This chapter is an invited contribution to a book on the naturalness of theistic belief. I start by considering ordinary usage of the term 'natural'. I then clarify how I shall use the terms 'naturalism', 'theism', 'worldview' and 'big picture'. I consider the demographic spread of commitment to theistic big pictures and naturalistic big pictures. I consider the distribution of happiness over those committed to theistic big pictures and naturalistic big pictures. I consider the distribution of reasons over those (...) committed to theistic big pictures and naturalistic big pictures. I consider whether intuitive considerations favour one kind of big picture over the other. As it often the case, I draw somewhat irenic conclusions from these considerations. (shrink)

This essay offers some fairly extensive objections to the critique of Bhaskar’s use of transcendental arguments found in chapter four of Tuukka Kaidesoja’s Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology. The essay has three sections that correspond to three sets of objections, each of which centres around a certain topic in Kaidesoja’s critique. The first concerns Kaidesoja’s appeal to the connection between transcendental arguments and Kant’s transcendental idealism to criticize Bhaskar. The second concerns Kaidesoja’s problematization of a posteriori premises in Bhaskar’s transcendental (...) arguments. The third concerns Kaidesoja’s rejection of the prospect of ‘naturalized transcendental arguments’ and the non-transcendental ‘naturalistic arguments’ he proposes as an alternative. The overall aim of this essay is not just to defend Bhaskar’s naturalized transcendentalism against Kaidesoja’s metaphilosophical naturalism but also to help counter the association of transcendental philosophy with anti-naturalistic apriorism, foundationalism, idealism, and infalliblism frequently voiced by antitranscendental philosophers. (shrink)

I first offer some reflections on the term religious naturalism. I then outline how moral thought might be configured in the context of religious naturalism. It is proposed that the goal of morality is to generate a flourishing community and that humans negotiate their social interactions using moral capacities that are cultivated in the context of culture. Six such capacities are considered: strategic reciprocity, humaneness, fair–mindedness, courage, reverence, and mindfulness. Moral capacities are contrasted with moral susceptibilities, fueled by (...) self–interest, and brought to the fore in times of stress and humiliation. The essay is in two parts. I first respond to Jerome Stone's query as to the nature of religious naturalism. This is followed by the text of my presentation at the 2001 AAR meeting. (shrink)

In this article, I assess Tuukka Kaidesoja’s response to my objections to his critique of transcendental arguments and respond to his criticisms of my work. I argue that his new attempt to link transcendental arguments to Kant’s transcendental idealism is just as question-begging as his previous attempt, that his problematization of Bhaskar’s use of Kantian terminology is premised upon a confusion, and that his elaboration of explanatory necessity still fails to clearly distinguish it from transcendental necessity. I also elaborate and (...) defend my conception of transcendental arguments and the relative a priority it involves against Kaidesoja’s criticisms of them. While I concede the validity of his concerns about the starting point of Bhaskar’s transcendental analysis of experimental activity, I maintain that this does not undermine naturalized transcendentalism itself. I thus conclude that Kaidesoja’s metaphilosophical naturalism is premised upon a flawed critique of transcendentalism and an insufficiently motivated alternative approach. (shrink)

This paper explores Kornblith's proposal in "Knowledge and its Place in Nature" that knowledge is a natural kind that can be elucidated and understood in scientific terms. Central to Kornblith's development of this proposal is the claim that there is a single category of unreflective knowledge that is studied by cognitive ethologists and is the proper province of epistemology. This claim is challenged on the grounds that even unreflective knowledge in language-using humans reflects forms of logical reasoning that are in (...) principle unavailable to nonlinguistic animals. (shrink)

