The Orders of Nature
The Orders of Nature

Author: Lawrence Cahoone

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2013-01-29

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 1438444176

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Winner of the 2015 John N. Findlay Award in Metaphysics presented by the Metaphysical Society of America Reviving and modernizing the tradition of post Darwinian naturalism, The Orders of Nature draws on philosophy and the natural sciences to present a naturalistic theory of reality. Conceiving of nature as systems, processes, and structures that exhibit diverse properties that can be hierarchically arranged, Lawrence Cahoone sketches a systematic metaphysics based on the following orders of nature: physical, material, biological, mental, and cultural. Using recent work in the science of complexity, hierarchical systems theory, and nonfoundational approaches to metaphysics, Cahoone analyzes these orders with explanations of the underlying science, covering a range of topics that includes general relativity and quantum field theory; chemistry and inorganic complexity; biology and telenomic explanation, or "purpose"; the theory of mind and mental causation as an animal phenomenon; and the human mind's unique cultural abilities. The book concludes with an exploration of what answers such a theory of naturalism can provide to questions about values and God.

The Order of Nature
The Order of Nature

Author: Josh Scheinert

Publisher:

Published: 2017-10-23

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9781775160007

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What does it mean to live a life that's illegal, to be born into a community where you don't belong? Set in The Gambia where homosexuality is a crime, The Order of Nature follows Andrew and Thomas's relationship. Their secret is safe at first, but eventually, they are exposed and arrested, charged for committing acts against the order of nature.

The Nature of Order: The phenomenon of life
The Nature of Order: The phenomenon of life

Author: Christopher Alexander

Publisher: Nature of Order

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 0972652914

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In Book Oneof this four-volume work, Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and establishes this understanding of living structures as an intellectual basis for a new architecture. He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make. These properties are seen over and over in nature and in the cities and streets of the past, but they have almost disappeared in the impersonal developments and buildings of the last hundred years. This book shows that living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.

The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature
The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature

Author: Eric Watkins

Publisher:

Published: 2013-11

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0199934401

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This volume contains ten new essays focused on the exploration and articulation of a narrative that considers the notion of order within medieval and modern philosophy—its various kinds (natural, moral, divine, and human), the different ways in which each is conceived, and the diverse dependency relations that are thought to obtain among them. Descartes, with the help of others, brought about an important shift in what was understood by the order of nature by placing laws of nature at the foundation of his natural philosophy. Vigorous debate then ensued about the proper formulation of the laws of nature and the moral law, about whether such laws can be justified, and if so, how-through some aspect of the divine order or through human beings-and about what consequences these laws have for human beings and the moral and divine orders. That is, philosophers of the period were thinking through what the order of nature consists in and how to understand its relations to the divine, human, and moral orders. No two major philosophers in the modern period took exactly the same stance on these issues, but these issues are clearly central to their thought. The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature is devoted to investigating their positions from a vantage point that has the potential to combine metaphysical, epistemological, scientific, and moral considerations into a single narrative.

Religion and the Order of Nature
Religion and the Order of Nature

Author: Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1996-09-26

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0195356160

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The current ecological crisis is a matter of urgent global concern, with solutions being sought on many fronts. In this book, Seyyed Hossein Nasr argues that the devastation of our world has been exacerbated, if not actually caused, by the reductionist view of nature that has been advanced by modern secular science. What is needed, he believes, is the recovery of the truth to which the great, enduring religions all attest; namely that nature is sacred. Nasr traces the historical process through which Western civilization moved away from the idea of nature as sacred and embraced a world view which sees humans as alienated from nature and nature itself as a machine to be dominated and manipulated by humans. His goal is to negate the totalitarian claims of modern science and to re-open the way to the religious view of the order of nature, developed over centuries in the cosmologies and sacred sciences of the great traditions. Each tradition, Nasr shows, has a wealth of knowledge and experience concerning the order of nature. The resuscitation of this knowledge, he argues, would allow religions all over the globe to enrich each other and cooperate to heal the wounds inflicted upon the Earth.

Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750
Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750

Author: Lorraine Daston

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1998-05

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13:

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Discusses how European scientists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonders, monsters, curiosities, marvels, and other phenomena to envision the natural world.

Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature
Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature

Author: Donald Rutherford

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780521597371

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This major contribution to Leibniz scholarship will prove invaluable to historians of philosophy, theology, and science.

Finding Order In Nature
Finding Order In Nature

Author: Paul Lawrence Farber

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM

Published: 2003-04-30

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0801873541

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“Engaging . . . a concise work that gives the general reader a solid understanding . . . an excellent introduction to the history of natural history.” —Library Journal Since emerging as a discipline in the middle of the eighteenth century, natural history has been at the heart of the life sciences. It gave rise to the major organizing theory of life—evolution—and continues to be a vital science with impressive practical value. Central to advanced work in ecology, agriculture, medicine, and environmental science, natural history also attracts enormous popular interest. In Finding Order in Nature Paul Farber traces the development of the naturalist tradition since the Enlightenment and considers its relationship to other research areas in the life sciences. Written for the general reader and student alike, the volume explores the adventures of early naturalists, the ideas that lay behind classification systems, the development of museums and zoos, and the range of motives that led collectors to collect. Farber also explores the importance of sociocultural contexts, institutional settings, and government funding in the story of this durable discipline. “The history of natural history can rarely have been as succinctly told as in Paul Lawrence Farber’s 129-page Finding Order in Nature. From the intellectual revolutions of Linnaeus and Darwin through the Victorian obsessions with classifying and collecting, to the conservationists led by E. O. Wilson, it is an odyssey beautifully told.” —New Scientist “Farber does an impressive job of demonstrating how practitioners like Linnaeus, Buffon, Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier advanced the field and set the stage for the development of science as we know it today.” —Publishers Weekly

Rethinking Order
Rethinking Order

Author: Nancy Cartwright

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-06-30

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1474244084

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This book presents a radical new picture of natural order. The Newtonian idea of a cosmos ruled by universal and exceptionless laws has been superseded; replaced by a conception of nature as a realm of diverse powers, potencies, and dispositions, a 'dappled world'. There is order in nature, but it is more local, diverse, piecemeal, open, and emergent than Newton imagined. In each chapter expert authors expound the historical context of the idea of laws of nature, and explore the diverse sorts of order actually presupposed by work in physics, biology, and the social sciences. They consider how human freedom might be understood, and explore how Newton's idea of a 'universal designer' might be revised, in this new context. They argue that there is not one unified totalizing program of science, aiming at the completion of one closed causal system. We live in an ordered universe, but we need to rethink the classical idea of the 'laws of nature' in a more dynamic and creatively diverse way.