Intelligibility Of Nature Research Articles

The Theodicy Challenge and the Intelligibility of the World

This paper revisits one of the most difficult theological issues, namely God’s infinite goodness and the presence of pain and suffering in the natural world. We deepen the understanding of this problem by referring to the philosophical notion of the intelligibility of the world. We argue that pain and suffering are present in biological evolution as a “structural necessity” for the development of more complex structures from simpler ones. The struggle for existence works as a necessary condition for the development of a sophisticated order of nature at the expense of an increase in pain and suffering. If this is so, arguments justifying the ways of a good, omniscient, and omnipotent God in a world where evil and suffering are widespread seem to be undercut. Therefore, we argue that the astonishing intelligibility of nature may help to open our understanding of whatever nature may reveal of itself. This notion—analyzed from ontic and epistemic perspectives—seems to be crucial in reflecting the evolving world, not only from the scientific point of view but also from the theological one.

Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology : Monism, Parallelism, and the Problem of Singularity

Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology:Monism, Parallelism, and the Problem of Singularity Warren Montag (bio) To read Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology, as the title itself seems, if only in retrospect, to warn the unwary reader, is to immerse oneself in a fast-moving current of thought in which terms, concepts, names, and languages, lifted out of their original contexts, come together only sooner or later to be pulled apart again and hurtle on toward new encounters. It is to witness firsthand the movement of things from "encounter to encounter, to a pile-up and the birth of a world," as Althusser put it (169). Such worlds are born neither from order nor from nothing: their birth is made possible by a breaking apart and freeing up of the pieces of previous worlds. In the realm of theory, this means that previous theories are not simply nullified (in a legal sense) by a rational judgment, nor are they annihilated, never to appear again in the realm of philosophy or theory. They are instead broken apart, separated from themselves, by an act of division that is directed, not haphazardly, but at the site of already existing lines (or fractures) of separation that have become visible and identifiable as such after a long period of invisibility. As Plato argued, the philosopher is like a butcher who knows exactly where to make the cut: those places, joints and sockets, where two separate parts are connected (Phaedrus 265e). Kordela makes many such cuts and separations, combining parts we did not know were parts into a new body, a new world she calls "epistemontology." We would do well to keep these preliminary observations in mind as we follow her argument, given the sheer number of theories Kordela mobilizes, some of them irreducibly antagonistic at precisely the points that interest her. Rather than suppress or overlook difference and conflict, however, she arranges the theoretical singularities she produces into a new form or body that she calls "structuralism." [End Page 169] As she is quick to point out, the term is meant to be understood, not in its historical specificity, as "the eponymous twentieth-century theoretical movement, even as some of its aspects remain central in approaching structuralism as meant here" (2). Kordela's structuralism is "the specific episteme required for the study of value within secular capitalist modernity—which is also to say, for the study of things insofar as, in capitalism, they are also values" (2). It rests on a notion of "structurality" (2) that allows us to understand things diacritically (drawing from both Marx and Saussure) as values whose existence and identity are determined by the set of differential relations to which it belongs: "Henceforth, both thought and reality express being as value. … Insofar as thought and reality in capitalist modernity express being as value, value becomes the ubiquitous object of knowledge, from economics, aesthetics, ethics, and accounts of subjectivity and society, to ontology. As a result, a tendency toward formalization and structuralism—the model of thought capable of grasping the logic of value—marks and defines the philosophical and theoretical paradigm of secular capitalist modernity" (4). The notion of structuralism, or more fundamentally "structurality," the condition of possibility of any structure or structuralism, Kordela argues, is itself made intelligible by Spinoza's declaration that 'the eternal and infinite being, whom we call God, or Nature, acts by the same necessity whereby it exists" (EIV, Preface). The Latin conjunction "sive" (Deus, sive Natura) here establishes an equivalence or, perhaps more precisely, a synonymy between realms previously assumed to exist in opposition, not only different but mutually exclusive, two distinct substances between which there is nothing in common: "do you not know that love of the world is enmity towards God?" (John 4:4). God and his creation, spirit and matter, become identical in Spinoza's formulation. God's being is action, the infinite act of becoming himself in his creation: "God could not have been prior to his decrees, nor could he have been without them" (EI, P33, Sch. 2). The intelligibility of God or nature (its structurality) is immanent in its existence and therefore in its infinite self-production, a relation Spinoza describes in EII...

