Though Kant is best known for his strictly philosophical works in the 1780s, many of his early publications in particular were devoted to what we would call 'natural science'. Kant's Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) made a significant advance in cosmology, and he was also instrumental in establishing the newly emerging discipline of physical geography, lecturing on it for almost his entire career. In this volume Eric Watkins brings together new English translations of (...) Kant's first publication, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (1746-1749), the entirety of Physical Geography (1802), a series of shorter essays, along with many of Kant's most important publications in natural science. The volume is rich in material for the student and the scholar, with extensive linguistic and explanatory notes, editorial introductions and a glossary of key terms. (shrink)

Though Kant is best known for his strictly philosophical works in the 1780s, many of his early publications in particular were devoted to what we would call 'natural science'. Kant's Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens made a significant advance in cosmology, and he was also instrumental in establishing the newly emerging discipline of physical geography, lecturing on it for almost his entire career. In this volume Eric Watkins brings together new English translations of Kant's (...) first publication, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces, the entirety of Physical Geography, a series of shorter essays, along with many of Kant's most important publications in natural science. The volume is rich in material for the student and the scholar, with extensive linguistic and explanatory notes, editorial introductions and a glossary of key terms. (shrink)

This study aims to understand scientific inference for the evolutionary procedure of Continental Drift based on abductive inference, which is important for creative inference and scientific discovery during problem solving. We present the following two research problems: (1) we suggest a scientific inference procedure as well as various strategies and a criterion for choosing hypotheses over other competing or previous hypotheses; aspects of this procedure include puzzling observation, abduction, retroduction, updating, deduction, induction, and recycle; and (2) we analyze the “theory (...) of continental drift” discovery, called the Earth science revolution, using our multistage inference procedure. Wegener’s Continental Drift hypothesis had an impact comparable to the revolution caused by Darwin’s theory of evolution in biology. Finally, the suggested inquiry inference model can provide us with a more consistent view of science and promote a deeper understanding of scientific concepts. (shrink)

Through an exploration of theoretical physics, this paper suggests the need for regrounding natural science in phenomenological philosophy. To begin, the philosophical roots of the prevailing scientific paradigm are traced to the thinking of Plato, Descartes, and Newton. The crisis in modern science is then investigated, tracking developments in physics, science's premier discipline. Einsteinian special relativity is interpreted as a response to the threat of discontinuity implied by the Michelson-Morley experiment, a challenge to classical objectivism that Einstein sought to (...) counteract. We see that Einstein's efforts to banish discontinuity ultimately fall into the “black hole” predicted in his general theory of relativity. The unavoidable discontinuity that haunts Einstein's theory is also central to quantum mechanics. Here too the attempt has been made to manage discontinuity, only to have this strategy thwarted in the end by the intractable problem of quantum gravity. The irrepressible discontinuity manifested in the phenomena of modern physics proves to be linked to a merging of subject and object that flies in the face of Cartesian philosophy. To accommodate these radically non-classical phenomena, a new philosophical foundation is called for: phenomenology. Phenomenological philosophy is elaborated through Merleau-Ponty's concept of depth and is then brought into focus for use in theoretical physics via qualitative work with topology and hypercomplex numbers. In the final part of this paper, a detailed summary is offered of the specific application of topological phenomenology to quantum gravity that was systematically articulated in The Self-Evolving Cosmos (Rosen 2008a). (shrink)

Immanuel Kant is better known as a philosopher but in the pre-critical period he studied in a very deep way many aspects of the natural sciences and that’s why the new volume of the English edition of Kant’s works is devoted to the publications of Kant’s writings on natural science. This massive volume is edited by Erik Watkins and Kant’s writing are translated by Lewis White Back, Jeffrey B. Edwards, Olaf Reinhardt, Martin Schönfeld and Erik Watkins.

This article takes seriously Collingwood's claim that history is a science and explores what he could have meant by this contention. The essence of his claim is the inferential nature of history, but its specific character was not fully explored. It is argued that the type of inference he hinted at was abduction as developed by Peirce. The importance of this type of reasoning is increasingly endorsed in contemporary debates, and Collingwood's ideas on the scientific status of (...) class='Hi'>history turn out to be relevant. (shrink)

Discussion of Alexander Bogdanov as a Marxist revisionist has largely centred on his philosophy of being and cognition and on Plekhanov’s and Lenin’s accusation that Bogdanov was an idealist renegade from Marxism. However, the real issue of revisionism at the time was not materialism but determinism: the question of whether socialism would appear by the working of the objective laws of nature or the subjective will of human beings. Bogdanov did indeed revise Marxism, but he did so in order to (...) defend it as a natural science. He conceived of society as a form of life subject to biological laws of nature: the need to assimilate energy from the environment and the need to adapt to the environment in the struggle to survive. He reinterpreted the key elements of scientific socialism – the idea that existence determines consciousness and the labour theory of value – in terms of this worldview. (shrink)

