The topicality of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought is reflected in his critique of mass culture, society and the state, and scientific methods, which later had a significant impact on modern discourse. Mass culture is the foundation of modern social reality as a force of decadence and nihilism that degrades the authentic and creates a mediocre culture. Nietzsche opposed a “culture” that implies a transcendence and sublimation of “nature” into the forms of “moral” ideals, and he called for a natural life without (...) harmful cultural influences that are an obstacle to a healthy human life. The idea of nihilism present in culture is relevant to our time because it manifests as a loss of depth or meaning in life itself, which, like nature, is chaos, without structure or empirical evidence. To understand the scientific revolution and its impressively devastating pace in the high-tech laboratories of our global research ecosystem, relevant is Nietzsche’s perspective aimed at demystifying science, especially positivism and naturalism, which seek to impose truth based on scientifically verified knowledge. Scientific interpretations and constructions are efforts to control and “humanise” nature by adapting chaos to our anthropomorphic expectations, needs, and concerns and making chaotic nature predictable. The paper shows that Nietzsche’s critique of culturalism and naturalism is based on the vision of the life of the “last man human” who rejects the culture of self-overcoming and dismantles reduces the fear of the uncertain and sudden and lives enframed in reality as presented by the scientific community. In the life of the contemporary human being, the will to live is merely maintained because he lacks the will to power. (shrink)

This study addresses a central theme in current philosophy: Platonism vs Naturalism and provides accounts of both approaches to mathematics, crucially discussing Quine, Maddy, Kitcher, Lakoff, Colyvan, and many others. Beginning with accounts of both approaches, Brown defends Platonism by arguing that only a Platonistic approach can account for concept acquisition in a number of special cases in the sciences. He also argues for a particular view of applied mathematics, a view that supports Platonism against Naturalist alternatives. Not only does (...) this engaging book present the Platonist-Naturalist debate over mathematics in a comprehensive fashion, but it also sheds considerable light on non-mathematical aspects of a dispute that is central to contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This article starts from the assumption that there are various innate contributions to our view of the world and explores the epistemological implications that follow from this. Specifically, it explores the idea that if certain components of our worldview have an evolutionary origin, this implies that these aspects accurately depict the world. The simple version of the argument for this conclusion is that if an aspect of mind is innate, it must be useful, and the most parsimonious explanation for (...) its usefulness is that it accurately depicts the world. There are a number of important criticisms of this argument. These include the idea that evolutionary justifications are circular, that evolved mental content and principles are not necessarily accurate, and that, if the argument is taken seriously, it has some highly dubious consequences. These criticisms necessitate various qualifications to the initial argument. Nonetheless, it is argued that, in some cases, important conclusions can be drawn about the world from an analysis of evolved contributions to our view of the world. An evolutionary approach cannot provide an ultimate justification for any belief; however, in certain circumstances, it supports the conclusion that a given belief is a reasonable first approximation. To the extent that innate content and principles pertain to topics in metaphysics, they can be viewed as a naturalistic source of metaphysical knowledge. (shrink)

Our main goal in this paper is to present and scrutinize Reichenbach’s own naturalism in our contemporary context, with special attention to competing versions of the concept. By exploring the idea of Reichenbach’s naturalism, we will argue that he defended a liberating, therapeutic form of naturalism, meaning that he took scientific philosophy to be a possible cure for bad old habits and traditional ways of philosophy. For Reichenbach, naturalistic scientific philosophy was a well-established form of liberation. We do not (...) intend to suggest that Reichenbach acted as an inventor of naturalism; nonetheless, invoking the term and the idea of ‘naturalism’ is more than a simple rhetorical strategy for rehabilitating Reichenbach as a forerunner of this field. We think that his ideas can make a valuable contribution to contemporary debates, and that he presents an interesting case among the other scientifically oriented proponents of his time. After presenting a short reconstruction of the meaning of naturalism—or, more appropriately, naturalisms—in order to be able to correctly situate Reichenbach within his own as well as a systematic context, we discuss Reichenbach’s naturalism against the background of his scientific philosophy, his views on the relation of common-sense knowledge to science, and his efforts at popularization. To delve deeper into this topic, we present a case study to show how Reichenbach argued that in both scientific and philosophical discussions, it is necessary to move from the request and value of truth to probability. And, finally, we argue that the liberation of knowledge and nature was a socio-political program for Reichenbach, who talked about his own scientific philosophy as “a crusade.” By emphasizing this aspect of Reichenbach’s naturalism, we may be in a better position to situate him in the history of analytic philosophy in general, and in the yet-to-be-written narrative of the naturalistic movement in particular. (shrink)

The contention in this paper is that central to Sellars’s famous attempt to fuse the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” of the human being in the world was an attempt to marry a particularly strong form of scientific naturalism with various modified Kantian a priori principles about the unity of the self and the structure of human knowledge. The modified Kantian aspects of Sellars’s view have been emphasized by current “left wing” Sellarsians, while the scientific naturalist aspects have (...) been championed by “right wing” Sellarsians, the latter including William Rottschaefer’s constructive criticisms of my own reconciling interpretation of Sellars. In this paper I focus first on how Sellars’s Kantian conception of the necessary a priori unity of the thinking self does not conflict with his ideal scientific naturalist conception of persons as “bundles” or pluralities of scientifically postulated processes. This then prepares the way for a more comprehensive discussion of how Sellars’s modified Kantian account of the substantive a priori principles that make possible any conceptualized knowledge of a world does not conflict with his simultaneous demand for an ideal scientific explanation and evolutionary account of those same conceptual capacities. Sellars’s own attempted via media synthesis—what I call his “ Kantian scientific naturalism”—merits another look from both the left and the right. (shrink)

The contention in this paper is that central to Sellars’s famous attempt to fuse the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” of the human being in the world was an attempt to marry a particularly strong form of scientific naturalism with various modified Kantian a priori principles about the unity of the self and the structure of human knowledge. The modified Kantian aspects of Sellars’s view have been emphasized by current “left wing” Sellarsians, while the scientific naturalist aspects have (...) been championed by “right wing” Sellarsians, the latter including William Rottschaefer’s constructive criticisms of my own reconciling interpretation of Sellars. In this paper I focus first on how (1) Sellars’s Kantian conception of the necessary a priori unity of the thinking self does not conflict with his ideal scientific naturalist conception of persons as “bundles” or pluralities of scientifically postulated processes. This then prepares the way for a more comprehensive discussion of how (2) Sellars’s modified Kantian account of the substantive a priori principles that make possible any conceptualized knowledge of a world does not conflict with his simultaneous demand for an ideal scientific explanation and evolutionary account of those same conceptual capacities. Sellars’s own attempted via media synthesis—what I call his “Kantian scientific naturalism”—merits another look from both the left and the right. (shrink)