Order and disorder in intellectual history. Spinoza’s case in the light of complexity

This article presents the conception of order and disorder developed by the philosopher B. Spinoza (1632-1677), and shows how this theory supports the intelligibility of nature without attributing any kind of organization to nature. From these principles, the author questions the use of causality in intellectual history, and sketches the possibility of a complex history based upon the disorder of interactions.

The Territories of Science and Religion, by Peter Harrison

The aim of Peter Harrison’s ambitious book is to destroy once and for all ‘the idea of a perennial conflict between science and religion’ (p. 5). There can be no doubt that there was no such conflict, but this will come as little surprise to any even semi-serious historian of science, being the preserve only of figures such as the former biologist and current professional internet provocateur Richard Dawkins—and even the most devout zealots of the Church of Dawkins know that he is not to be taken seriously as an authority on matters historical. But Harrison’s secondary aims are both far more sophisticated and far more interesting, for he wants to show that not only were ‘science’ and ‘religion’ not opposed, but that they were consistently in a symbiotic relationship predicated on the fact that, until the seventeenth century, neither of them existed, at least in the modern sense of the concepts; when they did emerge, one result was the scientific revolution. According to Harrison, from the ancient world through to the sixteenth century, ‘religion’ never implied a set of doctrinal propositions, but was an ‘inner disposition’, corresponding consistently to the meaning of the Latin term religio. ‘Science’, meanwhile, was similarly never a set of propositions about nature, but likewise a moral or ‘spiritual exercise’ intended to cultivate a ‘habit of mind’ and ‘a particular kind of life’ (p. 18): this was the case for everyone, from the ancient Greeks (Thales sacrificed an ox when he discovered his famous theorem [p. 24]) to the medieval Christian natural philosophers, who, Harrison claims, cared little for the abstracted truth of natural philosophical ideas, because, for them, ‘the intelligibility of nature lay primarily in its moral and theological meanings’ (p. 60). Only in the seventeenth century, when, in the wake of the Reformation, ‘religion’ began to take on the meaning of a system of belief, did ‘science’ concomitantly emerge as a discipline designed to produce true propositions about the natural world (although it was still conceived of as a spiritual exercise, albeit now one tied to the entirely new enterprise of natural theology, which, we are told, was non-existent in the medieval world).

And Yet He is a Monist: Comments on James Kreines, Reason in the World

AbstractI critically discuss Kreines’s arguments against readings on which Hegel holds some version of metaphysical monism. In section 1, I address Kreines’s claim that Hegel’s revised version of Kant’s argument in the Transcendental Dialectic implies a rejection of metaphysical monism. I argue both that the argument that Kreines ascribes to Hegel does not itself rule out monism, and that there are serious exegetical problems with the way Kreines understands Hegel’s diagnosis of the antinomies and his critique of the metaphysics of the understanding. In section 2, I discuss additional reasons that Kreines gives for seeing Hegel as rejecting metaphysical monism. In particular, I argue that Hegel is much more optimistic about the intelligibility of nature than Kreines thinks: to a substantial degree, the basic structure of nature, including the laws of mechanics, is open to explanations that are ultimately based on a monistic principle.

Incomputability in Physics and Biology

Computability has its origins in Logic within the framework formed along the original path laid down by the founding fathers of the modern foundational analysis for Mathematics (Frege and Hilbert). This theoretical itinerary, which was largely focused on Logic and Arithmetic, departed in principle from the renewed relations between Geometry and Physics occurring at the time. In particular, the key issue of physical measurement, as our only access to ‘reality’, played no part in its theoretical framework. This is in stark contrast to the position in Physics, where the role of measurement has been a core theoretical and epistemological issue since Poincaré, Planck and Einstein. Furthermore, measurement is intimately related to unpredictability, (in-)determinism and the relationship with physical space–time. Computability, despite having exact access to its own discrete data type, provides a unique tool for the investigation of ‘unpredictability’ in both Physics and Biology through its fine-grained analysis of undecidability – note that unpredictability coincides with physical randomness in both classical and quantum frames. Moreover, it now turns out that an understanding of randomness in Physics and Biology is a key component of the intelligibility of Nature. In this paper, we will discuss a few results following along this line of thought.

Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2006), xii+242 pp., $27.50 (cloth), $17.00 (paper).

Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2006), xii+242 pp., $27.50 (cloth), $17.00 (paper).

The intelligibility of nature and its nexus with the knowledge of the Universals

Using Aquinas’ proposal, this article tries to show the nexus between the intelligibility of Nature and the intellectual knowledge of Universals that we think, and that stricto sensu exist only as forms of singular things that are around us. For it, and based on the idea that Nature allows itself to be known because of its intelligibility per se , we try to show the solution that Aquinas delivers to the question for the metaphysical statute of the universals. Also, and because is a particular case of this medieval problem, since that links the fi nitude and contingency of the basic inclinations of human person with the universality of certain ethical imperatives, we will also treat the subject of Natural law, in accordance with the exposure of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae .

Models, scientific realism, the intelligibility of nature, and their cultural significance

In this article, I will view realist and non-realist accounts of scientific models within the larger context of the cultural significance of scientific knowledge. I begin by looking at the historical context and origins of the problem of scientific realism, and claim that it is originally of cultural and not only philosophical, significance. The cultural significance of debates on the epistemological status of scientific models is then related to the question of ‘intelligibility’ and how science, through models, can give us knowledge of the world by presenting us with an ‘intelligible account/picture of the world’, thus fulfilling its cultural-epistemic role. Realists typically assert that science can perform this role, while non-realists deny this. The various strategies adopted by realists and non-realists in making good their respective claims, is then traced to their cultural motivations. Finally I discuss the cultural implications of adopting realist or non-realist views of models through a discussion of the views of Rorty, Gellner, Van Fraassen and Clifford Hooker on the cultural significance of scientific knowledge.

The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World. By Peter Dear

The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World. By Peter Dear

The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (review)

The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (review)

The Productivity of Prediction and Explanation

The Intelligibility of Nature . How Science Makes Sense of the World. By Peter Dear . University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006. 254 pp. $27.50, £17.50. ISBN 9780226139487. Science.Culture. In this consideration of the evolution of science, Dear emphasizes a tension between two distinct but frequently conflated ends: doing and knowing.

The intelligibility of nature: how science makes sense of the world

Throughout the history of the Western world, science has possessed an extraordinary amount of authority and prestige. And while its pedestal has been jostled by numerous evolutions and revolutions, science has always managed to maintain its stronghold as the knowing enterprise that explains how the natural world works: we treat such legendary scientists as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein with admiration and reverence because they offer profound and sustaining insight into the meaning of the universe. In Intelligibility of Nature, Peter Dear considers how science as such has evolved and how it has marshaled itself to make sense of the world. His intellectual journey begins with a crucial observation: that the enterprise of science is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends - doing and knowing. ancient Greeks developed this distinction of value between craft on the one hand and understanding on the other, and according to Dear, that distinction has survived to shape attitudes toward science ever since. Teasing out this tension between doing and knowing during key episodes in the history of science - mechanical philosophy and Newtonian gravitation, elective affinities and the chemical revolution, enlightened natural history and taxonomy, evolutionary biology, the dynamical theory of electromagnetism, and quantum theory - Dear reveals how the two principles became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist. Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, The Intelligibility of Nature will be essential reading for aficionados and historians of science alike.

Being & Some 20thCentury Thomists by John F. X. Knasas

148 BOOK REVIEWS Ultimately, I cannot see how what goes under Rowland's rubric of "postmodern" and "Augustinian" coheres with what goes under the rubric of "Thomism." It is therefore no accident that she never tries to explain what she means by the term: it cannot be given a credible definition in the light of the "postmodern" and"Augustinian" assumptions driving this book. While it would take more space than I have here to explain why this is so, I would say that it has something to do with another famous Greek term that Rowland neglects to consider: physis. One can grant to de Lubac (as Gilson did) that the Thomist tradition went wrong in its parsing of the nature-grace distinction while at the same time maintaining the importance of that distinction and the intelligibility of nature as the terminus of God's first gift in creation. One can also grant that culture has a profound influence on nature without collapsing the latter into the former. If nature is intelligible apart from grace and culture, then it can indeed serve as a starting point for an account of the human good that does not make explicit appeal to revelation and so can serve as a way to talk about that good to those who are not inside the circle. The simple fact that separates Thomas from us-he lived in a culture permeated by Catholic Christianity and we do not-means that we need some moral language that allows us a voice in the secular domain. Such language is not a substitute for evangelization and critique, both of which need to go on, but it is in the meantime a way of talking to strangers that can promote the common human good (including human rights) this side of the coming of the kingdom. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. BRIAN]. SHANLEY, O.P. Being & Some 20'h Century Thomists. By JOHN F. X. KNASAS. Bronx, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 2003. Pp. 335. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-82322248 -9. Being and Thomism are two very elusive ideas. Knasas's book tries to pin them both down in no uncertain terms and, one might add, in function of one another. Thomism is taken primarily as a unique philosophy of being in a realistic sense and this realistic sense is taken to mean one thing only in the approach to the question of being: namely, that which is derived only from sense experience. Being & Some 20'h Century Thomists comes as a response to other accounts of Thomism and its evolution in the twentieth century, such as that of Gerald McCool's From Unity to Plurality (also published by Fordham University Press, in 1992). In fact, it could be viewed as a response of the Toronto school, or more precisely the Joseph Owens school, to the transcendental Thomism BOOK REVIEWS 149 propounded by Joseph Donceel of Fordham. The argument of the book, to put it perhaps too succinctly, is to show that versions of Thomism other than that of Joseph Owens, especially those labeled as idealist but also some thought to be realist, fail the test of realism in their approach to the question of being and therefore fail the test of Thomism as found in the writings of St. Thomas. "Generally speaking," we are told in the introduction, "Existential Thomism is a posteriori. It is built from extra-mental reality as presented in the data of sensible experience. It is specified by the perception of a basic intelligibility, or commonality, in those real things of sensation" (xvii). The problem for the author is that this Existential Thomism, as he conceives it, is only a species of Neo-Thomism, which must be distinguished from and defended against other species because it is the only one that really works as an elaboration of the ratio entis. In chapter 1 Knasas gives his own version of the Neo-Thomist revival contra that of the man he calls "the dean of the twentieth-century Thomist narrative, Gerald McCool, S.J."(29) Knasas names most of those one would think of as part of this revival and then divides them into what he calls three...

