Foundations for a Natural Science of Philosophy

David Hull’s Natural Philosophy of Science

The foundations of knowledge in transcendental philosophy

  The relation among the three elements of knowledge is considered as an important issue in epistemology. Mollasadra introduced the relation between knowledge and object-known in mental existence and upon his own principals of philosophy believed that the essence of knowledge is the occurring of quiddity and the nature of external object in mind. Knowledge is a kind of existence, which within ...

From philosophy to science (to natural philosophy): evolutionary developmental perspectives.

This paper focuses on abstraction as a mode of reasoning that facilitates a productive relationship between philosophy and science. Using examples from evolutionary developmental biology, I argue that there are two areas where abstraction can be relevant to science: reasoning explication and problem clarification. The value of abstraction is characterized in terms of methodology (modeling or da...

Why natural science needs phenomenological philosophy.

Through an exploration of theoretical physics, this paper suggests the need for regrounding natural science in phenomenological philosophy. To begin, the philosophical roots of the prevailing scientific paradigm are traced to the thinking of Plato, Descartes, and Newton. The crisis in modern science is then investigated, tracking developments in physics, science's premier discipline. Einsteinia...

Foundations of "new" social science: institutional legitimacy from philosophy, complexity science, postmodernism, and agent-based modeling.

Since the death of positivism in the 1970s, philosophers have turned their attention to scientific realism, evolutionary epistemology, and the Semantic Conception of Theories. Building on these trends, Campbellian Realism allows social scientists to accept real-world phenomena as criterion variables against which theories may be tested without denying the reality of individual interpretation an...