Michael Esfeld: 3 books

Conservative Reductionism sets out a new theory of the relationship between physics and the special sciences within the framework of functionalism. It argues that it is wrong-headed to conceive an opposition between functional and physical properties (or functional and physical descriptions, respectively)...

This book seeks to work out which commitments are minimally sufficient to obtain an ontology of the natural world that matches all of today’s well-established physical theories. We propose an ontology of the natural world that is defined only by two axioms: (1) There are distance relations that...

Was ist die Natur? Seit der Antike gehört diese Frage zu den Hauptthemen der Philosophie. Eine philosophische Gesamtsicht der Natur muss zunächst von den Ergebnissen der Naturwissenschaften ausgehen. Allgemeine und spezielle Relativitätstheorie sowie Quantenphysik werfen vor allem die Frage nach...