This essay takes the last pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at its word: at the moment the narrator achieves a definitive conception of the work he intends to write, he sees society composed, not of people of flesh and blood, but of monsters fit for a museum of natural history. As the novel culminates in images and concepts that are essentially nonhuman, inhuman, or posthuman in character, it demonstrates an exacting knowledge of what the (...) present is only now beginning to realize: after two world wars and humanity’s recent entry into what is called the age of the Anthropocene, certain fundamental relations (between subject and object, between nature and history, between past, present, and future) must be rethought to account for both the eclipse of the human as well as nature’s ultimate survival. This essay seeks to develop a philosophical form that would approximate the novel’s discovery of this posthuman natural history. (shrink)

Nature, History, State: 1933-1934 presents the first complete English-language translation of Heidegger's seminar 'On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and State', together with full introductory material and interpretive essays by five leading thinkers and scholars: Robert Bernasconi, Peter Eli Gordon, Marion Heinz, Theodore Kisiel and Slavoj Žižek. The seminar, which was held while Heidegger was serving as National Socialist rector of the University of Freiburg, represents important evidence of the development of Heidegger's political thought. The text (...) consists of ten 'protocols' on the seminar sessions, composed by students and reviewed by Heidegger. The first session's protocol is a rather personal commentary on the atmosphere in the classroom, but the remainder have every appearance of being faithful transcripts of Heidegger's words, in which he raises a variety of fundamental questions about nature, history and the state. The seminar culminates in an attempt to sketch a political philosophy that supports the 'Führer state'. The text is important evidence for anyone considering the tortured question of Heidegger's Nazism and its connection to his philosophy in general. (shrink)

Advocates of a more socially responsible discipline of economics often emphasize the purposive and unpredictable nature of human economic behavior, contrasting this to the presumably deterministic behavior of natural forces. This essay argues that such a distinction between “social” and “natural” sciences is in fact counterproductive, especially when issues of ecological sustainability are concerned. What is needed instead is a better notion of science—“science-with-wonder”—which grounds serious science in relational, non-Newtonian thinking.

While "natural history" is practically synonymous with the name of Buffon, the term itself has been otherwise overlooked by historians of science. This essay attempts to address this omission by investigating the meanings of "physique," "natural philosophy," and "history," among other terms, with the purpose of understanding Buffon's actual objectives. It also shows that Buffon never claimed to be a Newtonian and should not be considered as such; the goal is to provide a historical analysis that (...) resituates Buffon's thought within his own era. This is done, primarily, by eschewing the often-studied question of time in Buffon. Instead, this study examines the nontemporal meanings of the word "history" within the naturalist's theory and method. The title of his Natural History is examined both as an indicator of the kind of science that Buffon was hoping to achieve and as a source of great misinterpretation among his peers. Unlike Buffon, many of his contemporaries actually envisioned the study of nature from a Baconian perspective where history was restricted to the mere collection of facts and where philosophy, which was the implicit and ultimate goal of studying nature, was seen, at least for the present, as unrealizable. Buffon confronts this tendency insofar as his Histoire naturelle claims to be the real physique that, along with describing nature, also sought to identify general laws and provide clear insight into what true knowledge of nature is or should be. According to Buffon, history (both natural and civil) is not analogous to mathematics; it is a nonmathematical method whose scope encompasses both nature and society. This methodological stance gives rise to the "physicization" of certain moral concepts--a gesture that was interpreted by his contemporaries as Epicurean and atheist. In addition, Buffon reduces a number of metaphysically tainted historical concepts (e.g., antediluvian monuments) to objects of physical analysis, thereby confronting the very foundation of natural theology. In Buffon, as this essay makes clear, natural history is paving the way for a new physique (science of natural beings), independent from mathematics and from God, that treats naturalia in a philosophical and "historical" manner that is not necessarily "temporal. ". (shrink)

This collection of essays originated from an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Pittsburgh. Contents: Aesthetic Factors in Natural Science, by Nicholas Rescher; Three Arguments against Simplicity, by Kristin Shrader-Frechette; Simplicity and the Aesthetics of Explanation, by Joseph C. Pitt; Simplicity as an Epistemic Virtue: The View from the Neuronal Level, by Paul M. Churchland; Taming a Regulative Principle: From Kant to Schlick, by Matti Sintonen; Simplicity and Distinctness: The Limits of Referential Semantics, by Ulrich Majer; The Aesthetics (...) of Theory Testing: Economy and Simplicity, by Jane Duran; Simplicity in Evolutionary Explanations, by David B. Resnik; and The Role of Simplicity in Geology, by illiam R. Brice. Index. Co-published with Center for the Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

