The World as One of a Kind: Natural Necessity and Laws of Nature

1992 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN BIGELOW ◽  
BRIAN ELLIS ◽  
CAROLINE LIERSE
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Necessity

The World Essence

Dialogue ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bigelow
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Joint Paper ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Necessity

Recently, Brian Ellis came up with a neat and novel idea about laws of nature, which at first I misunderstood. Then I participated, with Brian Ellis and Caroline Lierse, in writing a joint paper, “The World as One of a Kind: Natural Necessity and Laws of Nature” (Ellis, Bigelow and Lierse, forthcoming). In this paper, the Ellis idea was formulated in a different way from that in which I had originally interpreted it. Little weight was placed on possible worlds or individual essences. Much weight rested on natural kinds. I thought Ellis to be suggesting that laws of nature attribute essential properties to one grand individual, The World. In fact, Ellis is hostile towards individual essences for any individuals at all, including The World. He is comfortable only with essential properties of kinds, rather than individuals. The Ellis conjecture was that laws of nature attribute essential properties to the natural kind of which the actual world is one (and presumably the only) member.

The concepts of Ayurveda and Pāli Literature in connection to Psychotherapy

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kolarkar Rajesh Shivajirao ◽  
Kolarkar Rajashree Rajesh
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Code Of Conduct ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Ultimate Truth ◽  
Traditional System ◽  
The World ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Buddha

The perfect balance of Mind and body is considered as complete health in Pāli literature as well as in Ayurveda. Pāli literature and Ayurveda have their own identity as most ancient and traditional system of medicine in India.The universal teachings of the Buddha are the most precious legacy ancient India gave to the world. The teachings are a practical code of conduct, a way of purity and of gracious living. There is a scientific study of the truth pertaining to mind and matter, and the ultimate truth beyond. In fact, the Buddha should be more appropriately known as a super-scientist who studied the entire laws of nature governing the Universe, by direct personal experience. The Buddha's rational teachings are clearly explained in the Eight-fold Noble Path, divided in three divisions of Sīla (morality), Samādhi (mastery over the mind), Paññā i.e. ‘Pragya' (purification of the mind, by developing insight). In Ayurveda Psychotherapy can be done by Satvavajaya Chikitsa and good conduct. Aim is to augment the Satva Guna in order to correct the imbalance in state of Rajas (Passion) and Tamas (Inertia). Sattvavajaya as psychotherapy, is the mental restraint, or a "mind control" as referred by Caraka, as well as Vagbhata is achieved Dnyan (education), Vidnyan (training in developing skill), Dhairya (development of coping mechanism), Smruti (memory enhancement), Samadhi (concentration of mind). According to WHO, Mental disorders are the common problem. The burden of mental disorders continues to grow with significant impacts on health and major social, human rights and economic consequences in all countries of the world.

scholarly journals The Reception of Egyptian Modernism in Indonesia: Harun Nasution on Theology of Muhammad Abduh

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-64
Author(s):  
D. V. Mukhetdinov
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Human Race ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Entire Area ◽  
Intellectual Abilities ◽  
Divine Justice ◽  
The World ◽  
Interpretive Model

In the present article we are going look at the interpretation of the theology of Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) undertaken by the Indonesian scholar Harun Nasution (1919–1998). Nasution compares Abduh’s position to neo- Mutazilism, relying on the treatise “Risālah al- Tawḥid”. Nasution carries out a step-by-step interpretation of the most popular “exoteric” work of the Egyptian thinker, proving the rationalist character of his theological system. From the point of view of Nasution, the division of the human race into the elect and commoners characteristic of Abduh is intended to confi rm the special ontological status of people endowed with high culture and advanced intellectual abilities. The elect are able to comprehend the entire area of intelligible being, which includes both God with his attributes and the created world. From this follows the limited, confi rmatory character of Revelation. It does not so much reveal to people a hitherto unfamiliar truth as confi rms (legitimizes) the knowledge already available to the Elect. Nasution believes that Abduh’s views on human freedom and divine justice are in confl ict with Asharism. Man is the source of his own actions, he is given the freedom to independently determine his own destiny. Allah Almighty rules the world through the eternal laws of nature, sunan, and prefers not to interfere in the aff airs of people directly, although he is interested in their welfare. The article concludes with critical remarks challenging the interpretive model proposed by Nasution and other neoMutazilite scholars of Abduh.

