Carving Nature at Its Joints: Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science

Reflections on the metaphysics and epistemology of classification from a distinguished group of philosophers.

Contemporary discussions of the success of science often invoke an ancient metaphor from Plato’s Phaedrus: successful theories should carve nature at its joints. But is nature really jointed ? Are there natural kinds of things around which our theories cut? The essays in this volume offer reflections by a distinguished group of philosophers on a series of intertwined issues in the metaphysics and epistemology of classification.

The contributors consider such topics as the relevance of natural kinds in inductive inference; the role of natural kinds in natural laws; the nature of fundamental properties; the naturalness of boundaries; the metaphysics and epistemology of biological kinds; and the relevance of biological kinds to certain questions in ethics. Carving Nature at Its Joints offers both breadth and thematic unity, providing a sampling of state-of-the-art work in contemporary analytic philosophy that will be of interest to a wide audience of scholars and students concerned with classification.