Newton's philosophical views are unique and uniquely difficult to categorise. In the course of a long career from the early 1670s until his death in 1727, he articulated profound responses to ...Cartesian natural philosophy and to the prevailing mechanical philosophy of his day. Newton as Philosopher presents Newton as an original and sophisticated contributor to natural philosophy, one who engaged with the principal ideas of his most important predecessor, René Descartes, and of his most influential critic, G. W. Leibniz. Unlike Descartes and Leibniz, Newton was systematic and philosophical without presenting a philosophical system, but over the course of his life, he developed a novel picture of nature, our place within it, and its relation to the creator. This rich treatment of his philosophical ideas will be of wide interest to historians of philosophy, science, and ideas.
This collection of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars presents research on Isaac Newton and his main philosophical interlocutors and critics. The essays analyze Newton's relation to ...his contemporaries, especially Barrow, Descartes, Leibniz and Locke and discuss the ways in which a broad range of figures, including Hume, Maclaurin, Maupertuis and Kant, reacted to his thought. The wide range of topics discussed includes the laws of nature, the notion of force, the relation of mathematics to nature, Newton's argument for universal gravitation, his attitude toward philosophical empiricism, his use of 'fluxions', his approach toward measurement problems and his concept of absolute motion, together with new interpretations of Newton's matter theory. The volume concludes with an extended essay that analyzes the changes in physics wrought by Newton's Principia. A substantial introduction and bibliography provide essential reference guides.
It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum, the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japan’s emergence as a modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by ...the distinctly hybrid institution—at once museum, laboratory, and prison—of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of Japan’s first modern zoo, Tokyo’s Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japan’s rapid modernization and changing relationship with the natural world. As the first zoological garden in the world not built under the sway of a Western imperial regime, the Ueno Zoo served not only as a staple attraction in the nation’s capital—an institutional marker of national accomplishment—but also as a site for the propagation of a new “natural” order that was scientifically verifiable and evolutionarily foreordained. As the Japanese empire grew, Ueno became one of the primary sites of imperialist spectacle, a microcosm of the empire that could be traveled in the course of a single day. The meaning of the zoo would change over the course of Imperial Japan’s unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today it remains one of Japan’s most frequently visited places. But instead of empire in its classic political sense, it now bespeaks the ambivalent dominion of the human species over the natural environment, harkening back to its imperial roots even as it asks us to question our exploitation of the planet’s resources.
The conviction that Nature was God's second revelation played a crucial role in early modern Dutch culture. This book offers a fascinating account on how Dutch intellectuals contemplated, ...investigated, represented and collected natural objects, and how the notion of the 'Book of Nature' was transformed.
Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer (1765–1844) was the ‘father of philosophy of nature’ owing to his profound influence on German Idealist and Romantic Naturphilosophie. With the recent growth of interest in ...Idealist and Romantic philosophy of nature in the UK and abroad, the importance of Kielmeyer’s work is being increasingly recognised and special attention is being paid to his influence on biology’s development as a distinct discipline at the end of the eighteenth century. In this exciting new book, Lydia Azadpour and Daniel Whistler present the first ever English translations of key texts by Kielmeyer, along with contextual and interpretative essays by leading international scholars, who are experts on the philosophy of nature and the formation of the life sciences in the late eighteenth century. The topics they cover include: the laws of nature, the concept of force, the meaning of ‘organism’, the logic of recapitulation, Kielmeyer and ecology, sexual differentiation in animal life and Kielmeyer’s relationship to Kant, Schelling and Hegel. In doing so, they provide a comprehensive English reference to Kielmeyer’s historical and contemporary significance.
In The Greek Concept of Nature, Gerard Naddaf utilizes historical, mythological, and linguistic perspectives to reconstruct the origin and evolution of the Greek concept of phusis. Usually translated ...as nature, phusis has been decisive both for the early history of philosophy and for its subsequent development. However, there is a considerable amount of controversy on what the earliest philosophers—Anaximander, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus—actually had in mind when they spoke of phusis or nature. Naddaf demonstrates that the fundamental and etymological meaning of the word refers to the whole process of birth to maturity. He argues that the use of phusis in the famous expression Peri phuseos or historia peri phuseos refers to the origin and the growth of the universe from beginning to end. Naddaf’s bold and original theory for the genesis of Greek philosophy demonstrates that archaic and mythological schemes were at the origin of the philosophical representations, but also that cosmogony, anthropogony, and politogony were never totally separated in early Greek philosophy.
Eternidade do Mundo e Evolução XAVIER, MARIA LEONOR
Revista portuguesa de filosofia,
07/2023, Letnik:
79, Številka:
1/2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This essay was born out of two astonishments: an admiration and a perplexity. On the one hand, this essay was born out of our admiration for the text of the question De aeternitate mundi, written by ...St. Thomas Aquinas in the full maturity of his thought (1271). It is a philosophically exemplary text, in terms of construction and discernment, in which the author argues that there is no contradiction between the theology of creation and the possibility of an eternal world, in accordance with Aristotelian physics. On the other hand, we were also motivated by our perplexity with the difficulty that even today the Christian faith in creation experiences in dealing with the Darwinian theory of evolution. It occurred to us, then, to elaborate a question of evolution, entirely analogous, in construction and in discernment, to the question of the eternity of the world, as it had been thought of by St. Thomas Aquinas. Thus, we also argue here that there is no contradiction between the theology of creation and the possibility of a world in evolution, according to Darwin’s biological theory. And we do this by following the structure of the Thomasian question step by step.
Enactivists frequently argue their account heralds a revolution in cognitive science: enactivism will unseat cognitivism as the dominant paradigm. We examine the lines of reasoning enactivists employ ...in stirring revolt, but show that none of these prove compelling reasons for cognitivism to be replaced by enactivism. First, we examine the
hard sell
of enactivism: enactivism reveals a critical explanatory gap at the heart of cognitivism. We show that enactivism does not meet the requirements to incite a paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense—there is no internal crisis in cognitivism. Nor does it provide inherently better explanations of cognition as some have claimed. Second, we consider the
soft sell
of enactivism: enactivism provides a more attractive, parsimonious, or clear-eyed lens on cognition. This move proves to boil down to a misunderstanding of how theories are selected in science. Instead we lend support to a broader and more desirable way to conceive of enactivism, the recent proposal that enactivism is a
philosophy of nature
. We explain how a philosophy of nature does more than support a single research paradigm by integrating scientific questions into a cohesive picture.