Divine Omnipotence and Laws of Nature

2018 ◽  
pp. 117-201
Author(s):  
Amos Funkenstein
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Mathematical Truth ◽  
Medieval Theology ◽  
Eternal Truths ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Divine Omnipotence ◽  
The World ◽  
Mathematical Operations ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter explores how eternal truths are created in a radical sense of the word; even mathematical theorems are contingent upon God’s will. What the most radical defenders of divine omnipotence in the Middle Ages hardly ever asserted, Descartes did without hesitation: that God could invalidate the most basic mathematical operations. Meanwhile, Spinoza argued that divine omnipotence and necessity of nature are one and the same, since all that is really possible in the world is also as necessary as any mathematical truth. The chapter shows how medieval theology introduced the distinction between the two aspects of God’s power so as to enlarge as far as possible the horizon of that which is possible to God without violating reason.

Contraponto. Klee e Kandinsky - Diálogos numa Terra Fértil

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (19) ◽  
pp. 217-240
Author(s):  
Ana Mantero ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World

Klee and Kandinsky, companions in adventure both in the world of painting and music, opened the paths of creation and built the beginning of an epistemology of art. From this intense intellectual and artistic exchange sprang a strong inspiration that heard the echoes of the cosmological order as reflected in the mysteries of nature and the sounds of the human soul. It is worth finding the counterpoint of their investigations, carefully written down at the time they taught together at the Bauhaus. Explorers of secret worlds, listeners of inaudible sounds, they discovered the profound similarities between the laws of nature and the arts.

The ‘Great Thing’ and the ‘Small Thing’

2014 ◽  
pp. 156-207
Author(s):  
David Gillis
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Great Thing ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law ◽  
Guide Of The Perplexed ◽  
Small Thing ◽  
Sub Specie Aeternitatis

This chapter examines what the idea of man as microcosm means for the place of the commandments in Maimonides' scheme of things. Mishneh torah's microcosmic form reflects the various parallels that Maimonides draws more or less explicitly in The Guide of the Perplexed between the laws of nature and the law of the Torah: both are perfect; both are permanent; both are accessible to reason. It implies the Torah's derivation from nature via the uniquely comprehensive prophecy of Moses, who understood God's governance of the world more perfectly than anyone before or since and translated this understanding into a system of laws. Despite Maimonides' programmatic remarks about ease of reference and so forth, the classification of the commandments in Mishneh torah is above all a rationalization of the commandments. Through its form, Mishneh torah presents them sub specie aeternitatis: they condense the rationality of the cosmos. Its treatment is to be distinguished from mystical interpretations that link the commandments to a supernal domain rather than to nature.

Laws of God or Laws of Nature?

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
The World ◽  
Divine Commands ◽  
Theological Understanding ◽  
Will Of God

The appeal to laws of nature as an explanatory principle is often regarded as fundamental to naturalism. Yet when the idea that there were immutable, mathematical laws of nature first rose to prominence in the seventeenth century it was deeply connected to a theological understanding of natural order. Descartes thus imagined laws of nature to be divine commands, and attributed their immutability to the immutability of their divine source. For Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, the invariable uniformity of nature was understood as a consequence not of God’s withdrawal from the world, but of his direct and incessant engagement with it. It followed that the world was to be investigated empirically, because this was the only way in which the otherwise inscrutable will of God could be discerned. Over the course of the following centuries, however, laws came to be reimagined as simply observational generalizations, or brute features of the natural world.