Seeking whether our perception produces knowledge which is not only relative or subjective perspective on things, is to be engaged in the realist/anti-realist debate regarding perception. In this article I pursue the naturalistic approach according to which the question whether perception delivers objective knowledge about the external world is inseparable from empirical investigation into mechanisms of perception. More precisely, I have focused on the dual aspect theory of perception, one of the most influential recent theories of (...) perception which unifies two traditionally opposite approaches to perception: ecological and constructivist. I have tried to show that the dualistic model of human vision does not support the majority of realist theses aimed at non-relativism, but supports only pragmatic realism about observational reports (dorsal system) and the moderate realism about observational reports (ventral system). (shrink)

The paper analyses theoretical presuppositions of the predominant form of semantic naturalism in contemporary analytic philosophy. The aim is to show that irrespective of the fact that the doctrine of semantic naturalism is grounded in ontological and epistemological naturalism, and is developed on the basis of semantic externalism, this conception of foundational semantics rests on internalist premises, and therefore should be construed as Cartesian. Theories and their interrelations that are assumed by semantic naturalism are explicated by relying on the tripartite (...) interpretation of “the problem of intentionality”. The Cartesian aspects of the assumed theories – and thus of the form of semantic naturalism that is analysed – are then specified in the context of Hilary Putnam’s version of semantic externalism. (shrink)

In this paper we argue for a naturalistic solution to some of the methodological controversies in regulatory science, on the basis of two case studies: toxicology and health claim regulation. We analyze the debates related to the scientific evidence that is considered necessary for regulatory decision making in each of those two fields, with a particular attention to the interactions between scientific and regulatory aspects. This analysis allows us to identify two general stances in the debate: a) one that (...) argues for more permissive standards of evidence and for methodological pluralism, and b) an opposing one that not only defends strict evidence requirements but also stipulates the use of one particular scientific methodologies for data generation. We argue that the real-world outcomes produced by alternative regulatory options are a vital piece of information that allows for the empirical assessment of these two stances. In particular, this information on outcomes makes it possible to analyze which standards of evidence and scientific methods generate the most useful knowledge as input for regulatory decision making. Our conclusion is that instead of an a priori selection of methodologies and standards, such decisions ought to be based on empirical evidence related to real-world outcomes. (shrink)

Recent scientific research suggests that altered states of consciousness induced by classic psychedelic drugs can cause durable psychological benefits in both healthy and patient populations. The phenomenon of ‘psychedelic transformation’ has many philosophically provocative aspects, not least of which is the claim commonly made by psychedelic subjects that their transformation is centrally due to some kind of learning or knowledge gain. Can psychedelic experiences really be a source of knowledge? From the vantage point of philosophical materialism or naturalism, (...) a negative answer is tempting because psychedelic subjects often claim drug-facilitated knowledge of non-natural, transcendent realities. This fact, combined with common conceptions of these drugs as ‘hallucinogenic’ or ‘psychotomimetic’, invites the conclusion that claims of epistemic benefit from psychedelic experience are uniformly false. However, several recent proposals have been made in the literature about naturalistically acceptable epistemic benefits that might arise from psychedelic use. In this chapter I review these proposals, classifying them in accordance with standard epistemological categories, and discuss the arguments for and against them. I also offer some suggestions for future research. (shrink)

In a number of recent papers, Davidson cultivates a new-found interest in “external world.” Starting from a naturalistic “attitude and method,” he purports to show that the skeptic's doubts are vacuous because the skeptic "does not understand his own doubts. ” His argument for this invokes a theory of cognitive content on which the traditional Cartesian picture of inference from inner to outer domains is allegedly turned on its head. On Davidson's alternative account, propositional thought is only made possible (...) by a prior understanding of "objective truth,” where this notion is itself only given content by the presupposition of communicative exchange between speakers disparately located in a common spatio-temporal setting. What allegedly emerges is a comprehensive system within which the preconditions of meaningfulness effectively double as the preconditions of knowledge, providing an account of knowledge within which the skeptic has no room to maneuver. My concern in this paper is both with the semantic aspects of this account and with the epistemological consequences that Davidson sees as following from them. The story he tells, I argue, fails to prevent an alternative form of skepticism from arising from within his own naturalistic account of the nature and acquisition of knowledge. This is because a central contention of the account he provides is not only capricious, but implicitly at odds with his long-held views on the anomalousness of the mental. (shrink)

The political passages in Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge are an integral part of his arguments against ‘objectivism’ and/or a post-critical, personalist, fiduciary and fallibilist philosophy. This paper elaboratesthe social and political implications of Polanyi’s emphasis upon acceptance of one’s situation and the exercise in it of a sense of responsibility to transcendent ideals, as against attempts to start with a clean slate, to overcome all imperfections and to find some simple rule for political policy. Prescriptive duties and rights, and mutual (...) trust and solidarity, are the bases of politics, anti responsible action must start with them. But much of modern politics expresses a Gnostic impatience of our created and finite existence which results in arbitrary commitment to some radical and destructive ideology. (shrink)