. In the first part of this essay I sketch a view on cosmogenesis from the perspective of modern science, emphasizing, first, that the laws of nature are outcomes of the history of nature, not imposed on nature from outside of nature; and, second, that the universe, including human beings, is the result of a single, natural process. It consistently brings forth novelty through a probabilistic sequence of syntheses. Consequently, the new emerges from the unification of elements that were previously (...) unified. This universal creative process is both probabilistic and nonlinear. It is probabilistic because each creative event occurs within a cohort of also possible events. It is nonlinear because the new has qualities that its elements in isolation do not possess. I refer to this model of understanding cosmogenesis as strict naturalism. In the second part of the essay I argue that deistic and theistic models of cosmogenesis cannot cope with strict naturalism because they exclude teleology and supernatural interference in the creative process. In contrast to deism and theism, I show that Christianity is capable of integrating strict naturalism. To do that I focus on the Christian notion of incarnation. At the center of this reflection is the attempt to increase the understanding of Christian faith that only the Word of God creates. (shrink)

Reviewing the state of play in the attempt to naturalise content a quarter of a century after John Haugeland’s survey paper “The Intentionality All-Stars”, Dan Hutto and Glenda Satne propose a new naturalistic account of content that supposedly synthesizes what is best in the three failed programs of neo-Cartesianism, neo-Behaviourism and neo-Pragmatism. They propose to appeal to a Relaxed Naturalism, a non-reductive genealogical form of explanation and a primitive notion of contentless ur-intentionality. In this paper I argue that the (...) authors’ Relaxed Naturalism is a broad form of Scientific Naturalism and, as such, it is unable to account for the problem of conceptual normativity that arises for any scientific naturalist attempt to explain content – whether reductive or not. This is based on the irreconcilability of the objective third-personal character of scientific inquiry and the intersubjective second-personal nature of the normativity of content. I suggest that the authors would do better to simply become neo-Pragmatists who, properly understood, are Liberal Naturalists who have the conceptual and methodological resources to acknowledge and do justice to conceptually normative content. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to examine the nature of moral and legal norms in a broader context: first, taking into account logical and methodological assumptions, second, in the perspective of psychology of emotions and legal policy. The basic subject of the research carried out by Leon Petrażycki was represented by law. Originally, it had a psychological character, not an objective, eternal, and unchanging one. To fully understand the genesis and nature of morality and law, Petrażycki addressed the study (...) of mental phenomena, especially emotional experiences. First, however, he developed appropriate rules of logic and scientific methodology. Then he developed a new classification of mental phenomena, among which the fundamental role is played by bilateral emotions. At some stage, emotions begin to cooperate with cognitive processes, first of all with imaginations. Imaginations of acts, such as theft, betrayal, murder, can cause repulsive emotions, and type imaginations, such as truthfulness, charity, justice can evoke apulsive emotions. On the basis of such associations, judgments are created over time, the content of which becomes a basis for fundamental rules of conduct, that is, for norms. There are two fundamentally different types of norms: moral norms and legal norms. The norms of the first type are imperative and represent the nature of validity, while the norms of the second type are imperative-attributive and they also always entitle someone to something, i.e. they give someone a right. This division determines a fundamental difference between morality and law. (shrink)

What is a human being? The twentieth and twenty-first century tradition known as 'philosophical anthropology' has approached this question with unusual sophistication, experimentalism, and subtlety. Such innovations as Arnold Gehlen's description of humans as naturally 'deficient' beings in need of artificial institutions to survive; Max Scheler's concept of 'spirit' (Geist) as the physically and organically irreducible realm of persons and spiritual acts; and Helmuth Plessner's analysis of the way human embodiment transcends spatial locations and limitations ('ex-centric positionality') have inspired generations (...) of European intellectuals. This edited collection from an international network of scholars critically engages the philosophical anthropologies of Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen, Blumenberg, and others in unparalleled detail, showing their applicability to the themes of nature and naturalism, organic life, comparative primatology, cultural anthropology, paleoanthropology, the body, addiction, and death. The volume sets a new standard for Anglophone scholarship on this tradition and will be required reading for specialists in twentieth-century philosophy, history of the human sciences, history of the life sciences, and philosophies of human nature. (shrink)

