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Topic: Irreducible (philosophy)

	20th WCP: Philosophy and Technology
		They have a specific object, irreducible to the object of other sciences: the technological action, the conditions of its efficiency (optimal output, economy) with respect to the global social activity, using the information with respect to the object of action, the goal and means of its achievement.
		The genesis of culture in the history of the human species is, actually, the genesis of the technical culture, because the first cultural elements were the working instruments the primitive man interposed between him and environment, to get the things necessary to live and to protect himself against an enemy world.
		Philosophy is situated exactly at the intersection of these four areas and partially overlaps them.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/Tech/TechPop.htm (3131 words)

	Irreducible Complexity
		A system performing a given basic function is irreducibly complex if it includes a set of well-matched, mutually interacting, nonarbitrarily individuated parts such that each part in the set is indispensable to maintaining the system's basic, and therefore original, function.
		The set of these indispensable parts is known as the irreducible core of the system.
		The degree of irreducible complexity is the number of unselected steps in the pathway.
	www.iscid.org /encyclopedia/Irreducible_Complexity (138 words)

	Irreducible (philosophy) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Irreducibility, in philosophy, has the sense that a complete account of an entity will not be possible at lower levels of explanation and which has novel properties beyond prediction and explanation.
		Another way to state this is that Occam's razor requires the elimination of only those entities that are unnecessary, not as many entities as could conceivably be eliminated.
		Irreducibility is most often deployed in defence of the reality of human subjectivity and/or free will, against those who treat such things as folk psychology, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Irreducible_(philosophy) (366 words)

	Philosophy Club
		We think of philosophy as the practice of the search for wisdom about the fundamental questions of human life — including how these fundamental questions may not be universalized, being inflected, as they often are, through historical and social matrices that give rise to irreducible differences of experience.
		Philosophy, in our view, thus also involves a more socially oriented role as a practice of critical examination of accepted social and scientific values and norms.
		These may be grand goals, but we aim to discuss philosophy in small groups where students can meet as equals and as peers in a variety of formats ranging from informal, free-wheeling discussions to more focused study groups on particular texts and traditions.
	dsa-stuorg.tamu.edu /philosophy (571 words)

	PHILOSOPHY : On Cognition, the Mindbrain, Neurotheology and the Brainmind (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		PHILOSOPHY : On Cognition, the Mindbrain, Neurotheology and the Brainmind
		The primitive "factum rationis" (Kant) is the irreducible and fundamental distinction between the possibility of subjectivity (transcendental subject) and the possibility of objectivity (transcendental object).
		Distinguish normative philosophy from theoretical metaphysics using the coercive necessity of the rules of the game fixed by the former by reflecting on the conditions of the possibility of the logical (correct), the epistemological (true), the esthetical (beautiful) and the ethical (good) conduct of humankind.
	www.sofiatopia.org /equiaeon/brainmind_mind.htm (15001 words)

	From Relativism and Skepticism to Truth and Certainty
		Not only was philosophy conceived as the loving quest for wisdom as knowledge of truth but it was also assumed that this loving desire for truth could be fulfilled, at least partially, through philosophical knowledge.
		Philosophy, or rather philosophers or people considered to be such, began to eliminate truth, to dethrone it, to attack its very concept, or to replace it with other ideals of philosophy and to engage, in a word, in an all-out war against truth.
		Rather, much of the philosophy of the last few centuries and of the present shows itself to be a concentrated effort to attack the two notions that were fundamental for philosophy of the past: truth and certainty.
	www.leaderu.com /truth/1truth14.html (5668 words)

	CB200: Irreducible complexity
		Irreducible complexity rules out the possibility of a system having evolved, so it must be designed.
		Irreducible complexity is an example of a failed argument from incredulity.
		It is defined in terms of parts, but it is far from obvious what a "part" is. Logically, the parts should be individual atoms, because they are the level of organization that does not get subdivided further in biochemistry, and they are the smallest level that biochemists consider in their analysis.
	www.talkorigins.org /indexcc/CB/CB200.html (616 words)

