Just wanted to let you know that we have a book coming out on April 25th.

It covers 18 episodes, including our discussions with Michael Sandell, Peter Singer, and Lucy Lawless.

And it includes essays by Mark, me and our editor Chris tsunami.

To learn more go to partial exam in life.com

slash book. You're listening to the Partially Examine Life episode 330, part 2, we've been discussing

Brian Ellis's book, The Philosophy of Nature, a guide to the new essentialism.

We had laid out his overall theory, how he's changing, how we look at the laws of, even the use of the term laws of nature.

We want to focus on the behavior of distinct natural kinds and natural kinds of processes.

So chapter two, he lays out his distinction between

empiricist and realist perspectives of the world.

And empiricism, he's going to associate with what he's called.

Passivism, it's pacifism not pacifism. He associates the two, they're anti-metophysical

science in a way is grounded in linguistic conventions and you systematize observations and have more or less useful mental constructs and you refrain from doing this metaphysical speculation about underlying causes.

So he talks about this guy Mock and I don't think we have to go into a huge detail about that.

Really that's his foil obviously for saying that as an essentialist he takes underlying causes more seriously and chemistry again is this paradigm

atoms and molecules do exist and they take part in these interactive processes and they have properties that can be discovered. They're not just there by definition, linguistic convention.

And then it's in the section starting on page 33 called the natural kind structure of reality that he will get into what is it to be a natural kind and this is where he gives some bullet points about what that is. Are there bullet points in my notes?

Are they bullet points in the original?

They are, yeah, they're broken down into like numbers one through five.

I have this is page 33, yeah.

I enjoyed the name dropping. So Ernst Mock, like that's the guy who came up with like why we call the speed of sound, Mach 1, Mach 2, is that the same guy or is this, I mean it's a physit, he's a physicist.

I'm just gonna guess and say no.

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