Seeking whether our perception produces knowledge which is not only relative or subjective perspective on things, is to be engaged in the realist/anti-realist debate regarding perception. In this article I pursue the naturalistic approach according to which the question whether perception delivers objective knowledge about the external world is inseparable from empirical investigation into mechanisms of perception. More precisely, I have focused on the dual aspect theory of perception, one of the most influential recent theories of (...) perception which unifies two traditionally opposite approaches to perception: ecological and constructivist. I have tried to show that the dualistic model of human vision does not support the majority of realist theses aimed at non-relativism, but supports only pragmatic realism about observational reports (dorsal system) and the moderate realism about observational reports (ventral system). (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. This article reveals the understanding of the concept of nature in the works of the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau is an American philosopher, poet, essayist, naturalist and political activist. Together with Ralph Waldo Emerson, his friend and mentor, he is considered one of the founders of the transcendentalist movement. Transcendentalism was a powerful movement of American philosophy of the 19th century. It was characterized by focusing on (...) the problem of human self-knowledge, human's returning to own essence, living in harmony with nature, as well as criticism of modern society and active abolitionism. M e t h o d s. The article uses both general scientific methods and special methods, such as – the method of historical-philosophical reconstruction, which made it possible to reproduce the ideas of the American thinker, the hermeneutic method – for explaining individual positions of the philosopher. In addition, literary-critical methods were used, for the possibility of using various primary sources, and systematic method – to identify a systematized structure in the philosophical work of H. D. Thoreau. R e s u l t s. One of the main features of transcendentalism is a special interest in reflection on nature and a special approach to it. Thus, the concept of nature is present in most of H. D. Thoreau's works, and it is the central topic of his philosophical searches. The concept of nature in his works appears in different contexts, acquires different meanings. Thus, H. D. Thoreau talks about nature in the context of nature, in the context of poetic creativity, in his philosophical searches, in his vision of man and in his argumentation of his own political position. However, the different meanings that H. D. Thoreau attaches to the concept of nature do not contradict each other, but, on the contrary, complement and clarify his understanding of nature. C o n c l u s i o n s. This article proposes to consider the use of the concept of nature by H. D. Thoreau in the following aspects: Nature and Peculiarities of nature as a subject of scientific knowledge. Nature and The relationship between nature and culture through the relationship between "the wild" and society. Nature and From naturalism to humanism. Nature as an inner essence of man and solitude with nature as a return to this essence. (shrink)

For thirty years at least, I have designated myself as a zoologist interested in the “philosophical aspects of biology”. But I have now to admit that not until within the last two or three years have I recognized that logic, particularly in its inductive aspect, is involved in such interest.For me as a zoologist with a predilection for natural history, observation has had a place of wide application and of implicit confidence. Until recently, I had rested in the supposition (...) that after all of the devices practiced by naturalists to insure certainty of their observations, nothing further was needed so far as the information and understanding they gained was concerned. I had gone ahead with my reasoning, my logic, with no more qualms about the trustworthiness of the “inductive” than of the “deductive” side of it. I had not taken seriously the assertion, made years ago in my hearing by an eminent philosopher, that no one can be a philosopher without being skeptical and critical of the use of his senses in getting knowledge. Latterly, however, I have come to see that traditional philosophers take themselves very seriously in such assertions. This realization has been due to the discovery that the recent advances in physics and mathematics have led most of the leaders in these fields to believe that observation and the inductive side of logic may be left where they were a hundred years ago. These scientists seem to be about where John Stuart Mill was in his effort to improve Lord Bacon's effort for a better understanding of both observation and induction. (shrink)

Seeking whether our perception produces knowledge which is not only relative or subjective perspective on things, is to be engaged in the realist/anti-realist debate regarding perception. In this article I pursue the naturalistic approach according to which the question whether perception delivers objective knowledge about the external world is inseparable from empirical investigation into mechanisms of perception. More precisely, I have focused on the dual aspect theory of perception, one of the most influential recent theories of (...) perception which unifies two traditionally opposite approaches to perception: ecological and constructivist. I have tried to show that the dualistic model of human vision does not support the majority of realist theses aimed at non-relativism, but supports only pragmatic realism about observational reports (dorsal system) and the moderate realism about observational reports (ventral system). (shrink)

The thought of Wilfrid Sellars has figured prominently in recent discussions of the relationship between naturalism and normativity . On the one hand, some have appealed to Sellars' philosophy in defence of the thesis that what he called the normative 'space of reasons' is in some sense sui generis and irreducible to the natural causal order described by the natural sciences. On the other hand, others have exploited equally central aspects of Sellars' philosophy in defence of the seemingly incompatible project (...) of attempting to give an exhaustive scientifically naturalist account of mind and meaning, and perhaps of the nature of normativity itself. I contend that what Sellars described as 'the Janus-faced character of languagings as belonging to both the causal order and the order of reasons' ( Naturalism and Ontology ) is the key to understanding his normative and pragmatist variety of naturalism. Sellars saw himself as having articulated a detailed philosophical perspective within which the normative aspects of meaning, knowledge, truth, and representation are themselves opened up, in principle, to naturalistic explanation. (shrink)

In this paper, I review Quine's response to the normativity charge against naturalized epistemology. On this charge, Quine's naturalized epistemology neglects the essential normativity of the traditional theory of knowledge and hence cannot count as its successor. According to Quine, normativity is retained in naturalism as ‘the technology of truth-seeking’. I first disambiguate Quine's naturalism into three programs of increasing strength and clarify the strongest program by means of the so-called Epistemic Skinner Box. Then, I investigate two ways in (...) which the appeal to technology as normative enterprise can be made good. I argue that neither coheres with other aspects of Quine's philosophy, most notably the elimination of intentionality. Finally, I briefly consider a third reconstruction of the response, which involves an extension of the web of “belief” to practical know-how. I conclude that the normativity of Quine's (strong) naturalism cannot be found in the technology of truth-seeking. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’ denunciation of the Myth of the Given was meant to clarify, against empiricism, that perceptual episodes alone are insufficient to ground and justify perceptual knowledge. Sellars showed that in order to accomplish such epistemic tasks, more resources and capacities, such as those involved in using concepts, are needed. Perceptual knowledge belongs to the space of reasons and not to an independent realm of experience. Dan Hutto and Eric Myin have recently presented the Hard Problem of Content (...) as an ensemble of reasons against naturalistic accounts of content. In a nutshell, it states that covariance relations—even though they are naturalistically acceptable explanatory resources—do not constitute content. The authors exploit this move in order to promote their preferred radical enactivist and anti-representationalist option, according to which, basic minds—the lower stratum of cognition—do not involve content. Although it is controversial to argue that the Hard Problem of Content effectively dismisses naturalistic theories of representation, a central aspect of it—the idea that information as covariance does not suffice to explain content—finds support among the defenders of classical cognitive representationalism, such as Marcin Miłkowski. This support—together with the acknowledgment this remark about covariance is a point already made by Sellars in his criticism of the Myth of the Given—has a number of interesting implications. Not only is it of interest for the debates about representationalism in cognitive science, where it can be understood as an anticipatory move, but it also offers some clues and insights for reconsidering some issues along Sellarsian lines—a conflation between two concepts of representation that is often assumed in cognitive science, a distinction between two types of relevant normativities, and a reconsideration of the naturalism involved in such explanations. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss and characterize transcendental and salvational aspects of two naturalistic philosophical projects, those of Robert Corrington, a contemporary American Naturalist and George Santayana, the first identifiable American Naturalist. I am considering here soteriological pathways available for transformation or transfiguration of the self toward a state of spiritual optimization in an imminent natural cosmos where all but limited gains seem to be out of human hands. The individual, imbedded in Nature, is caught up in an (...) unteleological stream of Nature's own formation. In my consideration of this subject in relation to Robert Corrington's work, I have found a helpful and insightful .. (shrink)