In this article I consider whether Hegel is a naturalist or an anti-naturalist with respect to his philosophy of nature. I adopt a cluster-based approach to naturalism, on which positions are more or less naturalistic depending how many strands of the clusternaturalismthey exemplify. I focus on two strands: belief that philosophy is continuous with the empirical sciences, and disbelief in supernatural entities. I argue that Hegel regards philosophy of nature as distinct, but not wholly discontinuous, from empirical science and (...) that he believes in the reality of formal and final causes insofar as he is a realist about universal forms that interconnect to comprise a self-organizing whole. Nonetheless, for Hegel, natural particulars never fully realize these universal forms, so that empirical inquiry into these particulars and their efficient-causal interactions is always necessary. In these two respects, I conclude, Hegel's position sits in the middle of the naturalism/anti-naturalism spectrum. (shrink)

An argument against the view that natural norms are constituted out of some form of historical success.

Ecstatic naturalism and classical American philosophy both emphasize the creative possibilities of nature and expound metaphysical views in support of them. Ecstatic naturalism proposes that the creative transformations witnessed at the level of nature natured are sustained and empowered by nature naturing, which consists in innumerable “potencies.” This view has a historical precedence in Charles Peirce’s evolutionary cosmology, most notably in its cosmogonic stage of a “Platonic world” that consists in innumerable aesthetic potentialities. While Peirce’s cosmological position shares (...) some affinities with ecstatic naturalism, it nonetheless proposes its own unique theoretical stance on the creativity of.. (shrink)

This paper aims to address the relevance of the natural sciences for transcendental phenomenology, that is, the issue of naturalism. The first section distinguishes three varieties of naturalism and corresponding forms of naturalization: an ontological one, a methodological one, and an epistemological one. In light of these distinctions, in the second section, I examine the main projects aiming to “naturalize phenomenology”: neurophenomenology, front-loaded phenomenology, and formalized approaches to phenomenology. The third section then considers the commitments of Husserl’s (...) transcendental phenomenology with respect to the three varieties of naturalism previously discussed. I argue that Husserl rejected strong and weak forms of epistemological naturalism, strong methodological naturalism, and ontological naturalism. The fourth section presents the argument that Husserl endorsed a weak, conditional form of methodological naturalism. This point is illustrated with Husserl’s proposal of “somatology,” a natural science apt to study the corporeality of the lived body. The final section addresses the complementarity and respective limits of the transcendental phenomenological and the natural scientific frameworks. I argue that, on Husserl’s account, the function of transcendental phenomenology with respect to the natural sciences is to provide them with an epistemological foundation and an ontological clarification. I suggest that certain natural sciences can be understood, within the transcendental phenomenological framework, as “sciences of constitution,” that is, as sciences investigating the contribution of real structures acting as conditions of possibility for the occurrence of certain kinds of comprehensive unities in lived experience. (shrink)

Hume begins the Treatise of Human Nature by announcing the goal of developing a science of man; by the end of Book 1 of the Treatise, the science of man seems to founder in doubt. Underlying the tension between Hume's constructive ambition – his 'naturalism'– and his doubts about that ambition – his 'skepticism'– is the question of whether Hume is justified in continuing his philosophical project. In this paper, I explain how this question emerges in the final section (...) of Book 1 of the Treatise, the 'Conclusion of this Book', then examine Janet Broughton's and Don Garrett's answers to it, and conclude by sketching a different approach to this question. (shrink)

Science and its philosophical companion, Naturalism, represent reality in wholly nonpersonal terms. How, if at all, can a nonpersonal scheme accommodate the first-person perspective that we all enjoy? In this volume, Lynne Rudder Baker explores that question by considering both reductive and eliminative approaches to the first-person perspective. After finding both approaches wanting, she mounts an original constructive argument to show that a non-Cartesian first-person perspective belongs in the basic inventory of what exists. That is, the world that contains (...) us persons is irreducibly personal.After arguing for the irreducibilty and ineliminability of the first-person perspective, Baker develops a theory of this perspective. The first-person perspective has two stages, rudimentary and robust. Human infants and nonhuman animals with consciousness and intentionality have rudimentary first-person perspectives. In learning a language, a person acquires a robust first-person perspective: the capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself, in the first person. By developing an account of personal identity, Baker argues that her theory is coherent, and she shows various ways in which first-person perspectives contribute to reality. (shrink)