	Ethics and Phenomenology [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
		The difference between logical positivism and analytic philosophy on the one hand, and Cartesian dualism on the other, rests with their views of reality.
		Philosophy can say that wonder and analysis begin with ethics, and that ethics continues as the context or orientation for analysis and wonder, and all activity.
		Objects and subjects are irreducible to mutual distinct, inherently unrelated entities.
	www.iep.utm.edu /e/eth-phen.htm (9418 words)

	GWFHegel.Org - Hegel's Science of Philosophy
		That personality should be the fundamental and irreducible nature of Reality as a whole as much as in part is rationally justifiable since the part may not have any greater quality than that of the whole to which it belongs.
		Hegel has admitted that his philosophy is basically the same as Aristotle's except that he has made it more systematic and scientific.
		The overthrow of what eventually was called "anthropomorphism", that seemed to form the very heart of Aristotelian philosophy, became immanent with this challenge to the authority of the great philosopher.
	www.gwfhegel.org /personalism.html (1806 words)

	Ephilosopher :: Metaphysics and Epistemology :: Bradley's relations, Russell, & physics (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		That is why Quantum theorists find his philosophy so appealing since in some metaphysical interpretations of the theory, the objective material world is merely the result of a series of quantum processes that exist separate from spacetime.
		Quantum theorists find his philosophy so appealing since in some metaphysical interpretations of the theory, the objective material world is merely the result of a series of quantum processes that exist separate from spacetime.
		This moves philosophical language in the direction of naturalism and utterances made in philosophy have the capacity to be evaluated by their truth condition.
	www.ephilosopher.com /phpBB_14-action-viewtopic-topic-4798.html (2152 words)

	20th WCP: On the Philosophy of Cognitive Science
		Such a dualism implies the main ontological problem of the philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of mind: the mind-body problem (MBP).
		But this very attraction should make us suspicious: in the history of philosophy, attempts at showing a problem to be "pseudo-problem" have often encountered the very same difficulties that have beset attempts to solve the problem.
		The dualism and the MBP were originally created by Descartes in the Metaphysical Meditations and developed by the tradition of modern philosophy.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/Cogn/CognRibe.htm (2011 words)

	Philosophy Now
		In Issue 44 of Philosophy Now, Peter Williams listed a bewildering array of eleven logical fallacies allegedly committed by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in a variety of his writings.
		Lastly, it is interesting that Williams introduces the concept of ‘irreducible complexity’ of proteins as if it were widely accepted in science.
		Philosophy occupies an interesting middle ground between these two approaches: while a philosopher attempts to build bullet-proof logical arguments (i.e., she aims at logical truth of the formal kind), the premises of her reasoning can only be of two types (Hume’s famous ‘fork’).
	www.philosophynow.org /issue46/46pigliucci.htm (3200 words)

	Redundant Complexity
		This reaction satisfies Behe's criteria for irreducible chemical complexity since in this reaction sequence there are many key components and pathways, and the characteristic behavior of the system is disrupted if key components (for example bromide ions or cerous ions) are absent at critical phases of the reaction (or somehow removed as they are produced).
		Irreducible complexity in a self-organizing system is something generated and sustained by natural mechanisms which can be elucidated without the aid of a designing deus ex machina.
		In the end, Behe overestimates the significance of irreducible complexity because his simple, linear view of biochemical reactions results in his taking snapshots of selective features of biological systems, structures and processes, while ignoring the redundant complexity of the context in which those features are naturally embedded.
	www.asa3.org /ASA/topics/Apologetics/POS6-99ShenksJoplin.html (5559 words)