Processes of adapting complex information for broad audiences became a pressing concern by the turn of the twentieth century. Channels of communication ranged from public lectures to printed books designed to serve a social class eager for self-improvement. Through analyzing a course of public lectures given by George Howard Darwin (1845–1912) for the Lowell Institute in Boston and the monograph he based on these, The Tides and Kindred Phenomena of the Solar System (1898), this article connects the important practices of (...) public lecturing and book production–two aspects of knowledge dissemination that tend to be studied as separate entities. Darwin, Plumian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge and son of the famous naturalist, relied on a diverse material culture when lecturing and producing a book. Giving a new account of Darwin’s scientific work through exploring his adaption of it for broader audiences, this article connects the diverse material culture Darwin employed in talks to the practice of producing a published book. The content of objects demonstrated and the lantern slides projected during Darwin’s lectures evolved to form a book designed to engage broad sectors of society in Europe and the United States. Darwin’s lectures were attended at full capacity, while The Tides was soon printed in numerous English editions and translated into German, Italian, Hungarian, and Spanish. (shrink)

The aim of the dissertation is to formulate a research program in moral cognition modeled on aspects of Universal Grammar and organized around three classic problems in moral epistemology: What constitutes moral knowledge? How is moral knowledge acquired? How is moral knowledge put to use? Drawing on the work of Rawls and Chomsky, a framework for investigating -- is proposed. The framework is defended against a range of philosophical objections and contrasted with the approach of developmentalists like (...) Piaget and Kohlberg. ;One chapter consists of an interpretation of the analogy Rawls draws in A Theory of Justice between moral theory and generative linguistics. A second chapter clarifies the empirical significance of Rawls' linguistic analogy by formulating a solution to the problem of descriptive adequacy with respect to a class of commonsense moral intuitions, including those discussed in the trolley problem literature originating in the work of Foot and Thomson. Three remaining chapters defend Rawls' linguistic analogy against some of its critics. In response to Hare's objection that Rawls' conception of moral theory is too empirical and insufficiently normative, it is argued that Hare fails to acknowledge both the centrality of the problem of empirical adequacy in the history of moral philosophy and the complexity of Rawls' approach to the problem of normative adequacy. In response to Nagel's claim that the analogy between moral theory and linguistics is false because whatever native speakers agree on is English, but whatever ordinary men agree in condemning is not necessarily wrong, it is argued that the criticism ignores both Rawls' use of the competence-performance distinction and the theory-dependence of the corresponding distinction in linguistics. In response to Dworkin's claim that Rawls' conception of moral theory is incompatible with naturalism and presupposes constructivism, it is argued that Dworkin's distinction between naturalism and constructivism represents a false antithesis; neither is an accurate interpretation of the model of moral theory Rawls describes in A Theory of Justice. The thesis concludes by situating Rawls' linguistic analogy within the context of broader debates in metaethics, democratic theory, natural law theory, and the theory of moral development. (shrink)

The contemporary consensus in analytic philosophy concerning cultural relativism is: it is impossible to formulate relativism coherently, diversity does not provide good reason for accepting relativist conclusions anyway, and if relativism is false, or incoherent, then cross-cultural disagreement, however intractable, raises no important epistemological challenge. I challenge every aspect of this consensus in the light of contemporary theories of reference and knowledge, focussing on various traditional cultures' supernatural explanations of illness. ;I defend the coherence of relativism against standard (...) objections, arguing that: it is possible to make sense of the claim that a sentence has different truth-conditions in different frameworks, while, in significant respects, retaining the same meaning; cultural relativism does not rule out the possibility of rational discussion between distinct cultural traditions; even self-referential relativist theses are neither self-refuting nor self-undermining. I suggest a distinctive way of arguing from cross-cultural differences to relativism, which is plausible, though inconclusive. ;I then argue that the alternative to relativism about rationally irresolvable cross-cultural disagreement is skepticism. Far from undermining the anthropological challenge to the objective justification of our beliefs--as might be thought--naturalistic epistemology and semantics themselves provide reasons to appreciate the force of this challenge, though they require us to rethink its nature. Reliability of belief production or regulation is not sufficient to provide knowledge, or even justification, in cases in which rival methods of belief assessment pose salient alternatives and there is no "neutral" reason for supposing one method to be more reliable. If, as I argue, neutral reasons for rejecting traditional methods of witchcraft detection are not available, then we do not know that witches do not exist. The resulting skepticism, however, would be a fairly circumscribed one. Most scientific beliefs we ordinarily take to be well confirmed--including beliefs about unobservable entities--remain so on the standards I defend. What proves less epistemically secure are the deeper metaphysical commitment to materialism and naturalism associated with Western science, commitments underlying our rejection of supernatural explanations of illness. (shrink)