Too many theologies beg the question about the nature of religion by building metaphysically substantive assumptions into its description. Typically these assumptions are: the object of religious devotion must be both absolute and personal, final causality must be true, and there must be a cosmic conservation of value. Theological naturalism, exemplified in the thought of Henry Nelson Wieman, articulates an entirely formal, yet not substantively empty, conception of religion which does not beg these questions and which is consequently more (...) descriptively adequate to the nature of religion. It cannot therefore be assumed, without begging the question, that religious adequacy requires the metaphysical falsity of philosophical naturalism. (shrink)

In this dissertation I argue for a broadly Chomskian account of all natural language linguistic properties, including semantic properties. But the dissertation is as much concerned with methodological issues as with this substantive question. ;In chapter one, I argue that the standard motivation for Naturalistic accounts of language and mind is misguided. Rather such accounts should be motivated by the potential explanatory gains afforded by successful Naturalistic accounts. Accordingly, we should seek accounts that increase the science's evidentiary basis and explain (...) the central explanatory roles of its kinds. My account of linguistic kinds is based on and illustrates this account of Naturalism. ;Following a brief introduction to current syntactic theory , I argue that, in the less philosophically loaded domain of syntactic properties, a broadly Chomskian account is superior, on empirical and methodological grounds, to a number of alternative accounts . I then extend the Chomskian view to cover semantic properties, treating semantic properties of natural language utterances as inherited from semantic properties of mental representations tokened in language processing . I argue for this extended account over the standard, Convention-based account of natural language semantic properties. ;Like Convention-based accounts in the Gricean tradition, the Chomskian account proceeds via a two step reduction. Natural language properties are first reduced to properties of psychological states or mental representations; then an account of the nature of these mental representations fills out the account. In my view there is quite a strong case for the Chomskian account of the first step in this reduction. I don't think there is an similarly powerful case for any particular theory of mental representation at this point. The various theoretical pressures on such theories and their ranking are not yet sufficiently clear. In chapter six I discuss Fodor's asymmetric dependence theory, arguing that a variety of cases suggest that asymmetric dependence theory puts too much emphasis on recognition. I suggest a way of amending the theory by introducing a further counterfactual component to it. (shrink)

Terry Pinkard draws on Hegel's central works as well as his lectures on aesthetics, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history in this deeply informed and original exploration of Hegel's naturalism.

The paper presents a positive argument for a version of metaphysically light ethical non-naturalism from the nature of mental states such as desires. It uses as its premise the time-honoured, and recently rediscovered, doctrine of the guise of the good, whereby it is essential to desire that the object of desire be conceived as good or as normatively favoured under some description. The argument is that if the guise of the good is a correct theory of desire, then a (...) certain version of non-naturalism is better placed than other meta-ethical views to make sense of it. First I define ethical non-naturalism and the guise of the good, providing also an initial defence of the latter. Then I briefly survey some historical precedents and proceed to the argument. For each major meta-ethical view I consider I offer reasons why combining them with the guise of the good leads to consequences that are or should be unwelcome by the guise of the good. At the end of this elimination process a form of relatively metaphysically light non-naturalism will emerge as the view that best fits with the guise of the good. (shrink)

