EMBODIMENT, RELATIONALITY and a NEW MORALITY a Thesis
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Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Scholarship@Western Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 9-23-2015 12:00 AM Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought Ben Woodard The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Tilottama Rajan The University of Western Ontario Joint Supervisor Joan Steigerwald The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Ben Woodard 2015 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the History of Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Woodard, Ben, "Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought" (2015). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 3314. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/3314 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought (Thesis Format: Monograph) by Benjamin Graham Woodard A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy in Theory and Criticism The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Ben Woodard 2015 Abstract: This dissertation examines F.W.J. von Schelling's Philosophy of Nature (or Naturphilosophie) as a form of early, and transcendentally expansive, naturalism that is, simultaneously, a naturalized transcendentalism. -
4338 Reason Int CC.Indd
“For my whole Christian life I’ve been saying, ‘My heart cannot rejoice in what my mind rejects.’ Today’s New Atheists seem to be saying something like that: that we should only believe what’s within the bounds of evidence and sound reason. For them, that means we should choose atheism, but in reality nothing could be further from the truth. True Reason explains clearly and deeply how New Atheists have both missed and misunderstood the evidence that exists, and why Christianity is by far the better choice for the thinking mind and worship- ing heart.” —Josh McDowell, Author and Speaker “With a clear message and respectful tone, True Reason challenges and con- vincingly refutes the claim of the New Atheists to own reason. The contribu- tors persuasively argue from history, science, and philosophy that the Christian world view is not only reasonable in itself but also provides the necessary founda- tion for reason. If you love reason, True Reason explains why Christianity is the best worldview for you.” —Michael Licona, PhD, Associate Professor in Theology, Houston Baptist University, Author of The Resurrection of Jesus “More than a year before he joined our staff, Tom Gilson came alongside Ratio Christi to help lead dozens of students to the atheist Reason Rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC. They entered a modern-day ‘lions’ den’ to share Christ’s love and truth, giving away bottles of water and excerpts from True Reason’s first edition. Armed with logic and True Reason, these students engaged in conversation with anyone who would listen. -
Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins Talk Ethics in Oxford Keeping Public
BHA news BHA news www.humanism.org.uk Issue 3 2011 Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other? — Attributed to George Eliot Keeping public services fair, inclusive, and secular The BHA is at the forefront of the to provide those services through its campaign to keep public services ‘Poppy Project’. The Salvation Army, an shared, inclusive, and secular. Since we evangelical organisation, has previously published our report and policy paper declared to parliament that it would on public service reform, Quality and be ‘impossible’ for it to be ‘religiously Equality: Human Rights, Public Services neutral’ in the provision of public and Religious Organisations (http:// services. The Salvation Army’s position tinyurl.com/Q-EReport) in 2007, we have statement on homosexuality also details been working hard for legal and policy homosexual behaviour as ‘self evidently changes to ensure that religious groups abnormal’ and condemns gay people to a cannot discriminate when they provide life of celibacy. public services. We’ve also been trying We believe that it is deeply to publicise the issues at stake, which, ones. In fact, many religious groups which concerning that the government has in light of more public services being wish to take on the delivery of public considered it appropriate to stop contracted to religious organisations, are services may be particularly conservative, contracting with an organisation specialist getting evermore serious for employees, evangelical, unrepresentative, or in working with victims of sexual service users, and the public alike. -
Humanism: the 10 Most Asked Questions Table of Contents