The thesis aims at analyzing the concepts of risk and safety as well as the class of concepts to which they belong, thick concepts, focusing in particular on the normative aspects involved. Essay I analyzes thick concepts, i.e. concepts such as cruelty and kindness that seem to combine descriptive and evaluative features. The traditional account, in which thick concepts are analyzed as the conjunction of a factual description and an evaluation, is criticized. Instead, it is argued that the descriptive and (...) evaluative aspects must be understood as a whole. Furthermore, it is argued that the two main worries evoked against non-naturalism – that non-naturalism cannot account for disagreement and that it is not genuinely explanatory – can be met. Essay II investigates the utilization of the Kripke/Putnam causal theory of reference in relation to the Open Question Argument. It is argued that the Open Question Argument suitably interpreted provides prima facie evidence against the claim that moral kinds are natural kinds, and that the causal theory, as interpreted by leading naturalist defenders, actually underscores this conclusion. Essay III utilizes the interpretation of the Open Question Argument argued for in the previous essay in order to argue against naturalistic reduction of risk, i.e. reduction of risk into natural concepts such as probability and harm. Three different normative aspects of risk and safety are put forward – epistemic uncertainty, distributive normativity and border normativity – and it is argued that these normative aspects cannot be reduced to a natural measure. Essay IV provides a conceptual analysis of safety in the context of societal decision-making, and argues for a notion that explicitly includes epistemic uncertainty, the degree to which we are uncertain of our knowledge of the situation at hand. Some formal versions of a comparative safety concept are also proposed. Essay V puts forward a normative critique against a common argument, viz. the claim that the public should follow the experts’ advice in recommending an activity whenever the experts have the best knowledge of the risk involved. The importance of safety in risk acceptance together with considerations from epistemic uncertainty makes the claim incorrect even after including plausible limitations to exclude ‘external’ considerations. Furthermore, it is shown that the scope of the objection covers risk assessment as well as risk management. Essay VI provides a systematized account of safety engineering practices that clarifies their relation to the goal of safety engineering, namely to increase safety. A list of 24 principles referred to in the literature of safety engineering is provided, divided into four major categories. It is argued that important aspects of these methods can be better understood with the help of the distinction between risk and uncertainty, in addition to the common distinction between risk and probability. (shrink)

This article has two tasks: to investigate the notions of space, time and causality in Schopenhauer’s theory of knowledge and, subsequently, to carry out a comparative study of the results obtained with the epistemological considerations between the first and second phase of Nietzsche’s thought. It is understood that conclusions concerning the world as representation had an echo in the first digressions of the author of The Birth of Tragedy on the conceptions of space, time and causality. However, the departures (...) begin to be perceived still in the first years of the 1870s. It is chosen to call the reflections on knowledge until On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, considering, besides the unsystematicity of the Nietzschean approaches, the maturation of the epistemological investigations in Human, All Too Human. It is discussed how the naturalistic aspects of the second phase of Nietzsche’s intellectual activity find implications in his conceptions of space, time and, above all, causality. It is emphasized, however, that it is not the intention of this work to argue that Nietzsche’s epistemology is originally derived from Schopenhauer or that it depends exclusively on the notions studied here. (shrink)

The marriage of Sally Peris Hughes (1895–1984) and Franz Schrader (1891–1962) in November 1920 launched a highly successful scientific collaboration that lasted over four decades. The Schraders were avid naturalists, adroit experimentalists, and keen theoreticians, and both had long, productive, and fruitful careers in zoology. They offer an extraordinarily rich case study that provides an insightful view of the work carried out in several areas of the life sciences from the 1920s to the 1960s—fieldwork, cytology, cytogenetics, and entomology—as well as (...) critical aspects of the social world of contemporary science. By focusing on the fieldwork the couple carried out in Mexico and Central America in the late 1920s and early 1930s, this paper seeks to illuminate how this collaborative scientific marriage embodies a collective, complex, and integrated personal and social arrangement that served to enhance both knowledge production and disciplinary development in several areas of science. It also reveals ways in which marriage could serve as a means to help both parties navigate and negotiate restrictive sociocultural norms and institutional arrangements in science involving gender, power, and authority in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

Nietzsche's views on knowledge have been interpreted in at least three incompatible ways-as transcendental, naturalistic, or proto-deconstructionist. While the first two share a commitment to the possibility of objective truth, the third reading denies this by highlighting Nietzsche's claims about the necessarily falsifying character of human knowledge. This chapter examines the ways in which his work can be construed as seeking ways of overcoming the strict opposition between naturalism and transcendental philosophy, whilst fully taking into account the (...) error theory. In doing so, it clarifies the nature of Nietzsche's ontological commitments, both in the early and the later work, and shows that his relation to transcendental idealism is more subtle than is allowed by naturalistic interpreters, while conversely accounting for the impossibility of conceiving the conditions of possibility of knowledge as genuinely a priori. (shrink)

Byung-Chul Han (Seoul, 1959) establishes one of the most meaningful and deep understandings of the experience of the contemporary subject. In his view, temporality has suffered a radical atomization that translates into a fragmented life experience: a collection of isolated instants devoid of a sense of duration. As a by-product of this circumstance, we see our very way of thinking and learning changing accordingly. Where we used to find knowledge, we now see information. The aim of this paper will (...) be to explore the transformative power of education in the context of our “broken” temporality. (shrink)

This paper contrasts the Hegelianism of contemporary neo-pragmatism and the Hegelianism of classical pragmatism as it has been reassessed in contemporary Deweyan scholarship. Drawing on Dewey’s interpretation of Hegel, this paper argues that Hegel’s theory of the spirit is in many aspects more akin to Dewey’s pragmatism than Brandom’s. The first part compares Dewey’s pragmatism with Hegel’s conceptions of experience and the theory/practice relation. The second part compares Dewey’s naturalism with Hegel’s theory of the relation between nature and spirit.

Nietzsche's views on knowledge have been interpreted in at least three incompatible ways - as transcendental, naturalistic or proto-deconstructionist. While the first two share a commitment to the possibility of objective truth, the third reading denies this by highlighting Nietzsche's claims about the necessarily falsifying character of human knowledge (his so-called error theory). This paper examines the ways in which his work can be construed as seeking ways of overcoming the strict opposition between naturalism and transcendental philosophy (...) whilst fully taking into account the error theory (interpreted non-literally, as a hyperbolic warning against uncritical forms of realism). In doing so, it clarifies the nature of Nietzsche's ontological commitments, both in the early and the later work, and shows that his relation to transcendental idealism is more subtle than is allowed by naturalistic interpreters while conversely accounting for the impossibility of conceiving the conditions of the possibility of knowledge as genuinely a priori. (shrink)

In this essay, I criticize Laudan's view that methodological rules in science are best understood as hypothetical imperatives, for example, to realize cognitive aim A, follow method B. I criticize his idea that such rules are best evaluated by a naturalized philosophy of science which collects the empirical evidence bearing on the soundness of these rules. My claim is that this view yields a poor explanation of (1) the role of methodological rules in establishing the rationality of scientific practices, (2) (...) the debates scientists have over rival methodological rules, and (3) the reasons on the basis of which scientists actually embrace, challenge, or transform methodological rules. A better explanation is provided by treating at least some methodological rules as foundational standards of theory-appraisal which define the criteria of scientific truth, knowledge, evidence, proof, explanations, etc., for a certain tradition or community of scientific practice. Such standards are in turn grounded or challenged on the basis of their coherence or incoherence with a wider body of scientific judgments. This view leads away from a naturalized philosophy of science back to its more classical epistemological conception. (shrink)

