Carving Nature at Its Joints
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- Synopsis
- Contemporary discussions of the success of science often invoke an ancient metaphor from Plato's Phaedrus: successful theories should "carve nature at its joints. " But is nature really "jointed"? Are there natural kinds of things around which our theories cut? The essays in this volume offer reflections by a distinguished group of philosophers on a series of intertwined issues in the metaphysics and epistemology of classification. The contributors consider such topics as the relevance of natural kinds in inductive inference; the role of natural kinds in natural laws; the nature of fundamental properties; the naturalness of boundaries; the metaphysics and epistemology of biological kinds; and the relevance of biological kinds to certain questions in ethics. Carving Nature at Its Joints offers both breadth and thematic unity, providing a sampling of state-of-the-art work in contemporary analytic philosophy that will be of interest to a wide audience of scholars and students concerned with classification.
- Copyright:
- 2007
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9780262015936
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- Date of Addition:
- 01/27/12
- Copyrighted By:
- The MIT Press
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Philosophy
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.