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Cities are conspicuous among settlements because of their bulk and pace: Venice, Paris, or New York. Each is distinctive, but all share a social structure that mixes systems (families, businesses, and schools), their members, and a public regulator. Cities alter this structure in ways specific to themselves: orchestras play music too elaborate for a quartet; city densities promote collaborations unachievable in simpler towns. Cities, Real and Ideal avers with von Bertalanffy, Parsons, Simmel, and Wirth that a theory of social structure is empirically testable and confirmed. It proposes a version of social justice appropriate to this structure, thereby updating Marx's claim that justice is realizable without the intervention of factors additional to society's material conditions.

Cities and towns --- Ontology. --- Being --- Philosophy --- Metaphysics --- Necessity (Philosophy) --- Substance (Philosophy) --- Philosophy.

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Meaning (significance) and nature are this book’s principal topics. They seem an odd couple, like raisins and numbers, though they elide when meanings of a global sort—ideologies and religions, for example—promote ontologies that subordinate nature. Setting one against the other makes reality contentious. It signifies workmates and a coal face to miners, gluons to physicists, prayer and redemption to priests. Are there many realities, or many perspectives on one? The answer I prefer is the comprehensive naturalism anticipated by Aristotle and Spinoza: "natura naturans, natura naturata." Nature naturing is an array of mutually conditioning material processes in spacetime. Each structure or event—storm clouds forming, nature natured—is self-differentiating, self-stabilizing, and sometimes self-disassembling; each alters or transforms a pre-existing state of affairs. This surmise anticipated discoveries and analyses to which neither thinker had access, though physics and biology confirm their hypothesis beyond reasonable doubt. Hence the question this book considers: Is reality divided:nature vrs. lived experience? Or is experience, with all its meanings and values, the complex expression of natural processes?

Philosophy of nature. --- Meaning (Philosophy) --- Philosophy --- Semantics (Philosophy) --- Nature --- Nature, Philosophy of --- Natural theology --- Spinoza, Benedictus de, --- Ispīnūzā, --- Spinoza, Baruch, --- Espinoza, Baruch d', --- Sbīnūzā, --- Espinosa, Baruch de, --- De Spinoza, Benedictus, --- Shpinozah, --- Shpinozah, Barukh, --- Spinoza, Benedict de, --- Spinoza, Barukh, --- Spinoza, Baruch de, --- Spinoza, Benoît de, --- ספינאזא, ברוך דע --- ספינאזא, ברוך, --- שפימוזה, ברוך --- שפינאזא, בענעדיקט --- שפינאזא, ברוך --- שפינאזע, ברוך --- שפינוזא, בנדיקטוס --- שפינוזהת ברוך, --- שפינוזה, ברוך --- שפינוזה, ברוך די, --- שפינוזה, ברוך, --- שפינוזה, ב. --- سبينوزا، بندكتس --- de Spinoza, Benedictus --- Spinoza, Benedictus de --- Spinoza, Baruch --- Spinoza, Benedict de --- Aristotle. --- Natura Naturans. --- reality. --- significance.

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"There is agency in all we do: thinking, doing, or making. We invent a tune, play, or use it to celebrate an occasion. Or we make a conceptual leap and ask more abstract questions about the conditions for agency. They include autonomy and self-appraisal, each contested by arguments immersing us in circumstances we don't control. But can it be true we that have no personal responsibility for all we think and do? Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will proposes that deliberation, choice, and free will emerged within the evolutionary history of animals with a physical advantage: organisms having cell walls or exoskeletons had an internal space within which to protect themselves from external threats or encounters. This defense was both structural and active: such organisms could ignore intrusions or inhibit risky behavior. Their capacities evolved with time: inhibition became the power to deliberate and choose the manner of one's responses. Hence the ability of humans and some other animals to determine their reactions to problematic situations or to information that alters values and choices. This is free will as a material power, not as the conclusion to a conceptual argument. Having it makes us morally responsible for much we do. It prefigures moral identity. Closely argued but plainly written, Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will speaks for autonomy and responsibility when both are eclipsed by ideas that embed us in history or tradition. Our sense of moral choice and freedom is accurate. We are not altogether the creatures of our circumstances."--Publisher's website.

Free will and determinism. --- Agent (Philosophy)

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Knowledge, Theory of --- Mind and body --- Théorie de la connaissance --- Esprit et corps

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Traditional moral theory usually has either of two emphases: virtuous moral character or principles for distributing duties and goods. Zone Morality introduces a third focus: families and businesses are systems created by the causal reciprocities of their members. These relations embody the duties and permissions of a system's moral code. Core systems satisfy basic interests and needs; we move easily among them hardly noticing that moral demands vary from system to system. Moral conflicts arise because of discord within or among systems but also because morality has three competing sites: self-assertive, self-regarding people; the moral codes of systems; and regulative principles that enhance social cohesion. Each wants authority to control the other two. Their struggles make governance fragile. A strong church or authoritarian government reduces conflict by imposing its rules, but democracy resists that solution. Procedural democracy is a default position. Its laws and equitable procedures defend people or systems having diverse interests when society fails to create a public that would govern for the common interest.

Reciprocity (Psychology) --- Interpersonal relations. --- Values. --- Moral Codes. --- Morality. --- Social Cohesion. --- Zones.