The paper focuses on one central aspect of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge: his exemption of the contents of mathematics and the natural sciences from sociological investigations. After emphasizing the importance of Mannheim’s contribution and his exemption-thesis to the history and development of the field and the problem of relativism, I survey several interpretations of the thesis – especially those put forward by proponents of the so-called ‘Strong Programme’. I argue that these interpretations do not get the philosophical (...) background and impetus of Mannheim’s contribution right. By distinguishing between naturalistic and anti-naturalistic strands in Mannheim’s work I propose a new reading on which Mannheim did not exempt the contents of the areas in question principally or because of a lack of nerve and will. It is argued that Mannheim’s exemption-thesis rather is a consequence of his own sketchy sociological investigations of ‘the paradigm of the natural sciences’. (shrink)

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism—as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu. That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind”. Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not (...) the extension to the study of the mind of the methods of natural philosophy; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader. Rather, Locke says quite directly if we pay heed to such passages, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct”. There would be more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism, but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which falls under what we now call epistemology becomes an ontology—materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality.. Put differently, I want to examine the shift from the logic of ideas in the seventeenth century to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us, to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe, and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds. (shrink)

This paper’s main contention is that some basically methodological developments in science which are apparently distant and unrelated can be seen as part of a sequential story. Focusing on general inferential and epistemological matters, the paper links occurrences separated by both in time and space, by formal and representational issues rather than social or disciplinary links. It focuses on a few limited aspects of several cognitive practices in medical and biological contexts separated by geography, disciplines and decades, but connected by (...) long term transdisciplinary representational and inferential structures and constraints. The paper intends to show a given set of knowledge claims based on organizing statistically empirical data can be seen to have been underpinned by a previous, more familiar, and probably more natural, narrative handling of similar evidence. To achieve that this paper moves from medicine in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth century in England among gentleman naturalists, following its subject: the shift from narrative depiction of hereditary transmission of physical peculiarities to posterior statistical articulations of the same phenomena. Some early defenders of heredity as an important causal presence in the understanding of life adopted singular narratives, in the form of case stories from medical and natural history traditions, to flesh out a special kind of causality peculiar to heredity. This work tries to reconstruct historically the rationale that drove the use of such narratives. It then shows that when this rationale was methodologically challenged, its basic narrative and probabilistic underpinings were transferred to the statistical quantificational tools that took their place. (shrink)

I begin by arguing that a consistent general naturalism must be understood in terms of methodological maxims rather than metaphysical doctrines. Some specific maxims are proposed. I then defend a generalized naturalism from the common objection that it is incapable of accounting for the normative aspects of human life, including those of scientific practice itself. Evolutionary naturalism, however, is criticized as being incapable of providing a sufficient explanation of categorical moral norms. Turning to the epistemological norms of science itself, particularly (...) those governing the empirical testing of specific models, I argue that these should be regarded as conditional rather than categorical and that, as such, can be given a naturalistic justification. The justification, however, is more cognitive than evolutionary. The historical development of science is found to be a better place for applying evolutionary ideas. After briefly considering the possibility of a naturalistic understanding of mathematics and logic, I turn to the problem of reconciling scientific realism with an evolutionary picture of scientific development. The solution, I suggest, is to understand scientific knowledge as being “perspectival” rather than absolutely objective. I first argue that scientific observation, whether by humans or instruments, is perspectival. This argument is extended to scientific theorizing which is regarded not as the formulation of universal laws of nature but as the construction of principles to be used in the construction of models to be applied to specific natural systems. The application of models, however, is argued to be not merely opportunistic but constrained by the methodological presumption that we live in a world with a definite causal structure even though we can understand it only from various perspectives. (shrink)

This comprehensive collection, bringing together significant essays by leading philosophers of the twentieth century, represents one prominent school of American thought philosophic naturalism. Naturalism holds that nature is objective and can be studied to gain knowledge that is not determined by methodology, perspective, belief, or theory. For the naturalist, "nature" is an all-encompassing concept; nothing is other than natural and any notion of a supernatural realm is rejected. Naturalism, however, cannot be equated with materialistic reductionism or strict determinism. Certain (...) nonmaterial aspects of human existence thoughts, feelings, meanings, values, beliefs, ideals, and free will are included within the scope of the naturalist's approach. (shrink)

More than a century ago, Edward W. Nelson and Edward A. Goldman spent 14 years traveling across much of Mexico in one of the most critical biological expeditions ever undertaken by two naturalists. This long-term survey was a cornerstone in Mexican mammalogy development; however, their specific role in discovering taxa that were practically unknown before the expedition is not yet necessarily recognized. In a time when the historical aspect of knowledge on mammals is being ignored for the new (...) generations of mammalogists, a detailed analysis of the legacy of the survey is essential. Here I focus on shrews to analyze how the fieldwork and the specimens they collected have contributed to the current knowledge of shrews in the country. Nelson and Goldman collected 474 specimens of shrews, representing 31 of the 40 species that have currently been recognized. This collection has been key to building taxonomic, evolutionary, and biogeographic knowledge of shrews in the country. The success of the expedition was primarily due to the epistemic role of novel methods and approaches in natural history research at the time. The collection also offers the opportunity to document the loss of species and ecological interactions as indirect consequences of human activities, especially in montane regions. I argue that the value of this expedition can still increase with the use of modern biodiversity study tools and the digitization and access of ancient material such as photographs, field notes, and correspondence. (shrink)

