stu- dents. One option is to start from philosophy (from Plato and Aristotle up to, say, Popper and Kuhn) and present student audiences with the ideas and conjectures of these “great thinkers,” these “authoritative voices,” concerning scientific inquiry: the top-down approach. Another option is to trawl the archives of science (of present and past) search- ing for philosophical quandaries, moral collisions and paradigm shifts, for intriguing case studies that contain important (...)
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  49. Bioconservatism, Partiality, and the Human-Nature Objection to Enhancement.Pugh Jonathan, Guy Kahane & Julian Savulescu - 2016 - The Monist 99 (4):406-422.
    “Bioconservatives” in the human enhancement debate endorse the conservative claim that we should reject the use of biotechnologies that enhance natural human capacities. However, they often ground their objections to enhancement with contestable claims about human nature that are also in tension with other common tenets of conservatism. We argue that bioconservatives could raise a more plausible objection to enhancement by invoking a strain of conservative thought developed by G.A. Cohen. Although Cohen’s conservatism is not sufficient to fully revive (...)
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  50. (1 other version)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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