Preface to paperback edition -- Why Schelling? why naturephilosophy? -- The powers due to becoming: the reemergence of platonic physics in the genetic philosophy -- Antiphysics and neo-Fichteanism -- The natural history of the unthinged -- "What thinks in me is what is outside me". phenomenality, physics and the idea -- Dynamic philosophy, transcendental physics -- Conclusion: transcendental geology.

Excerpt from Cultures and Institutions of Natural History: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science This volume consists mainly of papers delivered at two meetings cosponsored by the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale in Milan and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The first, on the Culture of Natural History, was held in Milan, November l4-l 6, I996. The second, on Institutions of Natural History, was held in San Francisco, October 5 - (...) 7, 1998. They followed two earlier conferences on Biology as History (pinna and Ghiselin I996; Ghiselin and Pinna I996) likewise held in Milan and San Francisco. We intend to continue the series of meetings and have publications based on them in commemoration of the Academy's sesquicentennial in 2003. The emphasis here is mainly upon natural history museums and the kind of science that goes on in them. Although the essays were originally written to stand by themselves, when arranged in chronological order they suggest a common theme. To paraphrase Darwin, the culture and institutions of natural history have been, and are being, evolved. They have adapted to local circumstances, diversified, and sometimes even progressed. We may hope that the future holds more than just retrogression and extinction in store. Read as case studies the essays provide valuable insights into not just how, but why, the institutions have come into being and subsequently been transformed. Previous generations had quite different ideas than we do about how a collection of naturalia is supposed to function and how it should be organized. And there were con icting goals and serious disputes about policy, much as there are today. Often, though not always, the institutions turn out to be very different from what had been envisioned by their founders. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.". (shrink)

[from the publisher's website] Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De (...) Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition. -/- De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality. (shrink)

Andrew Cooper presents the first systematic study of Kant's account of natural history. Cooper contends that Kant made a decisive contribution to one of the most explosive and understudied revolutions in the history of science: the addition of time to the frame in which explanations are required, sought, and justified in natural science. Through addressing a wide range of Kant's works, Cooper challenges the claim that Kant's theory of science denies a developmental conception of nature and argues (...) instead that it establishes a method by which natural historians can genuinely dispute historical claims and potentially come to consensus. This method, Cooper argues, can be used to expose serious flaws in Kant's own historical reasoning, including the formation and defence of his racist views. The book will be valuable to philosophers seeking to discern both the power and limitations of Kant's theory of science, and to historians of science working on the fractured landscape of eighteenth-century Newtonianism. (shrink)

Following the revival in the last decades of the concept of “organism”, scholarly literature in philosophy of science has shown growing historical interest in the theory of Immanuel Kant, one of the “fathers” of the concept of self-organisation. Yet some recent theoretical developments suggest that self-organisation alone cannot fully account for the all-important dimension of autonomy of the living. Autonomy appears to also have a genuine “interactive” dimension, which concerns the organism’s functional interactions with the environment and does not (...) simply derive from its internal organisation. Against this background, we focus on a family of natural philosophical approaches that historically have already strongly taken in account this aspect of autonomy, notably going beyond Kant’s perspective on self-organisation. We thus review Hegel, Plessner, and Jonas’ different perspectives on living beings, focussing in particular on four points: the distinction between organic and inorganic, the theory of biological organisation, the processuality of the living, and the “boundary” between inside and outside, through which the organism establishes its relationship to the environment. We, then, compare the three perspectives on these four points, and finally address the question of what advantages their contribution present—especially compared to Kant’s theory—with respect to the topic of organism’s autonomy. This could help—we hope—to better understand what is at the stake still today. (shrink)

Philosopherd have long stressed a distinction between theory justification and theory discovery based on a belief that justification and discovery are essentially different processes. What makes these two processes essentially different, it was assumed, is that the process of justification is guided by criteria which are expressable as rules, while the processes involved in discovery are not rule-guided. Moreover and perhaps more importantly, it was assumed that tha rules for justification are discoverable a priori by rationalistic logical analysis but an (...) account of discovery, whatever it turns out to be like, will be describable only a posteriori. (shrink)