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, the ways in which knowledge--scientific, social, and cultural--is produced are undergoing fundamental changes. In The New Production of Knowledge, a distinguished group of authors analyze these changes as marking the transition from established institutions, disciplines, practices, and policies to a new mode of knowledge production. Identifying such elements as reflexivity, transdisciplinarity, and heterogeneity within this new mode, the authors consider their impact and interplay with the role of (...) class='Hi'>knowledge in social relations. While the knowledge produced by research and development in science and technology is accorded central focus, the authors also outline the changing dimensions of social scientific and humanities knowledge and the relations between the production of knowledge and its dissemination through education. Placing science policy and scientific knowledge within the broader context of contemporary society, this book will be essential reading for all those concerned with the changing nature of knowledge, with the social study of science, with educational systems, and with the correlation between research and development and social, economic, and technological development. "Thought-provoking in its identification of issues that are global in scope; for policy makers in higher education, government, or the commercial sector." --Choice "By their insightful identification of the recent social transformation of knowledge production, the authors have been able to assert new imperatives for policy institutions. The lessons of the book are deep." --Alexis Jacquemin, Universite Catholique de Louvain and Advisor, Foreign Studies Unit, European Commission "Should we celebrate the emergence of a 'post-academic' mode of postmodern knowledge production of the post-industrial society of the 21st Century? Or should we turn away from it with increasing fear and loathing as we also uncover its contradictions. A generation of enthusiasts and/or critics will be indebted to the team of authors for exposing so forcefully the intimate connections between all the cognitive, educational, organizational, and commercial changes that are together revolutionizing the sciences, the technologies, and the humanities. This book will surely spark off a vigorous and fruitful debate about the meaning and purpose of knowledge in our culture." --Professor John Ziman, (Wendy, Janey at Ltd. is going to provide affiliation. Contact if you don't hear from her.) "Jointly authored by a team of distinguished scholars spanning a number of disciplines, The New Production of Knowledge maps the changes in the mode of knowledge production and the global impact of such transformations. . . . The authors succeed . . . at sketching out, in very large strokes, the emerging trends in knowledge production and their implications for future society. The macro focus of the book is a welcome change from the micro obsession of most sociologists of science, who have pretty much deconstructed institutions and even scientific knowledge out of existence." --Contemporary Sociology "This book is a timely contribution to current discussion on the breakdown of and need to renegotiate the social contract between science and society that Vannevar Bush and likeminded architects of science policy constructed immediately after World War II. It goes far beyond the usual scattering of fragmentary insights into changing institutional landscapes, cognitive structures, or quality control mechanisms of present day science, and their linkages with society at large. Tapping a wide variety of sources, the authors provide a coherent picture of important new characteristics that, taken altogether, fundamentally challenge our traditional notions of what academic research is all about. This well-founded analysis of the social redistribution of knowledge and its associated power patterns helps articulate what otherwise tends to remain an--albeit widespread--intuition. Unless they adapt to the new situation, universities in the future will find the centers of gravity of knowledge production moving even further beyond their ken. Knowledge of the social and cognitive dynamics of science in research is much needed as a basis of science and technology policymaking. The New Production of Knowledge does a lot to fill this gap. Another unique feature is its discussion of the humanities, which are usually left out in works coming out of the social studies of science." --Aant Elzinga, University od Goteborg. (shrink)

Philosophical interest in intentional action has flourished in recent decades. Typically, writers in the field of action theory seek necessary and sufficient conditions for a movement's being an action, conditions derived from a conceptual analysis of everyday action ascriptions. However, only a naturalistic account of intentional action, an account whose methods and aims are continuous with those of the empirical sciences, will truly help further our understanding of action as a biological phenomenon. ;Action is naturalized as a species of (...) movement that is both purposive and self-controlled, using these terms in novel senses. Various psychological and physiological models of purposiveness have been offered, including negative feedback, motor program, and dynamical systems models. However, while such non-historical models offer valuable insights into the nature of how organisms control their movements, they fail as general models of purposiveness because consideration of a movement's selectional history is required in order to classify movements as unitary behaviors rather than merely accidental motions. Non-historical models also fail to cover instances of unsuccessful purposive movements and cases of "functionally emergent behaviors." For such reasons, purposiveness must be seen as an historical property of movements; a movement is purposive insofar as it has a Millikanian proper function. ;An agent's capacity to exert a high degree of control over its movements marks the second key underlying property of action. I highlight an aspect of behavior-control which empirical theorists have largely ignored, namely the extent to which agents "could have done otherwise" than how they have in fact acted upon particular occasions. Self-control in this "could have done otherwise" sense is naturalized in terms of "modulatory interconnectivity." Modulatory interconnectivity involves the extent to which an agent's internal behavior-control modules facilitate behavioral interruptability via the interaction of informational links of inhibition and/or suppression. The greater the extent to which an agent's behavior-control modules have the capacity to modulate one another's activities, the more the agent has the capacity for self-control in the "could have done otherwise" sense. This view is elucidated and supported with the aid of models from robotics and neurophysiology. (shrink)

Ethical naturalism is the doctrine that moral properties, such as moral goodness, justice, rightness, wrongness, and the like, are among the “natural” properties that things can have. It is the doctrine that moral properties are “natural” and that morality is in this sense an aspect of “nature.” Accordingly, it is a view about the semantics and metaphysics of moral discourse. For example, a utilitarian naturalist might propose that wrongness is the property an action could have of being such as (...) to undermine overall happiness, where happiness is taken to be a psychological property. Unfortunately, it is unclear what the naturalist means by a “natural” property. For my purposes in this paper, I shall assume that natural properties are such that our knowledge of them is fundamentally empirical, grounded in observation. More precisely, a property is “natural” just in case any synthetic proposition about its instantiation can be known onlya posteriori,or with the aid of experience. (shrink)

Philosophy of Science, understood as a special philosophical discipline, was born only at the beginning of the twentieth century as part of the effort for overcoming the “foundational crisis” that had affected especially mathematics and physics. Therefore, it was conceived as an investigation about the features and reliability of scientific knowledge and for a few decades was deeply marked by the philosophical approach of logical empiricism. This cognitive point of view persisted also when, after Kuhn’s work, the attention focused (...) on the scientific activity in order to understand scientific change and a sociological model replaced the view that empirical adequacy and logical consistency are the factors that determine the change of scientific theories. Ethical, social and political considerations regarding science ware considered inappropriate and potentially dangerous since they violate the alleged “neutrality of science” with respect to values. Nevertheless, the strict intertwining of science and technology in contemporary “technoscience” has produced a wide debate regarding the practical aspect of technoscientific activity that has the intrinsic features of a philosophical debate. Therefore, it is natural and advisable that the entire wealth of the philosophical disciplines be called to contribute to the specific complex discourse of the Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

In the sociology of knowledge, the relationship between society and knowledge —or rather what separates them — remains an unsolved problem. A critical analysis of various solutions that we must look for to this problem suggests the plausibility of a passage between social groups, styles of argumentation and objects of knowledge. An empirical model of “decision displacements” is proposed on the basis of a corpus of texts and of observations derived from concrete analysis of a laboratory situation.

