Two kinds of natural

Two Kinds of Universals and two Kinds of Groups

Philosophers have long debated about two ways of conceiving of universals: as Platonic universals and as Aristotelian universals. Roughly, Aristotelian universals are inherent in the particulars that instantiate them; they can be multiply located (located just where the instances are located), and they exist only if they have at least one instance. Platonic universals, by contrast, are truly ab...

Naturalization without Natural Kinds:

Naturalization without Natural Kinds: On the prospects of a unified theory of religion. From the propagation of religion, it is not hard to understand the causes of the resolution of the same into its first seeds or principles; which are only an opinion of a deity, and powers invisible and supernatural; that can never be so abolished out of human nature but that new religions may again be made ...

Semantic Natural Kinds Brendan

The first of the two sentences in (1) entails the second; necessarily, if the first is true then so is the second. Moreover, (1) is an instance of a more general pattern whose validity doesn’t seem to depend on the specific meanings of the words in (1). The adverb ‘quickly’, for example, can be replaced with any of a wide range of adverbs without loss of validity; analogous remarks hold for the...

What are natural kinds ?

Are Emotions Natural Kinds?

Laypeople and scientists alike believe that they know anger, or sadness, or fear, when they see it. These emotions and a few others are presumed to have specific causal mechanisms in the brain and properties that are observable (on the face, in the voice, in the body, or in experience)-that is, they are assumed to be natural kinds. If a given emotion is a natural kind and can be identified obje...