This paper seeks to show Kant’s importance for the formal distinction between descriptive natural history and a developmental history of nature that entered natural history discussions in the late eighteenth century. It is argued that he developed this distinction initially upon Buffon’s distinctions of ‘abstract’ and ‘physical’ truths, and applied these initially in his distinction of ‘varieties’ from ‘races’ in anthropology. In the 1770s, Kant appears to have given theoretical preference to the ‘history’ of (...) class='Hi'>nature [Naturgeschichte] over ‘description’ of nature [Naturbeschreibung]. Following Kant’s confrontations with Johann Herder and Georg Forster in the late 1780s, Kant weakened the epistemic status of the ‘history of nature’ and gave theoretical preference to ‘description of nature’. As a result, Kant’s successors, such as Goethe, could draw from Kant either a justification for a developmental history of nature, or, as this paper argues, a warrant from the critical philosophy for denying the validity of the developmental history of nature as anything more than a ‘regulative’ idea of reason. (shrink)

Philosophy of science emerged as a distinctive part of philosophy in the twentieth century. Its defining moment was the meeting (and the clash) of two courses of events: the breakdown of the Kantian philosophical tradition and the crisis in the sciences and mathematics in the beginning of the century. But what we now call philosophy of science has a rich intellectual history that goes back to the ancient Greeks. It is intimately connected with the efforts made (...) by many thinkers to come to terms with the distinctive kind of knowledge (episteme; scientia) that science offers. Though science proper was distinguished from natural philosophy only in the nineteenth century, the philosophy of natural philosophy has had almost the very same agenda that current philosophy of science has. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine Kant’s views on evolution of organized beings and to show that Kant’s antievolutionary conclusions stem from his study of natural history and variability of organisms. Accordingly, I discuss Kant’s study of natural history and consider whether his conclusion about impossibility of knowledge about such history expands on the research of history of organized beings. Moving forward, I examine the notion of variability in Kant’s philosophy, and show that his theory of (...) organized beings relies on the preformationist conception of variability that provides limited insight into the history of organisms. I explain that Kant’s endorsement of preformationism is conditioned by a lack of knowledge about the mechanism that successfully explains adaptation and transmutation of organisms leading towards the creation of new species. Finally, I sumarize the following reasons for Kant’s rejection of the hypothesis of evolution: lack of cognitive ability to discover all changes of natural phenomena in different periods of time and adoption of preformationist conception of variability of organized beings. I finish off with a discussion about mechanical inexplicability of organisms and find a third reason Kant believes that the idea of evolution is only “a daring adventure on the part of reason”. (shrink)

This is a much-needed reissue of the standard English translation of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, originally published in 1970. The Philosophy of Nature is the second part of Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, all of which is now available in English from OUP (Part I being his Logic, Part III being his Philosophy of Mind). Hegel's aim in this work is to interpret the varied phenomena of Nature from the standpoint of a dialectical (...) logic. Those who still think of Hegel as a merely a priori philosopher will here find abundant evidence that he was keenly interested in and very well informed about empirical science. The Philosophy of Nature is integral to his philosophical system and deserves the most serious attention. Students and scholars of Hegel and the history of European philosophy will welcome the availability of this important text, which also includes a translation of Hegel's Zusatze or lecture notes. (shrink)

In this comprehensive tour of the long history and philosophy of expertise, from ancient Greece to the 20th century, Jamie Carlin Watson tackles the question of expertise and why we can be skeptical of what experts say, making a valuable contribution to contemporary philosophical debates on authority, testimony, disagreement and trust. His review sketches out the ancient origins of the concept, discussing its early association with cunning, skill and authority and covering the sort of training that ancient thinkers (...) believed was required for expertise. Watson looks at the evolution of the expert in the middle ages into a type of "genius" or "innate talent", moving to the role of psychological research in 16th-century Germany, the influence of Darwin, the impact of behaviorism and its interest to computer scientists, and its transformation into the largely cognitive concept psychologists study today. (shrink)

This volume dispels the idea that Platonism was an otherworldly enterprise which neglected the study of the natural world. Leading scholars examine how the Platonists of late antiquity sought to understand and explain natural phenomena: their essays offer a new understanding of the metaphysics of Platonism, and its place in the history of science.