Metaethical non-analytical naturalism consists in the metaphysical thesis that normative properties are identical with or reducible to natural properties and the epistemological thesis that we cannot come to a complete understanding of the nature of normative properties via conceptual analysis alone. In On What Matters, Derek Parfit (2011) argues that non-analytical naturalism is either false or incoherent. In § 1, I show that his argument for this claim is unsuccessful, by showing that it rests on a tacit assumption (...) about the nature of normative thought that non-analytical naturalists need not accept. In § 2, I show that escaping Parfit’s argument in this way is no ad hoc maneuver; as I demonstrate, the idea that non-analytical naturalists can exploit to escape Parfit’s argument is a familiar one. (shrink)

Normativity concerns what we ought to think or do and the evaluations we make. For example, we say that we ought to think consistently, we ought to keep our promises, or that Mozart is a better composer than Salieri. Yet what philosophical moral can we draw from the apparent absence of normativity in the scientific image of the world? For scientific naturalists, the moral is that the normative must be reduced to the nonnormative, while for nonnaturalists, the moral is that (...) there must be a transcendent realm of norms. _Naturalism and Normativity_ engages with both sides of this debate. Essays explore philosophical options for understanding normativity in the space between scientific naturalism and Platonic supernaturalism. They articulate a liberal conception of philosophy that is neither reducible to the sciences nor completely independent of them—yet one that maintains the right to call itself naturalism. Contributors think in new ways about the relations among the scientific worldview, our experience of norms and values, and our movements in the space of reason. Detailed discussions include the relationship between philosophy and science, physicalism and ontological pluralism, the realm of the ordinary, objectivity and subjectivity, truth and justification, and the liberal naturalisms of Donald Davidson, John Dewey, John McDowell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (shrink)

The first-person perspective is a challenge to naturalism. Naturalistic theories are relentlessly third-personal. The first-person perspective is, well, first-personal; it is the perspective from which one thinks of oneself as oneself* without the aid of any third-person name, description, demonstrative or other referential device. The exercise of the capacity to think of oneself in this first-personal way is the necessary condition of all our self-knowledge, indeed of all our self-consciousness. As important as the first-person perspective is, many philosophers have (...) not appreciated the force of the data from the first-person perspective, and suppose that the first-person perspective presents no particular problems for the naturalizing philosopher. For example, Ned Block commented, “It is of course [phenomenal] consciousness rather than...self-consciousness that has seemed such a scientific mystery.” And David Chalmers says that self-consciousness is one of those psychological states that “pose no deep metaphysical enigmas.”. (shrink)

Jan Baptist van Helmont’s development of the Paracelsian theory of the Archeus is often considered uncomfortably close to the animist theory that the specificity of organic bodies is largely due to the soul. In this paper, I argue that the historical assimilation of these two positions is mistaken. I show that van Helmont introduced his theory of the Archeus on the grounds that it guaranteed that natural processes are properly natural, and that his theory was driven by a specific conception (...) of what it means for a process to be properly natural. I also argue that the specific way in which van Helmont developed his theory of the Archeus put him at odds with the more animist positions defended in his own time, and that he stressed rather than downplayed the efficacy of natural secondary causes. This analysis runs counter to both the long tradition of reading van Helmont’s theory as a species of animism, and the more recent tendency to stress those Christian dimensions of his thought that seem to imply the inefficacy of natural causes. (shrink)

The fundamental issue dividing normative naturalists and non-naturalists concerns the nature of normativity. Non-naturalists hold that the normativity of moral properties and facts sets them apart from natural properties and facts in an important and deep way. As Derek Parfit explains matters, the normative naturalist distinguishes between normative concepts and the natural properties to which these concepts refer and also between normative propositions and the natural facts in virtue of which such propositions are true when they are true. This chapter (...) explains Parfit's Soft Naturalist's Dilemma. Parfit thinks that normative naturalism is "close to nihilism". According to normative naturalism, normative claims are intended to state facts. Naturalism denies that there are such facts, and yet Soft Naturalism claims that there nevertheless is reason to continue to have normative concepts and to use normative sentences. There is the 'eliminativist' strategy of arguing that in fact no property is normative since all normative properties are natural and no natural property is normative. (shrink)

Pragmatism’s naturalism is inconsistent with the phenomenological tradition’s anti-naturalism. This poses a problem for the methodological consistency of phenomenological work in the pragmatist tradition. Solutions such as phenomenologizing naturalism or naturalizing phenomenology have been proposed, but they fail. As a consequence, pragmatists and other naturalists must answer the phenomenological tradition’s criticisms of naturalism.

