What Philosophic Cosmology Can Teach Us

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Strachan Donnelley
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter introduces the fourth and most philosophical section of the book, which offers a history of the development of cosmology or natural philosophy primarily in the work of Spinoza, Whitehead, Jonas, and Mayr. The aim is to clarify an ecological alternative to the dominant contemporary legacy of Cartesian dualism and mechanistic materialism. In addition to providing a prelude to the history and synthesis offered in following chapters, this chapter also addresses the important question of the relationship between natural philosophy and ethics.

Marx in the Anthropocene: Value, Metabolic Rift, and the Non-Cartesian Dualism

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kohei Saito
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Metabolic Rift ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractCharacteristic to the Anthropocene is global ecological crisis that humans have created without knowing any effective solution. Beyond the division of humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, there thus emerged a series of serious attempts to figure out an adequate theoretical framework for comprehending the formation, development and future of the Anthropocene. Ecological Marxists also actively participate in this discussion to problematize the relationship between the Anthropocene and capitalism, which results in a new debate. While second-stage ecosocialists such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett are trying to connect the general issues of the Anthropocene to the concept of the ‘metabolic rift’, Jason W. Moore not only replaces the concept of the Anthropocene with the ‘Capitalocene’ and rejects the metabolic rift approach as falling into the ‘Cartesian division’, which cannot aptly theorize the nature of today’s crisis. Critically analyzing Moore’s ‘monist’ understanding of the history of capitalist development, this paper examines why Marx used apparently ‘dualist’ terminologies in his analysis. Moore claims that his post-Cartesian approach is the correct interpretation of Marx’s political economy, but a closer examination of Marx’s method reveals his non-Cartesian dualism, which functions as a basis for a radical critique of today’s ecological crisis. Furthermore, this paper argues that Marx’s theory of metabolism must be understood in relation to his intensive research on natural sciences and non-Western societies to envision possibilities of the revolutionary subjectivity.

ARISTOTELIANISM, DESCARTES, AND HOBBES

2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL EDWARDS
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The historiography of early modern Aristotelian philosophy and its relationship with its seventeenth-century critics, such as Hobbes and Descartes, has expanded in recent years. This article explores the dynamics of this project, focusing on a tendency to complicate and divide up the category of Aristotelianism into multiple ‘Aristotelianisms’, and the significance of this move for attempts to write a contextual history of the relationship of Hobbes and Descartes to their Aristotelian contemporaries and predecessors. In particular, it considers recent work on Cartesian and Hobbesian natural philosophy, and the ways in which historians have related the different forms of early modern Aristotelianism to the projects of the novatores.

Neo-Darwinian Cosmologies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Strachan Donnelley
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Ernst Mayr ◽  
Evolutionary Perspective ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Hans Jonas ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
History Of ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Relationship

In this chapter, Donnelley argues that evolutionary theory constitutes one of the most profound revolutions in the whole history of Western science and philosophy. The relational cosmology developed by Spinoza and Whitehead had then to take a decisive turn when it came into contact with an evolutionary perspective and was more explicated as a philosophy of organic life. This is exemplified, for Donnelley, in the work of Hans Jonas, who developed a new philosophy of organic life, and Ernst Mayr, who was instrumental in showing the genetic basis of Darwinian natural selection and who contributed as well as a historian and philosopher of science. Donnelley reviews the similarities and differences of these two thinkers in terms of materialism, causation, and the relationship between natural science and natural philosophy. He concludes that Mayr is the philosopher and ethical champion of natural and human becoming. Jonas, on the other hand, is the philosopher and ethical champion of organic and human being. He is less stunned by the innumerable material forms and processes of life than by the very fact of life itself and especially organic life’s capacity for moral responsibility, evidenced in human beings.

Gilles Deleuze

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Colebrook
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
Simple Event ◽  
Specific Discipline ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Relationship

Perhaps the best way to approach the relationship between Deleuze and Agamben is to adopt a method from Deleuze and Guattari’s late philosophy: the conceptual persona.1 Here philosophical proper names do not stand for biographies or persons but for orientations or maps of thinking. Descartes, for example, enables a whole tradition of Cartesian dualism, even for those who neither read nor reference his work. There are some occasions when Agamben’s history of thought also considers proper names less as labels for specific historical individuals, and more as markers of a certain style or distribution of thinking. His recent The Use of Bodies, for example, sees Spinoza as a way of coming to terms with the relation between essence and existence (between what a being is, and that a being is) (UB 160). The names Agamben draws upon are not so much focused upon for their singular greatness, but because they provide a way for thinking about what Agamben sees as the ongoing problem of the singular existence of an individuated being, and then the way that being is identified in language. One might also think of this as the difference between the simple event that something is, and then the identifiable what of the thing. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari treat proper names as conceptual personae, suggesting – as Agamben does – that philosophical problems (and the names that attach to them) are not academic exercises of a specific discipline, but have to do with the very possibility of thinking (in domains well beyond philosophy).

Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This volume examines the relationship between the history of scholarship and the history of Christianity in the early modern period. Leading British, American and continental scholars explore the ways in which erudition contributed to—or clashed with—the formation of confessional identities in the wake of the Reformation, at individual, institutional, national and international levels. Covering Catholics and Protestants in equal measure, the essays assess biblical criticism; the study of the church fathers; the ecclesiastical censorship of scholarly works; oriental studies and the engagement with Near Eastern languages, texts and communities; and the relationship between developments in scholarship and other domains, including practical piety, natural philosophy, and the universities and seminaries where most intellectual activity was still conducted. One of the volume’s main strengths is its chronological coverage. It begins with an unprecedentedly detailed and comprehensive review of the scholarly literature in this field and proceeds with case studies ranging from the early Reformation to the eighteenth century. The volume also features the publication of a remarkable new manuscript detailing Isaac Newton’s early theological studies in 1670s Cambridge. It will be of interest not only to early modern intellectual and religious historians, but also to those with broader interests in religious change, the reception of oriental and classical sources and traditions, the history of science, and in the sociology of knowledge.

The Natural Sciences and Philosophy of Nature

2021 ◽  
pp. 323-336
Author(s):  
Avihu Zakai
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Context ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Scientific Doctrine

Jonathan Edwards’s philosophy of nature demands our attention precisely because he embraced some features of the new scientific modes of thought and reasoning which developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, commonly called the ‘scientific revolution.’ Yet he rejected at the same time its mechanical, experimental philosophy, the predominant scientific doctrine of his time, according to which all natural phenomena can be explained and understood by the mere mechanics of matter and motion. When placed within the proper ideological, theological, and scientific context, Edwards’s writings on natural philosophy shed light not only on his specific reaction to contemporary scientific culture but also on the broader issue of the relationship between science and religion in the early modern period, thus constituting an important chapter in the history of ideas.

scholarly journals The development of mechanics and engineering design and machine theory since the rennaissance

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-307
Author(s):  
Thomas Chondros
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Industrial Plants ◽  
Machine Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Relationship

The history of science and mechanics is confronted by two interconnected problems: a critical accumulation and systematization of historical information about the subject of study, and the relationship between events and the laws of their development.The influence of natural philosophy in classical times that led to the development of mechanics and engineering as a science from the 5th century B.C. to the Middle-Ages was investigated in a previous article by the author. The rapid development of mechanics as a science started in the 16th and the 17th century. Machine design as an applied science was heavily relying on mechanics. Since the beginning of the 19th century, mechanics became the theoretical basis of an increasing number of applied technical disciplines directly connected with the development of industry, the elaboration of new technological processes machines, and industrial plants. A brief history of the development of the theory of machines and mechanisms is attempted here, along with the personalities and Academic Institutions that influenced Mechanisms and Machine Theory from Medieval Times to the recent past.

The relationship of the scleractinian corals to the rugose corals

Paleobiology ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 6 (02) ◽  
pp. 146-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Oliver
Keyword(s):  
Critical Points ◽  
Scleractinian Corals ◽  
Convincing Evidence ◽  
Early Triassic ◽  
Rugose Corals ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Biologic Factors

The Mesozoic-Cenozoic coral Order Scleractinia has been suggested to have originated or evolved (1) by direct descent from the Paleozoic Order Rugosa or (2) by the development of a skeleton in members of one of the anemone groups that probably have existed throughout Phanerozoic time. In spite of much work on the subject, advocates of the direct descent hypothesis have failed to find convincing evidence of this relationship. Critical points are:(1) Rugosan septal insertion is serial; Scleractinian insertion is cyclic; no intermediate stages have been demonstrated. Apparent intermediates are Scleractinia having bilateral cyclic insertion or teratological Rugosa.(2) There is convincing evidence that the skeletons of many Rugosa were calcitic and none are known to be or to have been aragonitic. In contrast, the skeletons of all living Scleractinia are aragonitic and there is evidence that fossil Scleractinia were aragonitic also. The mineralogic difference is almost certainly due to intrinsic biologic factors.(3) No early Triassic corals of either group are known. This fact is not compelling (by itself) but is important in connection with points 1 and 2, because, given direct descent, both changes took place during this only stage in the history of the two groups in which there are no known corals.

Investigating the Relationship Between Self-Esteem and Stigma Among Young Adults With History of Suicide Attempts

Crisis ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 265-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meshan Lehmann ◽  
Matthew R. Hilimire ◽  
Lawrence H. Yang ◽  
Bruce G. Link ◽  
Jordan E. DeVylder
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Suicide Attempts ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
High Risk Population ◽  
High Functioning ◽  
People With Mental Illness ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract. Background: Self-esteem is a major contributor to risk for repeated suicide attempts. Prior research has shown that awareness of stigma is associated with reduced self-esteem among people with mental illness. No prior studies have examined the association between self-esteem and stereotype awareness among individuals with past suicide attempts. Aims: To understand the relationship between stereotype awareness and self-esteem among young adults who have and have not attempted suicide. Method: Computerized surveys were administered to college students (N = 637). Linear regression analyses were used to test associations between self-esteem and stereotype awareness, attempt history, and their interaction. Results: There was a significant stereotype awareness by attempt interaction (β = –.74, p = .006) in the regression analysis. The interaction was explained by a stronger negative association between stereotype awareness and self-esteem among individuals with past suicide attempts (β = –.50, p = .013) compared with those without attempts (β = –.09, p = .037). Conclusion: Stigma is associated with lower self-esteem within this high-functioning sample of young adults with histories of suicide attempts. Alleviating the impact of stigma at the individual (clinical) or community (public health) levels may improve self-esteem among this high-risk population, which could potentially influence subsequent suicide risk.

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