Reason In Nature

A group of distinguished philosophers reflect on John McDowell’s arguments for nonreductive naturalism, an approach that can explain what is special about human reason without implying that it is in any sense supernatural. John McDowell is one of the English-speaking world’s most influential living philosophers, whose work has shaped debates in mind, language, metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, and the history of philosophy. A common thread running through McDowell’s diverse contributions has been his critique of a form of reductive naturalism according to which human minds must be governed by laws essentially similar to those that govern the rest of nature. Against this widely accepted view, McDowell maintains that human minds should be seen as “transformed” by reason in such a way that the principles governing our minds, while not supernatural, are in an important sense sui generis. Editors Matthew Boyle and Evgenia Mylonaki assemble a group of distinguished philosophers to clarify and criticize McDowell’s core position and explore its repercussions for contemporary debates about metaphysics and epistemology, perception, language, action, and value. The essays here scrutinize the core idea that human reason constitutes a second nature, emerging from humanity’s basic animal nature, and reflect on the underpinnings of McDowell’s claims in Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. Many of the contributors extend McDowell’s views beyond his own articulations, elaborating the transformative role that reason plays in human experience. In clarifying and expanding McDowell’s insights, Reason in Nature challenges contemporary orthodoxy, much as McDowell himself has. And, as this collection makes clear, McDowell’s unorthodox position is of enduring importance and has wide-ranging implications, still not fully appreciated, for ongoing philosophical debates.

In a series of essays nine philosophers and two psychologists address three main themes: the status of norms of rationality; the precise form taken by them; and the role of norms in belief and actions.

Against the dominant view of reductive naturalism, John McDowell argues that human life should be seen as transformed by reason so that human minds, while not supernatural, are sui generis. This collection assembles eleven critical essays that highlight the enduring significance and wide ramifications of McDowell’s unorthodox position.

First published in 1931, this volume represents the culmination of twenty years’ of the study on the principles of science. Noticing a widespread craving for philosophical light at a time of scant such offerings, Morris R. Cohen aimed to demonstrate here the fundamental and ancient connection between nature and science - between hearts and minds – in an attempt to salve the developing mutual hostility between the two in the 1920s. The volume bears particular relation to George Santayana’s Life of Reason and Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics and explores areas including the character of the insurgence against reason and reason in the contexts of the natural and social sciences.

From a variety of perspectives, the essays presented here explore the profound interdependence of natural philosophy and rational religion in the `long seventeenth century' that begins with the burning of Bruno in 1600 and ends with the Enlightenment in the early Eighteenth century. From the writings of Grotius on natural law and natural religion, and the speculative, libertin novels of Cyrano de Bergerac, to the better-known works of Descartes, Malebranche, Cudworth, Leibniz, Boyle, Spinoza, Newton, and Locke, an increasing emphasis was placed on the rational relationship between religious doctrine, natural law, and a personal divine providence. While evidence for this intrinsic relationship was to be located in different places - in the ideas already present in the mind, in the observations and experiments of the natural philosophers, and even in the history, present experience, and prophesied future of mankind - the result enabled and shaped the broader intellectual and scientific discourses of the Enlightenment.