Leibniz on Teleology and the Intelligibility of Nature

Leibniz on Teleology and the Intelligibility of Nature

Transient Natures at the Edges of Human Life: A Thomistic Exploration

TRANSIENT NATURES AT THE EDGES OF HUMAN LIFE: A THOMISTIC EXPLORATION PHILIP SMITH, O.P. Providence College Providence, R.I. T:HE CONCEPT OF human nature as the intrinsic and wdical source of characteristic human a;ctivity has great mportanoe for natural law ethics. But olosely allied to the concept of human nature is the possibility of there being tmnsient natures in humans, and this rpossirbility has implications for human life at its outer edges. What transient natures are wiill he discussed 1in detail below. Let us ,say for now that they are the life principles of entities transition from one state of being to another. These forms enjoy only a temporary existence before they disappear and are replaced by other emerging forms.1 When applied to the outer limits of human existence, such transient natures offer useful insights for addressing the difficult problems of when personhood begins and when death occurs. Thomistic philosophy defines a human person a;s a combination of mrutte1· and ,form, more oommorrly referred to as a unity of hody and soul.2 Relativie to the beginning of Jife and the 1 Such natures are discussed in William A. Wallace, 0.P., "Nature and Human Nature as the Norm in Medical Ethics,'' in Catholic Perspectives on Medical Morals, ed. E.D. Pellegrino et al., Philosophy and Medicine Series, Vol. 24 (Dordrecht-Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1989). This essay was originally presented at an international conference held at the Joseph and Rose Kenned,y Institute of Ethies of Georgetown UniYersity, October 13-16, 1986. For further background against which Wallace's discussion should be situated, see his "Nature as Animating: The Soul in the Human Sciences,'' The Thornist 49 (l985) : 612-6'18, and "The Intelligibility of Nature: A Neo-Aristotelian View," Rev,iew of Metaphysics 38 (1984): 33-56. 2 Thomas Aquinas, St., Surnrna Theologiae, I, q.29, a.4. 191 19Q PHILIP SMITH, O.P. onset of death, this philosophy of person raises the question of w:hen tihe soul is infused into the body and when :it is 1separated from it. Is the newly-fortiilized zygote capable of :receiving and sustaining the rational soul as its ,substantirul form? Or must the genetic materials be informed by one or more transient natures before they achieve ithe internal unity and stability necessary :for personhood? At the end of life, the person dies when the soul leaves the body. Does personail death coincide with the death of the human organism as a whole? Or can the destruction of only an essential part of the body, e.g. tihe cerebral cortex , cause personal death by damaging the body so severely that it is simply incapable of supporting a :rational soul, even though the rest of the body remains intact and spontaneously alive? If so, is the remaining organism informed by a succession of transient substantiail forms that maintain its existence but at ever lower levels of life as it gradually declines toward total death? In examining these questions posed by the possibility of transient natures, my point of departure will be an analysis of transient natures themselves. Recently, William A. Wallace, O.P., has 'begun to eX!plore the philosophical meaning and implications of transient natures for issues such as these.a His findings will he summarized here. The insights gathered from the exploration of transient natures will next he applied to the questions of when personhood begins and when death occurs. This will necessarily employ a fraiilework embracing both tihe empirical and the philosophical, with the empirical looking to the available biological data and the philosophical inquiring about the impact o.f these data for determining the status of human life at its outer edges. Since Aquinas's natural philoss Wallace, "Nature and Human Nature .. .," pp. 23-51. Additional background for his researches, apart from the essays cited in note l above, will be found in his "The Reality of Elementary Particles," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 38 (1964): pp. 154-166, and "Elementarity and Reality in Particle Physics," Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983), pp. 171-183 and pp. 185-212. TRANSIENT...

