Natural philosophy : from social brains to knowledge, reality, morality, and beauty /
Paul Thagard uses new accounts of brain mechanisms and social interactions to forge theories of mind, knowledge, reality, morality, justice, meaning and the arts. Natural Philosophy brings new methods for analyzing concepts, understanding values and achieving coherence. It shows how to unify the hum...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Oxford University Press,
[2019]
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| Series: | Oxford series on cognitive models and architectures.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | Paul Thagard uses new accounts of brain mechanisms and social interactions to forge theories of mind, knowledge, reality, morality, justice, meaning and the arts. Natural Philosophy brings new methods for analyzing concepts, understanding values and achieving coherence. It shows how to unify the humanities with the cognitive and social sciences. How can people know what is real and strive to make the world better? Philosophy is the attempt to answer general questions about the nature of knowledge, reality and values. Natural Philosophy pursues these questions by drawing heavily on the sciences and finds no room for supernatural entities such as souls, gods and possible worlds. It provides original accounts of the traditional branches of philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics. Rather than reducing the humanities to the sciences, this book displays fertile interconnections that show that philosophical questions and artistic practices can be much better understood by considering how human brains operate and interact in social contexts. The sciences and the humanities are interdependent, because both the natural and social sciences cannot avoid questions about methods and values that are primarily the province of philosophy. |
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| Physical Description: | xix, 335 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [295]-309) and indexes. |
| ISBN: | 9780190678739 0190678739 |