Universal Biology after Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel PDF Download

Author: Richard Dien Winfield
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319753584
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

View

Book Description
Here is a universal biology that draws upon the contributions of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel to unravel the mystery of life and conceive what is essential to living things anywhere they may arise. The book develops a philosopher’s guide to life in the universe, conceiving how nature becomes a biosphere in which life can emerge, what are the basic life processes common to any organism, how evolution can give rise to the different possible forms of life, and what distinguishes the essential life forms from one another.

Author: Richard Dien Winfield
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319662813
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 410

View

Book Description
This book defies the reigning dismissal of the philosophy of nature by turning to what Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel have had to say about nature and critically thinking through their arguments to reconstruct a comprehensive account of the universe. Aided by the contributions of more recent thinkers, such as Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Michael B. Foster, and Hans Jonas, Conceiving Nature shows how the mechanics of matter in motion, the physics of electromagnetism, and chemical process provide all that is needed for life to emerge and give rise to rational animals capable of knowing nature in truth. The work contains detailed discussions of much of Aristotle’s writing on nature, of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, and of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature.

Author: Richard Dien Winfield
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031355423
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 516

View

Book Description
In this book, Richard Dien Winfield builds upon Hegel’s Aesthetics to provide a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the individual fine arts, which remedies Hegel's inconsistencies and major omissions. In addition to conceiving the general aesthetics and particular stylistic forms of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature, Winfield determines the fundamental character of the new arts of photography and cinema that the master thinkers of aesthetics never had the opportunity to consider. Winfield’s analysis covers a wide-ranging array of artistic creations from diverse periods and cultures, while engaging in debate with the most important aesthetic theorists of the past and present.

Author: Michael Yudanin
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1793620199
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 291

View

Book Description
In Animal Choice and Human Freedom: On the Genealogy of Self-Determined Action, Michael Yudanin argues that describing freedom conceptually is impossible without explaining how it can exist in the world. Yudanin develops an account of freedom’s instantiation in biological agents and provides several prerequisites that are necessary for its exercise. He demonstrates that freedom is linked to the form of life and distinguishes between choice in non-verbal animals and human freedom, where the latter is enabled by the development of language and thus possesses a distinct character. Following this descriptive account, Yudanin explores freedom’s evolutionary history, explaining how it developed in the course of the evolution of species.

Author: Nicholas Mowad
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438475594
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

View

Book Description
Meaning and Embodiment provides a detailed study of Hegel's anthropology to examine the place of corporeity or embodiment in human life, identity, and experience. In Hegel's view, to be human means in part to produce one's own spiritual embodiment in culture and habits. Whereas for animals nature only has meaning relative to biological drives, humans experience meaning in a way that transcends these limits, and which allows for aesthetic appreciation of beauty and sublimity, nihilistic feelings of meaninglessness, and the complex and different systems of symbolic speech and action characterizing language and culture. By elucidating the different forms of embodiment, Nicholas Mowad shows how for Hegel we are embodied in several different ways at once: as extended, subject to physical-chemical forces, living, and human. Many difficult problems in philosophy and everyday experience come down to using the right concept of embodiment. Mowad traces Hegel's account through the growth and development of the body, gender and racial difference, cycles of sleep and waking, and sensibility and mental illness.

Author: Robert S. Cohen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400962339
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374

View

Book Description
To the scientists and philosophers of our time, Hegel has been either a ne glected or a provocative thinker, a source of irrelevant dark metaphysics or of complex but insightful analysis. His influence upon the work of natural scientists has seemed minimal, in the main; and his stimulus to the nascent sciences of society and to psychology has seemed to be as often an obstacle as an encouragement. Nevertheless his philosophical analysis of knowledge and the knowing process, of concepts and their evolutionary formation, of rationality in its forms and histories, of the stages of empirical awareness and human practice, all set within his endless inquiries into cultural formations from the entire sweep of human experience, must, we believe, be confronted by anyone who wants to understand the scientific consciousness. Indeed, we may wish to situate the changing theories of nature, and of humankind in nature, within a philosophical account of men and women as social practi tioners and as sensing, thinking, feeling centers of privacy; and then we will see the work of Hegel as a major effort to mediate between the purest of epistemological investigations and the most practical of the political and the religious. This book, long delayed to our deep regret, derives from a Symposium on Hegel and the Sciences which was sponsored jointly by the Hegel Society of America and the Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science a decade ago.

Author: Andrea Gambarotto
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319654152
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 137

View

Book Description
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.

Author: Nam T. Nguyen
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739150405
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

View

Book Description
Nature's Primal Self examines Corrington's thought, called "ecstatic naturalism," in juxtaposition to both C. S. Peirce's pragmatic and semiotic concept of the self and Karl Jaspers' existential elucidation of Existenz. Peirce's and Jaspers' anthropocentrism is thus corrected by Corrington's ecstatic naturalism. Ecstatic naturalism, as a new movement, is both a semiotic theoretical method and a metaphysics that probes deeply into the ontological divide between nature naturing and nature natured. Author Nam T. Nguyen attempts to achieve three goals: first, to present and elucidate the underlying philosophical concepts of Charles Peirce, Karl Jaspers, and Robert Corrington; second, to critique the anthropocentric self of Peirce's semiotic pragmatism and of Jaspers' existential anthropology (periechontology) from the standpoint of ecstatic naturalism; and third, to introduce the concept of nature's primal self, radically grounded in the perspective of ecstatic naturalism, as a judicious, more encompassing, and richer framework compared to Peirce's semiotic construction of the self and Jaspers' existential concept of Existenz.

Author: Kelvin Knight
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074563821X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

View

Book Description
Aristotle is the most influential philosopher of practice, and Knight's new book explores the continuing importance of Aristotelian philosophy. First, it examines the theoretical bases of what Aristotle said about ethical, political and productive activity. It then traces ideas of practice through such figures as St Paul, Luther, Hegel, Heidegger and recent Aristotelian philosophers, and evaluates Alasdair MacIntyre's contribution. Knight argues that, whereas Aristotle's own thought legitimated oppression, MacIntyre's revision of Aristotelianism separates ethical excellence from social elitism and justifies resistance. With MacIntyre, Aristotelianism becomes revolutionary. MacIntyre's case for the Thomistic Aristotelian tradition originates in his attempt to elaborate a Marxist ethics informed by analytic philosophy. He analyses social practices in teleological terms, opposing them to capitalist institutions and arguing for the cooperative defence of our moral agency. In condensing these ideas, Knight advances a theoretical argument for the reformation of Aristotelianism and an ethical argument for social change.

Author: Kenneth M. Stokes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315482592
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 511

View

Book Description
This sequel to "Man and the Biosphere" is an account of the origins and development of a cultural, social energetic and systems theoretical contribution to critical Marxism. It examines: the intellectual contributions of the Russian philosophers, A.A. Bogdanov and A.I. Bukharin; Bogdanov's and Bukharin's contributions as a search for a unity of scientific knowledge; and a paradigmatic change from a closed mechanical system to an open systems paradigm.