	Homer (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		Once the fixed, distant poles of poetry and philosophy have been unsettled and begin to drift across the boundaries designed to contain them in their purity, we might give some reconsideration to, and reassess, a number of our dominant presuppositions as we continually renew our approaches to the great Homeric epic poetry.
		In order to achieve his aim, "to disrupt the opposition between persuasion and philosophy," he could, as he remarks, have treated the Platonic texts, cataloguing all Platonic metaphors and similes "in order to show just how much philosophy depends upon its other to be itself" (8).
		Naas aims to be rigorously pure in treating the question of persuasion; he himself upholds a clear break between philosophy and the literature which precedes it: "This work attempts to show that the concepts of philosophy cannot be used to analyze that which "precedes" philosophy" (12).
	www.wordtrade.com /philosophy/ancient/homer.htm (3467 words)

	What is existential-phenomenology? (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		So understood, phenomenology as a philosophy is the science of the sciences, providing the principles which validate, a priori, all the sciences.
		Clearly, philosophy was 'not yet a science,' and this made Husserl launch his phenomenology as an attempt to make philosophy also a 'rigorous science.' He was clever enough to avoid the trap of ascribing to philosophy the same scientific character as belongs to the positive sciences.
		Philosophy cannot allow physics or any other positive science to dictate its methods, for the simple reason that philosophy is not a positive science.
	www.mythosandlogos.com /whatep.html (7199 words)

	Cahoone (specific) - From the Ends of Philosophy
		I propose that the three horizons for philosophical activity are irreducible and inescapable, that we cannot transcend or integrate them without presuming and giving priority to one of them.
		The choice between the three is undecidable because it is a choice about what philosophy is, what one expects to get from philosophy, what philosophy is supposed to contribute to culture.
		Either one understands the aim of philosophy as the assertion of the representational truth, or the actualization or reconstruction of the world of experience, or the exhibition or embodiment of the immediate qualities of experience.
	www.focusing.org /apm_papers/cahoone.html (601 words)

	Amazon.com: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Books: Richard Rorty (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		Discussions in the philosophy of mind usually start off by assuming that everybody has always known how to divide the world into the mental and the physical-that this distinction is common-sensical and intuitive, even if that between two sorts of "stuff," material and immaterial, is philosophical and baffling.
		I was 21 and an upper-level philosophy undergrad at the University of Houston.
		American philosophy was going to stay logical and technically difficult; it would remain a professional field separate from--and, by and large, of little importance to--other kinds of inquiry.
	www.amazon.com /Philosophy-Mirror-Nature-Richard-Rorty/dp/0691020167 (3647 words)

	Irreducible complexity - SkepticWiki (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		Irreducible complexity is the doctrine that at least some structures in biology cannot be simplified without causing the entire structure to fail, and that therefore they could not have evolved naturally.
		In this light, the several mechanisms for irreducible complexity can be accounted for by means of evolution and natural selection [3].
		Examples should be added here, such as the blood clotting cascade and flagella (each of the proteins that contributes to clotting and flagella have other functions), but for now the descriptions of their evolution are about 20 pages of technical detail that is too much for my laymen's understanding.
	www.skepticwiki.org /wiki/index.php/Irreducible_complexity (1183 words)

	Clark, 'Mourning Becomes Theory: Schelling and the Absent Body of Philosophy' - _Schelling and Romanticism_ - Romantic ...
		The irreducible idealistic remainder in Schelling helps explain the cutting violence of the language of loss that surfaces at key points in his negotiation with the philosophical tradition he inherited, his heartfelt disavowal of the systems that he diagnosed as themselves founded upon similarly feeling-full acts of disavowal.
		If a philosophy lacks this living fundament—which is usually a sign that the ideal principle too was originally only feebly at work in it—it loses itself in the kind of system whose attenuated concepts of aseity, modifications, etc., stand in sharpest contrast to the vital force and fullness of reality.
		Schelling's philosophy is itself never entirely free of the risk of this sort of symmetrical inversion, especially in the later work, organized as it is around oppositions of "positive" and "negative" that make such a substitution—which we could call "Hegelian"—all but irresistible.
	www.rc.umd.edu /praxis/schelling/clark/clark.html (5547 words)

