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Jim talks with Lawrence Cahoone about the ideas in his book The Orders of Nature: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Complex Systems for the Life Sciences. They discuss how Cahoone’s naturalist philosophy bridges multiple philosophical domains, his distinctive use of emergence theory borrowed from William Wimsatt, the concept of “no simples” in objective relativism, the role of Prigogine in emergence theory, Cahoone’s self-taught approach to understanding physics and science, fallibilist and local metaphysics, Columbian naturalism and its rejection of the supernatural, the relationship between objects and their contexts, scientific explanations of relativity and quantum mechanics, and much more.
- Episode Transcript
- The Orders of Nature: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Complex Systems for the Life Sciences, by Lawrence Cahoone
- The Emergence of Value: Human Norms in a Natural World, by Lawrence Cahoone
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics, by Richard Feynman
Lawrence Cahoone graduated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Stony Brook University in 1985. Cahoone’s areas of specialization are American Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Culture, Metaphysics and Natural Science and Modernism and Postmodernism. Since 2000, Cahoone has taught at Holy Cross and is now currently an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Holy Cross. He has also written and published seven books in his career, including The Emergence of Value, The Orders of Nature, and Cultural Revolutions.