The paper is a response to William Newman’s rebuttal of a critique of his account of the origins of modern chemistry by Alan Chalmers. A way in which the nature of science can be illuminated by history of science is identified and an account of how this can be achieved in the context of a study of the work of Boyle defended in the face of Newman’s criticism. Texts from the writings of Boyle that are cited by Newman as (...) posing problems for Chalmers’ thesis are interpreted as in fact supporting it. (shrink)

This essay is a broad overview of philosophy’s capacity of facing the historicity of nature. It shows why classical philosophy of history, especially Hegel, left nature outside of history, and also in what sense this kind of philosophy is outdated. Then it shows how natural sciences discovered historical phenomena since the invention of biology at the very end of the eighteenth century and especially since Darwinism, although these did not examine the philosophical presuppositions of their theories. (...) Assuming that the challenge of contemporary philosophy of history is to learn to include nature in history, the essay finally examines climatic change as a test case that allows us to see the problematics of nature’s historicity today. Climatic change cannot be explained if one holds onto the classical division into natural sciences and humanities, and this is because it is neither a natural nor a cultural phenomenon but manifests reality as a techno-nature, that has a singular, non-teleological and eventful historicity, the understanding of which is crucial today. (shrink)

Are scientific discoveries coming to an end? At what cost isscientific research undertaken? Priceless Knowledge? argues that perfecting natural science is impracticable, not on theoretical terms, but on strictly economic grounds. This is a rare philosophical examination of the economics of natural science. Nicholas Rescher argues that while there are no theoretical limits to natural science, we are limited by what we can afford to do. Rescher explores th exponential increase in resources necessary to accomplish growth in (...) knowledge. Priceless Knowledge? conveys an important message that philosophers of science, scientists, and those interested in scientific inquiry cannot ignore. (shrink)

Previous criteria of narrative coherence have failed to come to terms with narrative intelligibility. The principle of chronology is only a negative criterion. The one entity-one story criterion, which requires every episode to~ refer to one and the same entity, fails both in its positive and negative forms. The Aristotelian concept of necessary connection is useless for historians because there are no natural beginnings or endings in history. Yet genetic relationships in narrative, though they cannot be reduced to (...) causal or probabilistic relationships, do give coherences. History becomes science when historians transform stories into histories by seeking the mechanisms which underlie the genetic relationships between historical incidents. The construction of history in narrative form does not, therefore, cut the historian off from science, as positivists contend. (shrink)

This article discusses whether ecology represents an alternative type of natural science, that is normatively committed. Central questions are:-how man and human action are integrated into the subject matter of ecology.

This article discusses whether ecology represents an alternative type of natural science, that is normatively committed. Central questions are: -- how man and human action are integrated into the subject matter of ecology; -- whether evaluative concepts like 'health' are incorporated into the conceptual structure of ecology; and -- whether ecology transcends the image of natural knowledge as control of nature. It is concluded that all hypotheses of ecology being inherently judgmental in character must be rejected.

An odd, but persistent question. In _Guns, Steel and Germs, Jared Diamond's answer is that history is or should be a science. Like sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, he wants to extend the methods of the natural sciences to the social sciences and the humanities. My answer is an emphatic 'no!' E. H. Carr's _What is History? made an extended case for scientific history. The main burden of my essay is a dismantling of Carr's argument. (...) Concerned with objective truth (_pace the radical skeptics), history writing may have science in its tool kit. But it is essentially an interpretive, narrative art. (shrink)

The scope of this article is feminist philosophical engagement with the natural sciences. As a starting point we can view science as having the objective of “producing general propositions about nature, the physical ‘out there,’ that can be tested empirically where appropriate, and that are rational in character” but we also need to recognize the fluidity of the term “science”; for to term something “scientific” is honorific. It is signaled as something to be trusted and relied on, and (...) there are political as well as intellectual debates concerning what is to be dignified with this title. (shrink)

In philosophy /ontology/ as well as in physics one deals with various kinds of ESSE. Quantum objects do not obey the Bell inequalities, which are natural for macroscopic objects. Some beings may be real but not actual. Actual beings are those which show up NOW. For a physicist this seems to correspond to a reduction of the wave packet. Existence in an atractor.