The Intelligibility of Nature

The Intelligibility of Nature

The Intelligibility of Nature.

Journal Article Book Reviews Get access The Intelligibility of Nature. By G. N. Schlesinger. (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1985. Pp. xviii + 136. Price £9.37, pb. £6.37.) Peter Mott Peter Mott University of Lancaster Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 37, Issue 146, January 1987, Pages 111–113, https://doi.org/10.2307/2220067 Published: 01 January 1987

The Intelligibility of Nature

<i>The Intelligibility of Nature</i>

Nature as Animating: The Soul in the Human Sciences

NATURE AS ANIMATING: THE SOUL IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES HIS ESSAY ADDRESSES the problem of the fragmentation of knowledge on the contemporary scene, nd proposes that the rediscovery of the Aristotelian concept of nature can go far toward providing a solution.1 Well known is the situation in academe, where specialization is the price of advancement and tenure, and where few professors are capable of ranging outside their fields to assess truth claims or attain a comprehensive overview. No less serious is the compartmentalization of knowledge at research institutes and "think-tanks," where competent scholars are engaged in detailed analyses of problems in economics, political science, and international security, but where it has proven difficult to generate studies that direct prudent action by government leaders. Here the basic problem is the perennial gap that intrudes itself between knowledge and action, between what Aristotle identified centuries ago as theoria and praxis, which we may label, following him, as that between the theoretical and practical disciplines. The direction of sensible action in the sphere of human affairs, in Aristotle's view, pertained to ethics and politics, which he regarded as practical sciences-concerned not merely with knowing but with knowing as ordered to doing. The practical orientation of scholar1 The article is an expanded version of a colloquium paper read at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., on November 8, 1984, with the title "The Idea of Nature: Its Contemporary Relevance for Ethics and Politics." .An earlier draft was read in the Seminar on Problems of .Authority and Participation at the same Center on .August 13, 1984, with the title "The Modeling of Nature: Can the Soul Be Put Back Into the Human Sciences? " The author wishes to thank Edmund Pellegrino and Otto Bird for their helpful commentaries on the colloquium paper, and James Billington, Prosser Gifford, and .Ann Sheffield for providing the stimulating ambience in which it could be written and presented. 61~ THE SOUL IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES 613 ship-the ideal embodied in " knowing as ordered to doing "is a concern that goes far beyond the needs of academe and research institutes. Its neglect on the contemporary scene is but an instance of the more pervasive fragmentation of knowledge that characterizes our culture. The theme of this essay is that the concept of nature, particularly as animating and instantiated in the human soul, can be fruitful in overcoming such fragmentation in a basic way: by reuniting the physical and the human sciences and showing how action or doing can be related to both.2 By the physical sciences we mean the speculative or theoretical sciences concerned with nature, the phusis of the Greeks, whence the term "nature " in our title. Among such sciences one might include physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, psychology in its more theoretical aspects, and so on. The human sciences we take to embrace those concerned with man's affairs: the social and political sciences, ethics and politics, economics, the behavioral sciences in their more clinical aspects, etc. They less obviously are concerned with nature, and yet they are but manifestations of human nature in action, as will be shown in the sequel. Thus nature as seen in the world of nature and as embodied in human nature as part of that world is the concept around which we propose our integration. The regulative idea is simple: nature is an intrinsic principle of perfective activity, and the better we understand a nature or a natural kind the more we can appreciate how it should act. Thus we would bridge the " is " and the " ought " by rooting the norm for action in an objective standard: a nature that is not completely refractory to understanding. Here it is important to observe that there is a vast difference between knowing all there is to know about a nature and having no knowledge of it at all. By the somewhat elliptical expression, " a nature that is not completely refractory to understanding," 2 For an exposition of the concept of nature and the intellectual context in which the following development should be situated, see W. A. Wallace, "The Intelligibility of Nature: A Neo-Aristotelian View," Review of Metaphysics...