The prospects for moral realism and ethical naturalism have been important parts of recent debates within metaethics. As a first approximation, moral realism is the claim that there are facts or truths about moral matters that are objective in the sense that they obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers. Ethical naturalism is the claim that moral properties of people, actions, and institutions are natural, rather than occult or supernatural, features of the world. Though these (...) metaethical debates remain unsettled, several people, myself included, have tried to defend the plausibility of both moral realism and ethical naturalism. I, among others, have appealed to recent work in the philosophy of language—in particular, to so-called theories of “direct reference” —to defend ethical naturalism against a variety of semantic worries, including G. E. Moore's “open question argument.” In response to these arguments, critics have expressed doubts about the compatibility of moral realism and direct reference. In this essay, I explain these doubts, and then sketch the beginnings of an answer—but understanding both the doubts and my answer requires some intellectual background. (shrink)

This is a study of "three metaphysical naturalists" who, although minor figures in their own right, nonetheless substantially influenced the direction and cast of American naturalism. The theme that unites them, according to Delaney, is their reaction to the bifurcation of mind and corporeal nature bequeathed to modern philosophy by Descartes and Locke. Morris R. Cohen, as a logician and philosopher of science, saw such a bifurcation as engendering conventionalism and a type of nominalism in science, and he reacted (...) against these with his own "logical realism." Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, working out of the Aristotelian and Spinozistic traditions, saw it as entailing subjectivism and attempted to counteract this by reasserting an "experiential realism." Roy Wood Sellars, himself an evolutionist, viewed the duality of mind and nature as a stimulus for the imaginative projection of idealism and the quietistic escapism of spiritualism, and countered these with a thorough-going "materialistic humanism." Delaney elaborates his thesis with clarity and cogency, using it as a vehicle to reconstruct the metaphysical views of the three men under study. He concludes with a critical comparison of the resulting "naturalistic reintegrations" of the mind-nature bifurcation: Cohen's through a more adequate philosophy of science, Woodbridge's by a realistic theory of experience, and Sellars' by an emergent theory of evolution. Delaney's critique focuses on the fundamental notions of existence, nature, and man, using these to expose essential differences between the "metaphysics" of the New York naturalists and that of Sellars. Woodbridge emerges from Delaney's analysis as the most substantial philosopher of the group. This is not a ponderous tome--it can be read practically at one sitting--but it succeeds in throwing new light on American naturalism in terms of its positive contributions to both the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of mind.--W. A. W. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Nietzsche's (Artful) Naturalism The Subject Naturalized Nietzsche's Artful Naturalism Toward an Ethos of the Agonized Subject.

This chapter argues that the best way for a non-naturalist to explain why the normative supervenes on the natural is to claim that, while there are some sui generis normative properties whose essences cannot be fully specified in non-normative terms and do not specify any non-normative sufficient conditions for their instantiation, there are certain hybrid normative properties whose essences specify both naturalistic sufficient conditions for their own instantiation and sufficient conditions for the instantiation of certain sui generis normative properties. This (...) is the only metaphysical explanation for supervenience on offer, the chapter argues, that can both clearly maintain the pre-theoretical commitments of non-naturalism, and provide a metaphysical explanation not just for supervenience, but for all metaphysical necessities involving natural and normative properties. (shrink)