This paper aims to highlight how the philosophy of chemistry could be of help for rethinking Nature today. To do so, we will point out: the co-definition of chemical relations and chemical relata within chemical activities; the constitutive role of the modes of intervention in the definition, always open and provisional, of “active” chemical bodies; and the mutual dependence of the levels of organization in chemistry. We will insist on the way chemists tailor networks of interdependencies within which (...) chemical bodies and properties are context-sensitive and mutually determined by means of particular chemical operations or transformations. To conclude, we will show how the specific action of bodies upon the Earth at different scales of space and time, and how the relational definition of a chemical body, pave the way for a new understanding of Nature. (shrink)

This book examines the philosophies of nature of the early Greek thinkers and argues that a significant and thoroughgoing shift is required in our understanding of them. In contrast with the natural world of the earliest Greek literature, often the result of arbitrary divine causation, in the work of early Ionian philosophers we see the idea of a cosmos: ordered worlds where there is complete regularity. How was this order generated and maintained and what underpinned those regularities? What analogies (...) or models were used for the order of the cosmos? What did they think about causation and explanatory structure? How did they frame natural laws? Andrew Gregory draws on recent work on mechanistic philosophy and its history, on the historiography of the relation of science to art, religion and magic, and on the fragments and doxography of the early Greek thinkers to argue that there has been a tendency to overestimate the extent to which these early Greek philosophies of nature can be described as 'mechanistic'. We have underestimated how far they were committed to other modes of explanation and ontologies, and we have underestimated, underappreciated and indeed underexplored how plausible and good these philosophies would have been in context. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive account of vitalism and the Romantic philosophy of nature. The author explores the rise of biology as a unified science in Germany by reconstructing the history of the notion of “vital force,” starting from the mid-eighteenth through the early nineteenth century. Further, he argues that Romantic Naturphilosophie played a crucial role in the rise of biology in Germany, especially thanks to its treatment of teleology. In fact, both post-Kantian philosophers and naturalists were (...) guided by teleological principles in defining the object of biological research. The book begins by considering the problem of generation, focusing on the debate over the notion of “formative force.” Readers are invited to engage with the epistemological status of this formative force, i.e. the question of the principle behind organization. The second chapter provides a reconstruction of the physiology of vital forces as it was elaborated in the mid- to late-eighteenth century by the group of physicians and naturalists known as the “Göttingen School.” Readers are shown how these authors developed an understanding of the animal kingdom as a graded series of organisms with increasing functional complexity. Chapter three tracks the development of such framework in Romantic Naturphilosophie. The author introduces the reader to the problem of classification, showing how Romantic philosophers of nature regarded classification as articulated by a unified plan that connects all living forms with one another, relying on the idea of living nature as a universal organism. In the closing chapter, this analysis shows how the three instances of pre-biological discourse on living beings – theory of generation, physiology and natural history – converged to form the consolidated disciplinary matrix of a general biology. The book offers an insightful read for all scholars interested in classical German philosophy, especially those researching the philosophy of nature, as well as the history and philosophy of biology. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine Kant's views on evolution of organized beings and to show that Kant's antievolutionary conclusions stem from his study of natural history and variability of organisms. Accordingly, I discuss Kant's study of natural history and consider whether his conclusion about impossibility of knowledge about such history expands on the research of history of organized beings. Moving forward, I examine the notion of variability in Kant's philosophy, and show that his theory of (...) organized beings relies on the preformationist conception of variability that provides limited insight into the history of organisms. I explain that Kant's endorsement of preformationism is conditioned by a lack of knowledge about the mechanism that successfully explains adaptation and transmutation of organisms leading towards the creation of new species. Finally, I sumarize the following reasons for Kant's rejection of the hypothesis of evolution: lack of cognitive ability to discover all changes of natural phenomena in different periods of time and adoption of preformationist conception of variability of organized beings. I finish off with a discussion about mechanical inexplicability of organisms and find a third reason Kant believes that the idea of evolution is only "a daring adventure on the part of reason". (shrink)

The concept of natural history has received a great deal of attention in contemporary practical philosophy, especially as a result of Michael Thompson's concept of natural-historical judgments which aims to explain the normativity of the human life-form. With this concept, the norms effective in a life-form are understood as something natural and constitutive for that life-form. Although Thompson does not present a historical-philosophical model, he claims to be able to determine the normativity of the historically developing human life-form. (...) By contrast, Theodor W. Adorno developed his own concept of natural history on the one hand as an interpretative conceptual model of historical reality, on the other hand, to indicate the normativity of the natural-historical course of human history itself. The normativity of natural history that Adorno focuses on is historically and socially determined, in contrast to the categorically conceived natural normativity that is at the heart of Thompson's approach. This article analyses the similarities and differences between the two approaches in such a way that it becomes clear to what extent ethical naturalism also provides possibilities for critique that can be made fruitful for a critical theory inspired by Adorno. (shrink)

