Rationis Defensor is to be a volume of previously unpublished essays celebrating the life and work of Colin Cheyne. Colin was until recently Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago, a department that can boast of many famous philosophers among its past and present faculty and which has twice been judged as the strongest research department across all disciplines in governmental research assessments. Colin is the immediate past President of the Australasian Association for Philosophy (New Zealand Division). He is the author of Knowledge, Cause, and Abstract Objects:...
Rationis Defensor is to be a volume of previously unpublished essays celebrating the life and work of Colin Cheyne. Colin was until recently Head of t...
This book reconstructs key aspects of the early career of Descartes from 1618 to 1633; that is, up through the point of his composing his first system of natural philosophy, Le Monde, in 1629-33. It focuses upon the overlapping and intertwined development of Descartes' projects in physico-mathematics, analytical mathematics, universal method, and, finally, systematic corpuscular-mechanical natural philosophy. The concern is not simply with the conceptual and technical aspects of these projects; but, with Descartes' agendas within them and his construction and presentation of his...
This book reconstructs key aspects of the early career of Descartes from 1618 to 1633; that is, up through the point of his composing his first sys...
It was in 1660s England, according to the received view, in the Royal Society of London, that science acquired the form of empirical enquiry we recognize as our own: an open, collaborative experimental practice, mediated by specially-designed instruments, supported by civil discourse, stressing accuracy and replicability. Guided by the philosophy of Francis Bacon, by Protestant ideas of this worldly benevolence, by gentlemanly codes of decorum and by a dominant interest in mechanics and the mechanical structure of the universe, the members of the Royal Society created a novel experimental...
It was in 1660s England, according to the received view, in the Royal Society of London, that science acquired the form of empirical enquiry we rec...
Offers an extremely bold, far-reaching, and unsuspected thesis in the history of philosophy: Aristotelianism was a dominant movement of the British philosophical landscape, especially in the field of logic, and it had a long survival. British Aristotelian doctrines were strongly empiricist in nature, both in the theory of knowledge and in scientific method; this character marked and influenced further developments in British philosophy at the end of the century, and eventually gave rise to what we now call British empiricism, which is represented by philosophers such as John Locke, George...
Offers an extremely bold, far-reaching, and unsuspected thesis in the history of philosophy: Aristotelianism was a dominant movement of the British ph...
This book addresses some of the key questions that scientists have been asking themselves for centuries: what is knowledge? What is information? How do we know that we know something? How do we construct meaning from the perceptions of things? Although no consensus exists on a common definition of the concepts of information and communication, few can reject the hypothesis that information - whether perceived as object or as process - is a pre-condition for knowledge. Epistemology is the study of how we know things (anglophone meaning) or the study of how scientific knowledge is arrived at...
This book addresses some of the key questions that scientists have been asking themselves for centuries: what is knowledge? What is information? Ho...
Normativity has long been conceived as more properly pertaining to the domain of thought than to the domain of nature. This conception goes back to Kant and still figures prominently in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of mind and ethics. By offering a collection of new essays by leading scholars in early modern philosophy and specialists in contemporary philosophy, this volume goes beyond the point where nature and normativity came apart, and challenges the well-established opposition between these all too neatly separated realms. It examines how the mind's embeddedness in nature can be...
Normativity has long been conceived as more properly pertaining to the domain of thought than to the domain of nature. This conception goes back to Ka...
This book offers a framework that presents imagination as founded in the placement of appearances, and traces the development of the concept from Plato to Descartes to Kant, and on through recent theorists as diverse as Wittgenstein, Benjamin and Bachelard.
This book offers a framework that presents imagination as founded in the placement of appearances, and traces the development of the concept from Plat...
This volume reconstructs the body of sensibility and the discourse which constructed it. The discourse of sensibility was deployed very widely throughout the mid- to late-eighteenth century, particularly in France and Britain. To inquire into the body of sensibility is then necessarily to enter into an interdisciplinary space and so to invite the plurality of methodological approaches which this collection exemplifies. The chapters collected here draw together the histories of literature and aesthetics, metaphysics and epistemology, moral theory, medicine, and cultural history. Together,...
This volume reconstructs the body of sensibility and the discourse which constructed it. The discourse of sensibility was deployed very widely thro...
This book provides a detailed analysis of Aristotle's Parts of Animals. It presents the wealth of information provided in the biological works of Aristotle and revisits the detailed natural history observations that inform, and in many ways penetrate, the philosophical argument. It raises the question of how easy it is to clearly distinguish between what some might describe as "merely" biological and the philosophical. It explores the notion and consequences of describing the activity in which Aristotle is engaged as philosophical biology. The book examines such questions as: do readers of...
This book provides a detailed analysis of Aristotle's Parts of Animals. It presents the wealth of information provided in the biological works of Aris...
Only in fairly recent years has History and Philosophy of Science been recognized - though not always under that name - as a distinct field of scholarly endeavour. Previously, in the Australasian region as elsewhere, those few individuals working within this broad area of inquiry found their base, both intellectually and socially, where they could. In fact, the institutionalization of History and Philosophy of Science began compara- tively early in Australia. An initial lecturing appointment was made at the University of Melbourne immediately after the Second World War, in 1946, and other...
Only in fairly recent years has History and Philosophy of Science been recognized - though not always under that name - as a distinct field of scholar...
