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A maxim is thought to be part of an agent's thought process for every rational action, indicating in its standard form: (1) the action, or type of action; (2) the conditions under which it is to be done; and (3) the end or purpose to be achieved by the action, or the motive. The maxim of an action is often referred to as the agent's intention.
A prominent question in the philosophy of biology is whether biology can be reduced to lower-level sciences such as chemistry and physics. Materialism is the view that every biological system including organisms consists of nothing except the interactions of molecules; it is opposed to vitalism.
Darwinism subsequently referred to the specific concepts of natural selection, the Weismann barrier, or the central dogma of molecular biology. [2] Though the term usually refers strictly to biological evolution, creationists have appropriated it to refer to the origin of life or to cosmic evolution, that are distinct to biological evolution, [3] and therefore consider it to be the belief and ...
Karl Popper's (1945) book The Open Society and its Enemies presents an evolutionary approach to political philosophy, [27] as does David Sloan Wilson's (2019) book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution. The Handbook of Biology and Politics (2017) [28] examines biopolitics and the intersection of evolutionary biology and ...
The first maxim, "Know thyself", has been called "by far the most significant of the three maxims, both in ancient and modern times". [14] In its earliest appearances in ancient literature, it was interpreted to mean that one should understand one's limitations and know one's place in the social scale. [ 15 ]
By his own account, Herbert Spencer described a concept similar to "survival of the fittest" in his 1852 "A Theory of Population". [9] He first used the phrase – after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species – in his Principles of Biology of 1864 [10] in which he drew parallels between his economic theories and Darwin's biological, evolutionary ones, writing, "This survival of ...
A similar formulation is given in Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative: "act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law". [88] The principle of universality has been suggested as a basic principle both for morality and for rationality. [ 12 ]
These questions continue to receive much attention in the philosophy of science. A clear "yes" to the first question is a hallmark of the scientific realism perspective. Philosophers such as Bas van Fraassen have important and interesting answers to the second question.