This work analyses Marx's philosophy of nature and shows how it is the basis for his practical philosophy. Previous analysis of Marx's philosophy of nature has considered humans as only natural beings and social beings. But, Marx analyzed humans' relationship to the natural world and to themselves as natural, social, and material. This material feature of human action can server as a basis for social critique and as the foundation for a practical analysis. The first (...) chapter of this book analyzes Marx's philosophy of nature from his early to late works and argues that humans are natural begins that use nature to develop new capacities. This consideration is central in Marx's critiques of Hegel and Feuerbach. The second chapter discusses Marx's material critique of social forms and discusses why the distinction between material action and social action is a key component of Marx critique of capitalism. This chapter also discusses industrial history, ideology, wages, justice, and valorization. The third and final chapter builds on Marx's materialist analysis to develop a standard of practical action that takes human's material activity as its basis. This chapter also discusses classical historical materialist claims, liberal ethical theories, and a practical philosophic consideration of socialism. (shrink)

Each and every one of us has our personal secrets, secrets which we do not disclose to outsiders. If we do decide to let an outsider into those secrets, we want to be certain that they will be properly understood and respected. Revealing our secrets to someone else is also normally preceded by a long acquaintanceship, which serves to create an atmosphere of trust. If we accept that nature, understood as the entire physical reality of the universe, contains within (...) itself secrets regarding its origins, functioning, and ulterior development, then the study of these secrets is only possible for beings such as ourselves, possessed of consciousness, sensory tools, and intellect. In this context, the history of .. (shrink)

Hegel’s many remarks that seem to imply that philosophy should proceed completely a priori pose a problem for his philosophy of nature since, on this reading, Hegel offers an a priori derivation of...

The application of the polluter-pays principle in environmental policy depends on answers to the philosophical questions about what is good or detrimental with respect to nature. Science and the economy constitute a functional circle of “observing” nature’s unity as well as its utility. Based on a concept of nature as a system of causally related objects or - complementary to this - as a bunch of “resources,” however, the human interest and responsibility in nature do not (...) seem to be properly observed. Subjecting nature to human subjectivity may have been an adaptation in the wrong direction, since, if humanity is taken as the measure, there is no measure for humanity. A practical philosophy of nature should start from the assumption that science’s missing unity and the economy’s missing goodness are equivalent shortcomings in a complenlentary way. On the one hand, philosophy should engage in the problem-oriented reintegration of the sciences by establishing nuclei of interdisciplinary cooperation. We are relatingourselves to nature in a responsible way only when approaching nature as our own nature. On the other hand, while our technological faculties have reached a very high level of reliability and differentiation, we are definitely much less successful in recognizing goodness in economic “goods.” This calls for demand education with respect to how human needs are to be brought to bear as demands on nature, ahuman relation to nature as well as natural relations between human beings, again depending on answers to philosophical questions. In the history of ideas, nature has declined from “the nature of things and beings” to “the things and beings of nature,” or from being to beings. We will, however, never be able to judge what is good or bad with respect to nature if we do not from the outset start - pragmatically-with a normative concept of nature. (shrink)

This is a much-needed reissue of the standard English translation of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, originally published in 1970. The Philosophy of Nature is the second part of Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, all of which is now available in English from OUP. Hegel's aim in this work is to interpret the varied phenomena of Nature from the standpoint of a dialectical logic. Those who still think of Hegel as a merely a priori philosopher (...) will here find abundant evidence that he was keenly interested in and very well informed about empirical science. The Philosophy of Nature is integral to his philosophical system and deserves the most serious attention. Students and scholars of Hegel and the history of European philosophy will welcome the availability of this important text, which also includes a translation of Hegel's Zusatze or lecture notes. (shrink)

