Nature and value: from convergence to conflation via the ‘natural imperative'

Chong, William L H (2024) Nature and value: from convergence to conflation via the ‘natural imperative'. Masters by Research thesis (MA), Manchester Metropolitan University.

Preview

Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (616kB) | Preview

Abstract

Studies on the longstanding dichotomy between value and nature are broad and multifarious. Present paper focuses on the place of value in natural behaviour, because I assume that it is here at ‘ground level’ that the place of value in nature can be examined in situ. Hence a real convergence of value and nature, if in the first place tenable, involves a prior convergence between philosophies and psychologies of value. Which then presupposes a more fundamental assumption that the Kantian twofold concept-and-content criteria of knowledge, which entails a conflated formal-andmaterial value, is tenable. The outcome has been affirmative. Drawing from Christian Wolff’s (HIJK) philosophical psychology of ‘maxim’—alongside Aristotelian philosophies and psychologies of eudaimonia—my research yields a thesis of ‘natural imperative’: that value, in its formal-and-material conflation, is necessary for action. My proposed method of theoretical convergence however cannot be taken for granted; because it is potentially objectionable by both traditional realists (who tend to assert a divergent dualism) and another longstanding and respectable scepticalempiricism (which holds firmly to a relativist-divergent position). A detailed discussion on convergence, and a comparative study of the types of convergence in the literature—namely, social and theoretical convergences—are hence in order. I suggest that theoretical convergence is a viable, perhaps the only viable, method for the dissolution of any longstanding, or what some philosophers call ‘faultless’, disagreement, in which a theoretical stalemate is sustained through a twofold ‘ideal conditions’ of reason and evidence at each of its opposing ends.