Humanism: The 10 Most Asked Questions Table of Contents The 10 Most Asked Questions Definitions Beliefs What Do Humanists Believe About…? Values Morals, Ethics and Goodness Faith and Reason Life and Death Organized Religion Customs, Ceremonies and Celebrations Some Non-believers You Might Recognize Becoming a Humanist Appendix: Further Reading and Resources About the Author Copyright 2016, John Sias Humanism: The 10 Most Asked Questions The 10 Most Asked Questions What is a humanist? A humanist is a person who contends that belief in a supernatural being is not essential to being a good person and living a good life. A short definition is “Being good without a god." Who might be a humanist? Among humanists are those who are call themselves agnostic, atheist, “bright”, cynic, deist, freethinker, naturalist, nothing, non-religious, rationalist, secular, secular humanist, skeptic, spiritualist. What does a humanist believe about the purpose of life? For each individual to reach his potential and to help others do the same. And when choosing a purpose of life, your choice should be based on how you, as a human being, should relate to other human beings. Humanists think that almost everyone is capable of choosing purposes and goals that will help guide their life. What does a humanist believe about afterlife? The only afterlife we humans might experience is the way we have affected individuals and institutions during our lifetime. There is neither heaven nor hell. What does a humanist believe about salvation? They do not believe that anyone is born sinful or guilty. Therefore, they do not believe anyone needs to be “saved." What does a humanist believe about evolution? The earth is 4.5 billion years old. -
Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-‐Darwinian
Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 144 pp. $24.95. For some time now, Thomas Nagel has been troubled by the place of Darwinism in public intellectual life. In 2008, he argued in Philosophy and Public Affairs that Intelligent Design Theory has a place in high-school science curricula. More recently, he reviewed Alvin Plantinga’s anti-Darwinism favourably in the New York Review of Books, writing: when our faculties lead us to beliefs vastly removed from those our ancestors needed to survive—as in the recent production and assessment of evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson—Plantinga’s sceptical argument remains powerful. Now, in Mind and Cosmos, we have a more systematic treatment, which affords us a better understanding of his view. Let us begin with the inflammatory sub-title. You might think that Nagel is offering a refutation of a scientific theory. As far as I can tell, this is not exactly his intention (except for a strange pronouncement I’ll discuss later). And it is certainly not the result, of his argument. Nagel claims that materialist neo-Darwinism (“Darwinism” for short) doesn’t offer us a certain sort of understanding: it doesn’t render the emergence of mind, consciousness, and value intelligible. For reasons I’ll outline, scientific Darwinism doesn’t claim to, and perhaps couldn’t, offer this kind of understanding. So Nagel does not meet Darwinism on its ground. This criticism is from a point of view external to Darwinism itself. -
MIND and COSMOS INTRODUCTION '/F
Chapter 1 Introduction The aim of this book is to argue that the mind-bodyjprobtem is not — just a local problem, having to do with the relation between mind, brain, and behavior in living animal organisms, but that it invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history. The physical sciences and evolutionary biology cannot be kept insulated from it, and I believe a true appreciation of the difficulty of the problem must eventually change our conception of the place of the physical £} sciences in describing the natural order. One of the legitimate tasks of philosophy is to investigate the limits of even the best developed and most successful forms of con temporary scientific knowledge. It maybe frustrating to acknowledge, but we are simply at the point in the history of human thought at ^\fi4^A/ which we find ourselves, and our successors will make discoveries and develop forms of understanding of which we have not dreamt. Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellec tual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to under stand the universe as a whole. Pointing out their limits is a philo- <&£-• sophical task, whoever engages in it, rather than part of the internal pursuit of science—though we can hope that if the limits are recog nized, that may eventually lead to the discovery of new forms of ; scientific understanding. Scientists are well aware of how much they 1 Sf MIND AND COSMOS INTRODUCTION '/f don't know, but this is a different kind of problem—not just of evidence favors some form of neutral monism over the traditional acknowledging the limits of what is actually understood but of alternatives of materialism, idealism, and dualism. -
To Download This Guide in PDF Format