This commentary of Aquinas on the first book of the Physics of Aristotle is a summary of the thought of the Pre-Socratics and of Aristotle's approach to cosmology. A unit with all cross-references in English, it clarifies the thought of the ancients and of the medieval Aquinas with regard to the philosophy of nature; it presents all of this as a basis for subsequent philosophy of science. This work can be read by the layman; it can be (...) used as a text for an introduction to philosophy course; and it can be read with profit by one seeking a fully researched work in ancient philosophy. The work is a long overdue text for both the history of ancient philosophy and of the synthesis of ancient philosophers with that of Aquinas. It presents in English both the text of Aristotle and that of Aquinas' Commentary. (shrink)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1752 edition. Excerpt:... to which the original Exclusion had been owing, the Points of two short and slender Hairs appear'd protruding themselves from its oval Surface. The thicker butoblong Bodies, from whose Extremities these grew, next forc'd themselves out, and it was evident to a-'n accustom'd Eye, that they were (...) the Antennze of a two wing'd Fly; next presented themselves the anterior Surfaces of two chequeffd Orbs, which were plainly the complex Eyes of anlnsect' of the same Species, separated by a plain Portion of a Forehead; and soon after the whole Head. This was no sooner all in View, than it swell'd to a Diameter equal to twice the Measure of that of the Breast. lt might have appear'd from the first, that the Head was growing under the Eye of the Observer, from the Extremity of the Thorax, but tho' a more rational Enquiry could not but produce for its Answer, that it was only now thrust forth out of the Cavity of the Breast in which it had before been lodg'd; it yet appear'd singular after this sudden Change in Size to conceive how a Thing should have been till that Moment lodg'd in a Cavityz not equal to half its own Diameter. P a The The Head was now entire and in its Place, and the Legs were firm, and supported the Body well, but the Wings did not yet appear. On examining the Place where they were to be expacted, I discover'd two irregular Protuberances of a wrinkled Surface, and considerably large, and under them the two oblong Pedicies which we see supporting the Balls under the Wings of all the two wing'd Flies. It was evident from this, that the Protuberances at the two Sides of the Base of the Thorax were the very Wings in their folded State, and this was soon prov'd by their expanding. The Wings in all this Race of Creatures are the last Part... (shrink)

Natural philosophy encompassed all natural phenomena of the physical world. It sought to discover the physical causes of all natural effects and was little concerned with mathematics. By contrast, the exact mathematical sciences were narrowly confined to various computations that did not involve physical causes, functioning totally independently of natural philosophy. Although this began slowly to change in the late Middle Ages, a much more thoroughgoing union of natural philosophy and mathematics occurred in the seventeenth century and (...) thereby made the Scientific Revolution possible. The title of Isaac Newton's great work, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, perfectly reflects the new relationship. Natural philosophy became the 'Great Mother of the Sciences', which by the nineteenth century had nourished the manifold chemical, physical, and biological sciences to maturity, thus enabling them to leave the 'Great Mother' and emerge as the multiplicity of independent sciences we know today. (shrink)

Scholars often draw attention to the remarkably individual and progressive character of Kant's Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. What is less often noted, however, is that Kant's project builds on several transformations that occurred in natural science during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Without contextualising Kant's argument within these transformations, the full sense of Kant's achievement remains unseen. This paper situates Kant's essay within the analogical form of Newtonianism developed by a diverse range of naturalists including (...) Georges Buffon, Albrecht von Haller and Thomas Wright. It argues that Kant's universal conception of natural history can be viewed within the free-thinking and anti-clerical movement associated with Buffon. This does not mean, however, that it breaks from the methodological rules of Newtonianism. The claim of this paper is that Kant's essay contributes to the transformation of natural history from a logical system of classification to an explanation for the physical diversity of natural products according to laws. (shrink)

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) was supposed to be the introduction and first part of the Jena System III, and as such it was to introduce us to the other parts of the project. Most commentators on Hegel’s Phenomenology , however, do not consider how the Phenomenology relates the other parts, and some discount Hegel understanding and commitment to the natural philosophy of his day. This paper attempts to make the connection between the Phenomenology and the Natural Philosophy (...) of 1805-06 explicit; to show where and how the connections are made; to identify how Hegel uses the natural sciences of his day in creating his system. By showing this I hope to prove that his concept of Spirit is born within his natural philosophy. It is part of his cosmology. (shrink)

The essays in this collection represent in scholarly infrastructure to Professor Furley's major study, The Greek Cosmologists, of which volume 1 was published by the Press in 1987. They tackle the questions in ancient cosmology and the clash between the two opposing systems known as Aristotelianism and Atomism. Some essays are general reflections on the nature of the debate; others explore certain detailed questions; yet all illustrate the author's incisive approach, which cuts through irrelevancies and goes directly to the (...) heart of an issue. (shrink)