Nature, science and technology

Topic · 10 readings

How do we understand and act within the more-than-human world?

A place to begin

Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 77
How does a scientific account earn trust?
Popper asks what would count against a theory, and Kuhn describes normal science and its revolutions. Heather Douglas shows how weighing the costs of error differs from substituting values for evidence.
Guided course · Module 14 · Lesson 84
What do we owe beyond the present human world?
Leopold, Rawls and Simpson give different reasons for obligations to land, to future generations and within particular relationships. The lesson keeps present needs, and the question of who has authority to decide, in view.

All readings

10 readings · Title A–Z

Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 71
Can a tradition be reconstructed rather than preserved unchanged?
Hu Shi and Liang Shuming disagree about how a tradition should be renewed and what science, democracy and inherited moral resources contribute. The lesson also separates a philosophical proposal from state policy.
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 8 of 9
How can occasions share space and time?
Whitehead distinguishes genetic analysis, which follows an occasion’s becoming, from coordinate analysis, which divides its completed extent. What does that distinction explain about continuity, measurement and abstraction?
Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 77
How does a scientific account earn trust?
Popper asks what would count against a theory, and Kuhn describes normal science and its revolutions. Heather Douglas shows how weighing the costs of error differs from substituting values for evidence.
Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 76
Land, knowledge and the right to continue a world
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson connects living knowledge with land, responsibility and authority over learning. The module checkpoint asks who can take part in shaping an account, and what must change for that participation to matter.
Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 23
What counts as explaining something?
Aristotle’s four causes answer different questions about one thing. A cup and a growing plant test what matter, form and an end can explain, including an end that no one consciously intends.
Guided course · Module 14 · Lesson 84
What do we owe beyond the present human world?
Leopold, Rawls and Simpson give different reasons for obligations to land, to future generations and within particular relationships. The lesson keeps present needs, and the question of who has authority to decide, in view.
Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 19
What stays the same when things change?
Heraclitus finds order in change, and Parmenides asks whether being could ever begin. Their surviving words are kept apart from the later reports that frame how they are read.
Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 82
What would explain conscious experience?
Does Mary learn something new when she first sees color? Jackson argues that she learns what the experience is like; Lewis’s ability hypothesis questions whether that is a new fact, and Chalmers separates explaining functions from explaining experience.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 12 of 12
When everything becomes a resource
Heidegger asks what technology is in its essence: a way of revealing things as standing-reserve, held ready for ordering. The study ends with a three-task checkpoint on a library decision.
Guided course · Module 14 · Lesson 85
Who is responsible when a decision is automated?
When a ranking system decides who gets a training place, who must answer for the decision? With Binns and Nissenbaum, the lesson asks what prediction, explanation and human review leave unresolved about justification and repair.

Study this in sequence

Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world
An experience receives a world it did not make, yet becomes something that was not there before. How can both be true? Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality builds a philosophy around that difficulty, asking us to begin with occasions of becoming and to explain enduring things, perception, judgment and value through their relations.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits
Begin with familiar encounters and follow Heidegger’s questions about being, a finite life, truth, art, dwelling and technology. Examine what the arguments explain, what they leave open and how they fare under political and ethical criticism.