Paul Thagard uses new accounts of brain mechanisms and social interactions to forge theories of mind, knowledge, reality, morality, justice, meaning, and the arts. Natural Philosophy brings new methods for analyzing concepts, understanding values, and achieving coherence. It shows how to unify the humanities with the cognitive and social sciences. How can people know what is real and strive to make the world better? Philosophy is the attempt to answer general questions about the nature of knowledge, reality, and values. Natural Philosophy pursues these questions by drawing heavily on the sciences and finds no room for supernatural entities such as souls, gods, and possible worlds. It provides original accounts of the traditional branches of philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. Rather than reducing the humanities to the sciences, this book displays fertile interconnections that show that philosophical questions and artistic practices can be much better understood by considering how human brains operate and interact in social contexts. The sciences and the humanities are interdependent, because both the natural and social sciences cannot avoid questions about methods and values that are primarily the province of philosophy. This book belongs to a trio that includes Brain-Mind: From Neurons to Consciousness and Creativity and Mind-Society: From Brains to Social Sciences and Professions. They can be read independently, but together they make up a Treatise on Mind and Society that provides a unified and comprehensive treatment of the cognitive sciences, social sciences, professions, and humanities.
This book describes how natural philosophy and exact mathematical sciences joined together to make the Scientific Revolution possible.
The complete title of one of the most famous works ever written, Isaac Newton's Principia, was actually Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy".
From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences should be valuable for historians of science, but also of great interest to scholars of all aspects of 19th-century life and culture.
Newton’s pivotal work Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which sets out his laws of universal gravitation and motion, is regarded as one of the most important works in the history of science.
This edition aims to make Margaret Cavendish’s most mature philosophical work more accessible to students and scholars of the period.
This volume brings together essays by an impressive group of scholars, including William Wallace, O.P., Jude P. Dougherty, John Haldane, Thomas DeKoninck, Alasdair MacIntyre, David Solomon, Daniel McInerny, Janet E. Smith, Michael Novak, ...
Towards the end of his life, Descartes published the first four parts of a projected six-part work, The Principles of Philosophy. This was intended to be the definitive statement of his complete system of philosophy.
Sixteenth-century Aristotelianism was the culmination of four centuries of commentary and criticism. Physiologia is one of the first books to provide an accessible and comprehensive guide to that tradition in natural philosophy.
Reprint of the original.
Shedding new light on the intellectual context of Newton's scientific thought, this book explores the development of his mathematical philosophy, rational mechanics, and celestial dynamics.