	Stuber on Film and Philosophy (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		If philosophy and art are not incommensurable, a supposition with which the editors of _Film and Philosophy_ would appear to agree, then it remains imperative to theorize that relationship rather than to posit it.
		While _Film and Philosophy_ rightly abjures the dichotomy that offers, on the one hand, an empirical description of artworks devoid of all theoretical grounding and, on the other, a reduction of individual artworks to the demonstration of a grand theory, it is an abjuration that too often fails.
		The work presented here is rigid and yet not rigorous: rigid in that its attempts to yoke film to philosophy are often clumsy and tendentious; not rigorous in that its failure to theorize comparison hobbles its ostensible goal of combining theory and practice.
	www.film-philosophy.com /vol5-2001/n28stuber (1182 words)

	Dialectics After Derrida
		It is therefore a question of inscribing philosophy within a field that exceeds it, that makes it possible as an activity and simultaneously undermines its foundations, and that explains the political stakes involved in the apparently natural gestures by which philosophy produces concepts.
		For ordinary language philosophy, the 'pragmatic character of communicative acts' is famously separable into the 'performative' element - the practical action performed by an utterance - and the 'constative' element - the substantive meaning conveyed by the signifying chain.
		All the gestures of philosophy - reflection and transcendentality, especially themes of subjectivity, transcendentality, freedom, origin, truth, presence and the proper - are impossible without the differences and discrepancies that permeate the texts of philosophy.
	www.marxists.org /reference/archive/hegel/txt/gb2000_3.htm (3589 words)

	Why scientists dismiss 'intelligent design' - LiveScience - MSNBC.com (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		To answer this, it is necessary to examine the two main arguments — irreducible complexity and specified complexity — that ID proponents use to support their claim that a Supreme Being is responsible for many or all aspects of life.
		Irreducible complexity asserts that certain biochemical systems in nature contain parts that are too well matched to be products of evolution.
		Irreducible complexity's main proponent is Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.
	www.msnbc.msn.com /id/9452500 (737 words)

	Philosophical Objections to Intelligent Design:Response to Critics : Behe, Michael
		Ordinarily I would simply overlook such a mistaken attribution, since it should be obvious to informed readers that I wouldn’t be lumping the proteins of cilia and flagella together--after all, they are completely different structures that occur in separate kinds of organisms.
		Currently there is only one phenomenon that has demonstrated the ability to produce irreducible complexity, and that is the action of an intelligent agent.
		Furthermore, I argued that irreducible complexity is a hallmark of intelligent design, took several chapters to explicate how we apprehend design, showed why some biochemical systems meet the criteria, and addressed objections to the design argument.
	www.arn.org /docs/behe/mb_philosophicalobjectionsresponse.htm (6055 words)

	Objectivism: Philosophy of Ayn Rand
		The first stage of consciousness is that of sensation, which is an irreducible state of awareness produced by the action of a stimulus on a sense organ.
		Philosophies form within small subgroups of people, who then spread their ideas and whose followers eventually create the application systems for those philosophies.
		Rand's removal of Plato's influence from Aristotle's philosophy led to her development of Objectivism, which has the greatest hope of sweeping Kantism from its position of influence on Western intellectuals.
	members.tripod.com /AttitudeAdjustment/Books/OPAR.htm (7150 words)

	Qualia (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
		The status of qualia is hotly debated in philosophy largely because it is central to a proper understanding of the nature of consciousness.
		The remaining sections focus on functionalism and qualia, the explanatory gap, qualia and introspection, representational theories of qualia, and finally the issue of qualia and simple minds.
		Sometimes it is held instead that qualia are one and the same as certain representational properties of experiences; and sometimes it is is argued that these representational properties are themselves irreducible (Siewert 1998).
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/qualia (8014 words)

	Behe, Biochemistry, and the Invisible Hand (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		Irreducible complexity is a phenomenon for which there exist naturalistic, unguided evolutionary explanations.
		The BZ reaction, we argued, manifested irreducible complexity as a consequence of self-organization.
		It manifests irreducible complexity in that the keystone at the top of the arch is supported by all the other stones in the arch, yet these stones themselves cannot stand without the keystone.
	www.philoonline.org /library/shanks_4_1.htm (5980 words)

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