Scientific realism is the position that the aim of science is to advance on truth and increase knowledge about observable and unobservable aspects of the mind-independent world which we inhabit. This book articulates and defends that position. In presenting a clear formulation and addressing the major arguments for scientific realism Sankey appeals to philosophers beyond the community of, typically Anglo-American, analytic philosophers of science to appreciate and understand the doctrine. The book emphasizes the epistemological aspects of scientific realism and (...) contains an original solution to the problem of induction that rests on an appeal to the principle of uniformity of nature. (shrink)

In his graceful philosophical account, Alfred I. Tauber shows why Thoreau still seems so relevant today—more relevant in many respects than he seemed to his contemporaries. Although Thoreau has been skillfully and thoroughly examined as a writer, naturalist, mystic, historian, social thinker, Transcendentalist, and lifelong student, we may find in Tauber's portrait of Thoreau the moralist a characterization that binds all these aspects of his career together. Thoreau was caught at a critical turn in the history of science, between the (...) ebb of Romanticism and the rising tide of positivism. He responded to the challenges posed by the new ideal of objectivity not by rejecting the scientific worldview, but by humanizing it for himself. Tauber portrays Thoreau as a man whose moral vision guided his life's work. Each of Thoreau's projects reflected a self-proclaimed "metaphysical ethics," an articulated program of self-discovery and self-knowing. By writing, by combining precision with poetry in his naturalist pursuits and simplicity with mystical fervor in his daily activity, Thoreau sought to live a life of virtue—one he would characterize as marked by deliberate choice. This unique vision of human agency and responsibility will still seem fresh and contemporary to readers at the start of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Any serious attempt to give an account of the cognitive aspect of science – as contrasted with e.g. its social or cultural aspects – cannot ignore the automation revolution. In the conception presented in this paper the results of computer science are taken seriously and integrated with many of the ideas concerning what constitutes scientific inquiry that have been proposed at least since the early Middle Ages. The central idea is that of reliable inquiry. Science makes explicit and elaborates (...) on the methods of acquiring beliefs in our daily life. The central question a scientific method applied to inquiry needs to face is if it is reliable in getting to the truth. On the reliabilist criteria presented here, if a method is logically warranted to get to the right answer – given data and background knowledge available – and to stick to it afterwards, then it is reliable. This is a normative theory, but the standard of reliability is adjusted to the domain of the inquiry at hand. This paper presents the central tenets of the reliabilist conception of science and briefly outlines the main results underlying it. Roughly, the aim of science is interesting truth about the world around us (scientific realism) and reliabilist epistemology affords us precise answers as to how far science can succeed in this task – given the methods, goals and background assumptions available. The philosophical task to deliver an adequate understanding of science is taken to be continuous with scientific research itself (naturalism), a major part of which is concerned with delivering causal explanations (causality) and can only be carried out with limited resources (computability). Many of the ideas integrated into the reliabilist conception of science and precisely articulated therewith have appeared earlier in both philosophy and science (history of ideas). I conclude the exposition of the ideas integrated into the reliabilist conception of science with discussions of sample case studies where the reliabilist conception of science has been applied to actual scientific research. For obvious reasons none of the grand conceptions of science from the distant past is adequate. Towards the end of this paper I give some substance to the claim that among the few contemporary conceptions of science reliabilist epistemology is the the most comprehensive account. For only it systematically elaborates the ideas of reliability and computability accompanying science from its inception. None of the past or contemporary alternatives to a thoroughly revised understanding of science offered by the reliabilist approach can embrace the recent outburst of new sciences such as computer science, Bayesian statistics and cognitive science. An outline of open problems and directions for future research concludes the paper. (shrink)

Confucius aimed to overcome the Spring and Autumn period and achieve order by restoring the humanist tradition and putting it right. At the same time, Confucius distanced himself from discovering the order of natural things, which caused him to be regarded as a representative humanist philosopher. This interpretation could be misleading in that it overlooks the natural aspect of Confucian philosophy. To that aspect, this article asserts that a moral practice in Confucianism has a natural character. The point (...) emphasizing the natural character of Confucian philosophy must be argued in a way in that it does not disregard the humanist character of Confucian thought. This is possible by recognizing the dual aspect of Zhi (直), and I argue further that Confucius can be interpreted through the concept of moral naturalism. Definitions of Zhi in the Analects indicates that morality bases itself on forms of human life developed in a natural way. Confucius’s references surrounding Zhi underlie the concept that our moral beliefs and actions are not solely justified by reason alone but in a sense also depend on facts in the natural world, providing grounds to interpret his moral philosophy as a naturalism. On the other hand, that Confucius thinks Zhi alone cannot make one Ren differentiates his position from strong naturalism, which reduces the normative realm of morality to causal laws of nature. From his emphasis on the cultivation of the given dispositions to personality, one can infer that Confucius did not agree with the reduction of moral norms to natural facts. The duality of Zhi showing the aspect of morality being forced by nature while not negating the proper character of morality can be properly and coherently understood from the view of soft naturalism. (shrink)

Purpose of the article is to present in two parts the selected aspects of application of monetary policy in the euro area pre and post 2008 as well as insitutional adaptations brought by the EU legislator. Methodology/methods In order to better explain these points, the article relies partially on a comparison with the framework and application of the monetary policy by the Federal Reserve as well as on a historic method when outlining the influence of definition of financial stability from (...) the ECB/eurosystem towards other prominent central banks. Scientific aim The article presents selected aspects of the monetary policy in the part of the EU where single currency was introduced in order to outline state of the art governance structure as well as a certain institutional creativity in application of powers conferred upon the central banks by the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and Protocol on the Statute of the European System of Central Banks and of the European Central Bank. The goal is to prove the hypothesis of robustness of the framework and present the limits that can only be pushed further by the legislative power. The conclusions confirm on the one hand that the framework of monetary policy based on strong institutional safeguards such as legislative power and independence is very resilient and can prove efficient and creative enough to stabilise an innovative monetary system, however, on the other hand, validate the hypothesis that certain adaptations can only be performed on the basis of a legislative adaptations. (shrink)