OPENING MINDS CHANGING HEARTS A Guide to Being Openly Secular A Beginner’s Guide to Becoming Openly Secular. Copyright © 2015 Openly Secular. Some Rights Reserved. Content written by Lori L. Fazzino, M.A., University of Nevada, Las Vegas Graphic design by Sarah Hamilton, www.smfhamilton.com This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. More information is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ Openly Secular grants you permission for all non-commercial uses, including reproduction, distribution, and adaptation, so long as you provide proper credit to Openly Secular and provide others with the same rights you are receiving. ABOUT THE OPENLY SECULAR CaMPAIGN Openly Secular is a coalition project that promotes tolerance and equality of people regardless of their belief systems. Founded in 2013, the Openly Secular Coalition is led by four organizations - Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, Secular Coalition for America, Secular Student Alliance, and Stiefel Freethought Foundation. This campaign is also joined by national partner organizations from the secular movement as well as organizations that are allies to our cause. OUR MISSION The mission of Openly Secular is to eliminate discrimination and increase acceptance by getting secular people - including atheists, freethinkers, agnostics, humanists and nonreligious people - to be open about their beliefs. www.openlysecular.org SPECIAL THANKS We would like to thank PFLAG, www.pflag.org, and the Secular Safe Zone Project, www.secularsafezone.org, for allowing us to adapt pieces of the Be Yourself: Questions and Answers for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth and the Secular Safe Zone Resource Guide for Allies for this text. -
Thomas Nagel Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
Philosophy in Review XXXIII (2013), no. 5 Thomas Nagel Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2012. x + 130 pages $24.95 (hardcover ISBN 978–0–19–991975–8) In this book, Thomas Nagel seeks to demonstrate that materialistic and evolutionary accounts of the mind fail. Given this failure, we must reconceive the whole scientific process so that it can explain the presence of minds, “since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind” (53). In other words, given that minds are the end-product, we have to reverse engineer the process so that the beginning stages make it likely that they would eventually lead to minds. This means that the universe must be more than just physical objects, properties, and processes, there must be some sort of mental aspect, one that is present from the very beginning. While Nagel thinks some of the criticisms offered against evolution by the Intelligent Design crowd harbor genuine insights (10–11), he remains “strongly averse” to the notion of God (12, n. 10), so he does not take this in a theistic direction. Rather, he argues that there must be teleological laws built into the universe in addition to the laws on which science has (hitherto) focused. This is not a denial of evolution itself, something Nagel remains convinced of (30), but of materialistic evolution. Anything less than teleology is bound to treat the mind as an accidental by-product of the struggle for survival. Of course, many philosophers and scientists have no difficulty treating the mind as an accidental by-product. -
Darwin's Doubt
Debating Darwin’s Doubt A Scientific Controversy that Can No Longer Be Denied DAVID KLINGHOFFER, EDITOR DISCOVERY INSTITUTE PRESS SEATTLE 2015 Description This book contains essays responding to criticism of Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design by Stephen Meyer. The book explores topics such as orphan genes, cladistics, small shelly fossils, protein evolution, the length of the Cambrian explosion, the God-of-the-Gaps objection to intelligent design, and criticisms raised by proponents of theistic evolution. Contributors include Stephen Meyer, Douglas Axe, David Berlinski, William Dembski, Ann Gauger, Casey Luskin, and Paul Nelson. Edited by David Klinghoffer. Copyright Notice Copyright © 2015 by Discovery Institute. All Rights Reserved. Publisher’s Note This book is part of a series published by the Center for Science & Culture at Discovery Institute in Seattle. Previous books include Signature of Controversy: Responses to CritiCs of Signature in the Cell, edited by David Klinghoffer; The Myth of Junk DNA by Jonathan Wells; The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays by David Berlinski; and DisCovering Intelligent Design: A Journey into the SCientifiC EvidenCe by Gary Kemper, Hallie Kemper, and Casey Luskin. Library Cataloging Data Debating Darwin’s Doubt: A SCientifiC Controversy that Can No Longer Be Denied Edited by David Klinghoffer. BISAC Subject: SCI027000 SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Evolution BISAC Subject: SCI080000 SCIENCE / Essays BISAC Subject: SCI034000 SCIENCE / History ISBN-13: 978-1-936599-30-1 (Kindle) 978-1-936599-31-8 (EPUB) 978-1-936599-28-8 (paperback) Publisher Information Discovery Institute Press, 208 Columbia Street, Seattle, WA 98101 Internet: http://www.discoveryinstitutepress.com/ First Edition. -
APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers, Vol. 14, No. 2
NEWSLETTER | The American Philosophical Association Philosophy and Computers SPRING 2015 VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 FROM THE GUEST EDITOR John P. Sullins NOTES FROM THE COMMUNITY ON PAT SUPPES ARTICLES Patrick Suppes Patrick Suppes Autobiography Luciano Floridi Singularitarians, AItheists, and Why the Problem with Artificial Intelligence is H.A.L. (Humanity At Large), not HAL Peter Boltuc First-Person Consciousness as Hardware D. E. Wittkower Social Media and the Organization Man Niklas Toivakainen The Moral Roots of Conceptual Confusion in Artificial Intelligence Research Xiaohong Wang, Jian Wang, Kun Zhao, and Chaolin Wang Increase or Decrease of Entropy: To Construct a More Universal Macroethics (A Discussion of Luciano Floridi’s The Ethics of Information) VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 SPRING 2015 © 2015 BY THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION ISSN 2155-9708 APA NEWSLETTER ON Philosophy and Computers JOHN P. SULLINS, GUEST EDITOR VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 | SPRING 2015 but here we wish to celebrate his accomplishments in the FROM THE GUEST EDITOR fields of philosophy and computing one last time. John P. Sullins To accomplish that goal I have compiled some interesting SONOMA STATE UNIVERSITY pieces from an autobiography that Pat wrote some years ago but that he added to a bit for an event held in his honor November 17, 2014, marked the end of an inspiring at Stanford. In this document he explains his motivations career. On that day Patrick Suppes died quietly at the and accomplishments in various fields of study that are age of ninety-two in his house on the Stanford Campus, of interest to our community. In that section you will see which had been his home both physically and intellectually just how ambitious Pat was in the world of computer since 1950. -
Free Will, Sam Harris Combines Neuroscience and Psychology to Lay This Illusion to Rest at Last
“Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe that we don’t have it. In Free Will, Sam Harris combines neuroscience and psychology to lay this illusion to rest at last. Like all of Harris’s books, this one will not only unsettle you but make you think deeply. Read it: you have no choice.” —JERRY A. COYNE, Professor of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, and author of Why Evolution Is True A BELIEF IN FREE WILL touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion. In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life. “In this elegant and provocative book, Sam Harris demonstrates—with great intellectual ferocity and panache—that free will is an inherently flawed and incoherent concept, even in subjective terms. If he is right, the book will radically change the way we view ourselves as human beings.” —V. S. RAMACHANDRAN, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, UCSD, and author of The Tell-Tale Brain “Brilliant and witty—and never less than incisive—Free Will shows that Sam Harris can say more in 13,000 words than most people do in 100,000.” —OLIVER SACKS “Many say that believing that there is no free will is impossible—or, if possible, will cause nihilism and despair. -
Naturalism Nagel and Theism.Docx
Nagel, Naturalism and Theism Todd Moody (Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia) In his recent controversial book, Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel writes: Many materialist naturalists would not describe their view as reductionist. But to those who doubt the adequacy of such a world view, the different attempts to accommodate within it mind and related phenomena all appear as attempts to reduce the true extent of reality to a common basis that is not rich enough for the purpose. Hence the resistance can be brought together as antireductionism.1 I want to discuss the italicized phrases and their implications. First, the term “materialist naturalist” calls for comment. Materialism is understood to be the ontological thesis that material things, or perhaps physical things and physical properties, are the only things there are. What does “naturalist” add to this? Nagel explains: I will use the terms “materialism” or “materialist naturalism” to refer to one side of this conflict and “antireductionism” to refer to the other side, even though the terms are rather rough.2 Elsewhere he adds, [T]here is ultimately one way that the natural order is intelligible, namely, through physical law—law—everything that exists and everything that happens can in principle be explained by the laws that govern the physical universe.3 What “naturalism” adds to materialism is the thesis that all that happens in the physical realm is “explained”, i.e., described by “mathematically stateable” laws.4 So much for “materialist naturalist.” Turning to the second italicized passage, we see that Nagel believes that this project has failed and must fail.