Neo‐Aristotelian ethical naturalism purports to show that moral evaluation of human action and character is an evaluation of natural goodness—a kind of evaluation that applies to living things in virtue of their nature and based on their form of life. The standard neo‐Aristotelian view defines natural goodness by way of generic statements describing the natural history, or the ‘characteristic’ life, of a species. In this paper, I argue that this conception of natural goodness commits the (...) neo‐Aristotelian view to a problematic anti‐individualism that results in the wrong assessment of individuals with uniquely adaptive adjustments. I then offer an alternative account of natural goodness that avoids this problem. Instead of relying on generic statements about a species, my account defines natural goodness based on counterfactual conditionals describing the modal properties of a single individual. I argue that this modal‐explanatory account gives a conception of natural goodness that is more intuitively plausible and better suited to capture the diversity and plasticity distinctive of life. (shrink)

Several difficulties have been raised concerning applicability of Glymour's model to developing and "un-natural" sciences, those contexts in which he claims it should be most clearly instantiated. An analysis of testing in such a field, archaeology, indicates that while bootstrapping may be realized in general outline, practice necessarily departs from the ideal in at least three important respects 1) it is not strictly theory contained, 2) the theory-mediated inference from evidence to test hypothesis is not exclusively deductive and, (...) 3) structural considerations do not displace or take precedence over substantive considerations. These points of divergence reflect the fact that bootstrapping in developing and exploratory sciences is as much a process of theory construction as of theory testing. (shrink)

In the field of natural science, Aristotle recognizes as his forerunners a select group of theorists such as Heraclitus of Ephesus, Empedocles of Acragas, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, and Leucippus and Democritus of Abdera. In addition, he mentions in the same contexts some whose claims to be “natural philosophers” are doubtful, yet who deserve notice in the same context, including Parmenides of Elea, Melissus of Samos, the people called Pythagoreans, and Plato as the author of the Timaeus. Aristotle takes (...) seriously almost all of these people, treating them as exemplary pioneers and valuable partners in the enterprise of “natural philosophy.” This article examines earlier opinions on certain fundamental questions about the natural world, as treated in the first three books of the Physics and in the first book of the Metaphysics. In Physics II and III, Aristotle represents most if not all of his predecessors as disastrously misunderstanding, in more than one way, the nature underlying the natural world. (shrink)

It is commonplace that whenever a metahistorian attempts to rule out some more or less general approaches to history, or certain methods, procedures as being impossible in history: “it just can’t be done!”—then, invariably, there is another metahistorian who will point to some historians who did just that, which allegedly could not be done. Equally predictable are the objections to such “contrary cases,” viz.: “That isn’t history!” What is it then? It may be religion, metaphysics, Spengler-ism, Toynbeeism,—or (...) worse: social science, sociology, and even: psychology! (shrink)

, whereby some causes are deemed more important than others, are ubiquitous in historical studies. Drawing from influential recent work on causation, I develop a definition of causal-explanatory strength. This makes clear exactly which aspects of explanatory weighting are subjective and which objective. It also sheds new light on several traditional issues, showing for instance that: underlying causes need not be more important than proximate ones; several different causes can each be responsible for most of an effect; small causes need (...) not be less important than big ones; and non-additive interactive effects between causes present no particular difficulty. Key Words: causation • explanation • history • interaction • proximate • underlying. (shrink)

From humans to hermit crabs to deep water plankton, all living things compete for locally limiting resources. This universal truth unites three bodies of thought--economics, evolution, and history--that have developed largely in mutual isolation. Here, Geerat Vermeij undertakes a groundbreaking and provocative exploration of the facts and theories of biology, economics, and geology to show how processes common to all economic systems--competition, cooperation, adaptation, and feedback--govern evolution as surely as they do the human economy, and how historical patterns in (...) both human and nonhuman evolution follow from this principle.Using a wealth of examples of evolutionary innovations, Vermeij argues that evolution and economics are one. Powerful consumers and producers exercise disproportionate controls on the characteristics, activities, and distribution of all life forms. Competition-driven demand by consumers, when coupled with supply-side conditions permitting economic growth, leads to adaptation and escalation among organisms. Although disruptions in production halt or reverse these processes temporarily, they amplify escalation in the long run to produce trends in all economic systems toward greater power, higher production rates, and a wider reach for economic systems and their strongest members.Despite our unprecedented power to shape our surroundings, we humans are subject to all the economic principles and historical trends that emerged at life's origin more than 3 billion years ago. Engagingly written, brilliantly argued, and sweeping in scope, Nature: An Economic History shows that the human institutions most likely to preserve opportunity and adaptability are, after all, built like successful living things. (shrink)