Causation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Water Solubility ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Middle Level ◽  
Causal Order ◽  
Electric Voltage ◽  
Singular Causation ◽  
Complex Organization ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Causal Laws

Two opposed viewpoints raise complementary problems about causation. The first is from Hume: watch the child kick the ball. You see the foot touch the ball and the ball move off. But do you see the foot cause the ball to move? And if you do not see it, how do you know that that is what happened? Indeed if all our experience is like this, and all of our ideas come from experience, where could we get the idea of causation in the first place? The second is from Kant. We can have no ideas at all with which to experience nature – we cannot experience the child as a child nor the motion as a motion – unless we have organized the experience into a causal order in which one thing necessarily gives rise to another. The problem for the Kantian viewpoint is to explain how, in advance of experiencing nature in various specific ways, we are able to provide such a complex organization for our experience. For the Kantian the objectivity of causality is a presupposition of our experience of events external to ourselves. The Humean viewpoint must find something in our experience that provides sufficient ground for causal claims. Regular associations between putative causes and effects are the proposed solution. This attention to regular associations connects the Humean tradition with modern statistical techniques used in the social sciences to establish causal laws. Modern discussions focus on three levels of causal discourse. The first is about singular causation: about individual ‘causings’ that occur at specific times and places, for example, ‘the cat lapped up the milk’. The second is about causal laws: laws about what features reliably cause or prevent other features, as in, ‘rising inflation prevents unemployment’. The third is about causal powers. These are supposed to determine what kinds of singular causings a feature can produce or what kinds of causal laws can be true of it – ‘aspirins have the power to relieve headaches’ for example. Contemporary anglophone work on causality has centred on two questions. First, ‘what are the relations among these levels?’ The second is from reductive empiricisms of various kinds that try to bar causality from the world, or at least from any aspects of the world that we can find intelligible: ‘what is the relation between causality (on any one of the levels) and those features of the world that are supposed to be less problematic?’ These latter are taken by different authors to include different things. Sensible or measurable properties like ‘redness’ or ‘electric voltage’ have been attributed a legitimacy not available to causal relations like ‘lapping-up’ or ‘pushing over’: sometimes it is ‘the basic properties studied by physics’. So-called ‘occurrent’ properties have also been privileged over dispositional properties (like water-solubility) and powers. At the middle level where laws of nature are concerned, laws about regular associations between admissible features – whether these associations are deterministic or probabilistic – have been taken as superior to laws about what kinds of effects given features produce.

The Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century Personification

PMLA ◽  
1950 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Earl R. Wasserman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Reference Frame ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
General Terms ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Convention ◽  
Emotional Excitation ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Accurate Reading

The current insistence upon a new poetic mythology to serve as a unifying reference frame for human experience and thought has recently provoked from Bertrand H. Bronson a brilliant defense of the eighteenth-century use of personified abstractions.1 Bronson properly recognizes in the eighteenth-century affection for personification a reflection of the emotional power lent to universals by the mathematicism that had created a sense of an ordered universe operating by simple and general laws. To the unity of this “view of the world so comprehensive and assured as to enable us to state common experience in general terms” he has opposed the fragmentary world of modern naturalism which requires expression by fragmentary concrete symbols. The neoclassicist conceived the norm to be the universal, which particulars struggle to fashion, and therefore he sought, in the highest forms of his art, to express himself in terms equally eternal and comprehensive as the laws of nature. Personification satisfied the desire for the grandeur of generality; “labored particularities” in themselves distract from the largeness of thought, for “great thoughts are always general.” Bronson's paper is salutary, for we have too long and too uncritically scorned what one modern critic has called “those allegorical capitals which the age affected.” We are indeed misguided in judging on the basis of our own responses, conditioned by our own civilization alone, that the personified abstraction was but a literary convention sterile of emotional force in the eighteenth century. And in relating personification to the emotional excitation the age received from the contemplation of a harmonious universe, Bronson has supplied us with the proper framework for a more nearly accurate reading of much eighteenth-century poetry.

Natural Necessity and Laws of Nature

1981 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert Hochberg
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Natural Necessity
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document