Paul Roth claims that “interpretivists” in the philosophy of social sciences like Charles Taylor assume a positivist caricature of natural science to motivate their arguments against naturalism in the social sciences. Roth argues that not only is adopting the view of meaning relied upon by those he sometimes refers to as the “friends of understanding” unmotivated once the critique of positivism has been taken on board, he argues further that Quine has shown why this “meaning realism” is unavailable in (...) principle. Roth bolsters his use of Quine against interpretivists by referring to Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein on rule-following. But McDowell has shown how Kripke overlooks an alternative reading of those remarks, which provides “interpretivists” with arguments against mainstream naturalism and which makes no use of anything resembling “meaning realism.” This opening for interpretivists is actually already present in Roth’s discussion of the distinction between “thin” and “thick” description. This suggests how mainstream naturalism itself might be rethought to accommodate interpretivism. (shrink)

What is the relationship between phenomenology and naturalism? Are they mutually exclusive or is a rapprochement possible between their approaches to consciousness and the natural world? Can phenomenology be naturalised and ought it to be? Or is naturalism fundamentally unable to accommodate phenomenological insights? How can phenomenological method be used within a naturalistic research programme? This cutting-edge collection of original essays contains brilliant contributions from leading phenomenologists across the world. The collection presents a wide range of fascinating and (...) carefully argued answers to these questions. (shrink)

We propose an objective and justifiable ethics that is contingent on the truth of evolutionary theory. We do not argue for the truth of this position, which depends on the empirical question of whether moral functions form a natural class, but for its cogency and possibility. The position we propose combines the advantages of Kantian objectivity with the explanatory and motivational advantages of moral naturalism. It avoids problems with the epistemological inaccessibility of transcendent values, while avoiding the relativism or (...) subjectivism often associated with moral naturalism. Our position emerges out of criticisms of the contemporary sociobiological views of morality found in the writings of Richard Alexander, Michael Ruse, and Robert Richards. (shrink)

My aims are exegetical rather than critical: I offer a systematic account of Hursthouse's ethical naturalism with an emphasis on the normative authority of the four ends, and try to correct some misconceptions found in the literature. Specifically, I argue that the four ends function akin to Wittgensteinian hinge-propositions for our practice of ethical reasoning and as such form part of a description of the logical grammar of said practice.

THIS VOLUME owcs its existence to the suggestion and the persuasive insistence of my friend and colleague Justus Buchler... the unpublished papers dealing with "the theory of history" and “the theory of nature” bulked large enough to form a volume in themselves. Hence the volume appears ...with [these] essays in philosophic analysis of two themes that have for some years been central in my own interests. -/- Each of the two Parts deals with a unified theme, and the two together (...) not only exhibit, it is hoped, a consistent philosophic attitude and approach, but also treat two different aspects of what is a common metaphysical inquiry. Aside from the prologue and the epilogue, none of these papers has appeared in this form before... History and nature together offer the great challenge to the philosophic mind. [Excerpt from Foreword]. (shrink)

In Time Reborn and elsewhere physicist Lee Smolin identifies Peirce as a precursor to his view that natural laws evolved, a view that runs counter the received opinion within physics that time isn’t real. After discussing Smolin’s arguments for the reality of time, two approaches advoacated by Smolin –cosmological natural selection and Quantum Energetic Causal Set Theory– are discussed in the context of Peirce’s cosmology. It is shown that Peirce’s approach provides a possible ground for a physical theory like Quantum (...) Energetic Causal Set Theory, opening the way for a full-fledged cosmology that does justice to contemporary physics. (shrink)

J. Ladyman, Ladyman and Ross refine J. Worral's structural realism, by developing an ontic structural realism which they argue is a consistently naturalistic means of characterizing the ontology of fundamental physics. I argue that elements of analytic metaphysics strengthen and refine their project of characterizing fundamental physics via OSR and by extension, their presentation of information-theoretic structural realism. I refine this point by situating M. Lange’s discussion of nomological modality qua natural necessity within Ladyman and Ross’s discussion of ITSR. The (...) logical hierarchy evinced in Lange’s ‘nomic stability’ further extends and refines Ladyman and Ross’s claims through the addition of nuanced modal distinctions in a systematic framework. (shrink)