Carving nature at its joints : natural kinds in metaphysics and science

• Tác giả: Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke, Matthew H Slater
• ISBN-10: 0262298783
• ISBN-10: 1283321750
• ISBN-13: 978-0262298780
• ISBN-13: 978-1283321754
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 113 Cosmology (Philosophy of nature)
• Thông tin xuất bản: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 2011
• Mô tả vật lý: 1 online resource (viii, 355 pages).
• Bộ sưu tập: NCBI
• ID: 254177
• Chủ đề: 1. Metaphysics; 2. Naturalism; 3. Philosophy of nature; 4. Science--Philosophy

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Tóm tắt

 "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."--MIT CogNet.