Scientific Essentialism

Scientific Essentialism
Author: Brian Ellis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2001-04-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780521800945

Examines the laws of nature.

The Philosophy of Nature

The Philosophy of Nature
Author: Brian Ellis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2014-12-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317489500

In "The Philosophy of Nature," Brian Ellis provides a clear and forthright general summation of, and introduction to, the new essentialist position. Although the theory that the laws of nature are immanent in things, rather than imposed on them from without, is an ancient one, much recent work has been done to revive interest in essentialism and "The Philosophy of Nature" is a distinctive contribution to this lively current debate. Brian Ellis exposes the philosophical and scientific credentials of the prevailing Humean metaphysic as less than compelling and makes the case for new essentialism as an alternative metaphysical perspective in lucid and unambiguous terms. This book develops this alternative metaphysic and considers the consequences for philosophy, and for some other areas of investigation, of working with such a metaphysic. Ellis argues that these consequences are profound and that a new essentialism provides a comprehensive new philosophy of nature for a modern scientific understanding of the world.

Essentialism

Essentialism
Author: Greg McKeown
Publisher: Crown Currency
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2014-04-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0804137390

THE LIFE-CHANGING NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • MORE THAN TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD • Now in a 10th anniversary edition featuring a new introduction and bonus 21-day challenge. “Essentialism holds the keys to solving one of the great puzzles of life: How can we do less but accomplish more?”—Adam Grant, bestselling author of Think Again Essentialism isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done. Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin? Are you often busy but not productive? Do you feel like your time is constantly being hijacked? If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the Way of the Essentialist. Essentialism is more than a time-management technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution toward the things that really matter. By forcing us to apply more selective criteria for where to spend our precious time and energy, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices, instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us. Essentialism is not one more thing to do. It’s a whole new way of doing less, but better, in every area of our lives. Join the millions of people who have used Essentialism to change their outlook on the world.

The Essential Child

The Essential Child
Author: Susan A. Gelman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2003
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780195154061

This text synthesizes 15 years of empirical research on essentialism into a coherent framework, examining children's thinking and ways in which language influences thought. It shows that children do not come into the world as passive recipients of data.

Real Essentialism

Real Essentialism
Author: David S. Oderberg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2007-11-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1134348851

Real Essentialism presents a comprehensive defence of neo-Aristotelian essentialism. Do objects have essences? Must they be the kinds of things they are in spite of the changes they undergo? Can we know what things are really like – can we define and classify reality? Many if not most philosophers doubt this, influenced by centuries of empiricism, and by the anti-essentialism of Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, and other thinkers. Real Essentialism reinvigorates the tradition of realist, essentialist metaphysics, defending the reality and knowability of essence, the possibility of objective, immutable definition, and its relevance to contemporary scientific and metaphysical issues such as whether essence transcends physics and chemistry, the essence of life, the nature of biological species, and the nature of the person.

What's Left of Human Nature?

What's Left of Human Nature?
Author: Maria Kronfeldner
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2018-10-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262347970

A philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against dehumanization, Darwinian, and developmentalist challenges. Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What's Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development result from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether.

The Tools of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Science

The Tools of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Science
Author: Theodore Sider
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2020
Genre: Metaphysics
ISBN: 019881156X

Metaphysics has shifted ground, moving away from necessity and possibility as the lens through which we look at things. Ted Sider shapes the agenda for the subject by exploring how this shift transforms the project of understanding the objects, properties, and quantities of the universe, and the relations between them, in terms of structures.

Kant, Science, and Human Nature

Kant, Science, and Human Nature
Author: Robert Hanna
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2006-10-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199285543

Robert Hanna argues for the importance of Kant's theories of the epistemological, metaphysical, and practical foundations of the 'exact sciences'--- relegated to the dustbin of the history of philosophy for most of the 20th century.Hanna's earlier book Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (OUP 2001), explores basic conceptual and historical connections between Immanuel Kant's 18th-century Critical Philosophy and the tradition of mainstream analytic philosophy from Frege to Quine. The central topics of the analytic tradition in its early and middle periods were meaning and necessity. But the central theme of mainstream analytic philosophy after 1950 is scientific naturalism, which holds---to use WilfridSellars's apt phrase---that 'science is the measure of all things'. This type of naturalism is explicitly reductive. Kant, Science, and Human Nature has two aims, one negative and one positive. Its negative aim is to develop a Kantian critique of scientific naturalism. But its positive and more fundamentalaim is to work out the elements of a humane, realistic, and nonreductive Kantian account of the foundations of the exact sciences. According to this account, the essential properties of the natural world are directly knowable through human sense perception (empirical realism), and practical reason is both explanatorily and ontologically prior to theoretical reason (the primacy of the practical).

The Nature of Race

The Nature of Race
Author: Ann Morning
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2011-06-24
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0520270312

Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-303) and index.