What makes a biological entity an individual? Jack Wilson shows that past philosophers have failed to explicate the conditions an entity must satisfy to be a living individual. He explores the reason for this failure and explains why we should limit ourselves to examples involving real organisms rather than thought experiments. This book explores and resolves paradoxes that arise when one applies past notions of individuality to biological examples beyond the conventional range and presents an analysis of identity and (...) persistence. The book's main purpose is to bring together two lines of research, theoretical biology and metaphysics, which have dealt with the same subject in isolation from one another. Wilson explains an alternative theory about biological individuality which solves problems which cannot be addressed by either field alone. He presents a more fine-grained vocabulary of individuation based on diverse kinds of living things, allowing him to clarify previously muddled disputes about individuality in biology. (shrink)

An introductory overview of the main issues in the epistemology of perception.

Among medieval Aristotelians, William of Ockham defends a minimalist account of artifacts, assigning to statues and houses and beds a unity that is merely spatial or locational rather than metaphysical. Thus, in contrast to his predecessors, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, he denies that artifacts become such by means of an advening ‘artificial form’ or ‘form of the whole’ or any change that might tempt us to say that we are dealing with a new thing (res). Rather, he understands artifacts (...) as per accidens composites of parts that differ, but not so much that only divine power could unite them, as in the matter and form of a proper substance. For Ockham, artifacts are essentially rearrangements, via human agency, of already existing things, like the clay shaped by a sculptor into a statue or the stick and bristles and string one might fashion into a broom. Ockham does not think that a new thing is thereby created, although his emphasis on the contribution of human artisans seems to leave questions about the ontological status of their agency open. In any case, there are no such things as natural statues, any more than substances created by human artifice. (shrink)

Geoengineering is defined as the ‘deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climatic system with the aim of reducing global warming’. The technological proposals for doing this are highly speculative. Research is at an early stage, but there is a strong consensus that technologies would, if realisable, have profound and surprising ramifications. Geoengineering would seem to be an archetype of technology as social experiment, blurring lines that separate research from deployment and scientific knowledge from technological artefacts. Looking into the experimental (...) systems of geoengineering, we can see the negotiation of what is known and unknown. The paper argues that, in renegotiating such systems, we can approach a new mode of governance—collective experimentation. This has important ramifications not just for how we imagine future geoengineering technologies, but also for how we govern geoengineering experiments currently under discussion. (shrink)

This article develops a fairness-based criticism of the UK’s policy of promoting free admissions at major museums. With a focus on geographic inequalities and per-capita museums spending, I argue that free admissions can be a surprisingly bad way of promoting cultural opportunities for disadvantaged groups. My criticism emphasises the fact that free admissions consume resources without necessarily providing targeted benefits to disadvantaged groups and addressing background inequalities. Given that museums vary in their location, visitor profile, and operating costs, this critique (...) does not apply to all museums. It applies to the largest and most popular museums in the most advantaged areas, which can expect to keep drawing significant numbers while charging. If we are aiming to prioritise the interests of less advantaged groups, we should be in favour of charging at London’s major museums, to finance “levelling up” across regions, and more direct access-promoting measures in targeted outreach, collaboration, and programming. (shrink)

This paper proposes to examine Daniel Cohen’s recent attempt to apply virtues to argumentation theory, with special attention given to his explication of how open-mindedness can be regarded as an argumentational or critical virtue. It is argued that his analysis involves a contentious claim about open-mindedness as an epistemic virtue, which generates a tension for agents who are simultaneously both an arguer and a knower (or who strive to be both). I contend that this tension can be eased or resolved (...) by clarifying the nature of open-mindedness and by construing open-mindedness in terms of its function. Specifically, a willingness to take a novel viewpoint seriously is sufficient for making open-mindedness both an epistemic and a critical virtue. (shrink)

Biology lacks a central organism concept that unambiguously marks the distinction between organism and non-organism because the most important questions about organisms do not depend on this concept. I argue that the two main ways to discover useful biological generalizations about multicellular organization--the study of homology within multicellular lineages and of convergent evolution across lineages in which multicellularity has been independently established--do not require what would have to be a stipulative sharpening of an organism concept.

This article poses a simple question: can AI lie? In response to this question, the article examines, as its point of inquiry, popular AI chatbots, such as, ChatGPT. In doing so, an examination of the psychoanalytic, philosophical, and technological significance of AI and its complexities are located in relation to the dynamics of truth, falsity, and deception. That is, by critically exploring the chatbot’s capacity to engage in natural language conversations and deliver contextually relevant responses, it is argued that what (...) distinguishes the AI chatbot from anthropocentric discussions, which suggest a form of conscious awareness in AI, is the importance of the lie—an importance which a psychoanalytic approach can reveal. Indeed, while AI technologies undoubtedly blur the line between lies and truth-speaking, in the case of the AI chatbot, it is detailed how such technology remains unable to lie authentically; or, in other words, is unable to lie like a human. For psychoanalysis, the capacity to lie bears witness to the unconscious, and, thus, plays an important role in determining the subject. It is for this reason that rather than uncritically accepting the chatbot’s authority—an authority that is easily reflected in its honest responses and frank admissions—a psychoanalytic (Lacanian) perspective can highlight the significance of the unconscious as a distorting factor in determining the subject. To help elucidate this argument, specific attention is given to introducing and applying Lacan’s subject of enunciation and subject of the enunciated. This is used to assert that what continues (for now) to set us apart from AI technology is not necessarily our ‘better knowledge’, but our capability to consciously engage in acts of falsehood that function to reveal the social nuances and significances of the lie. (shrink)

The growing demand for societal impact of teaching, research, and operations necessitates fresh approaches to our analysis of business school rankings. I discuss the Financial Times’ approach and the need for fresh methods, metrics, and standards.

Ten years ago there was little talk about adding “professionalism” to the medical curriculum. Educators seemed to believe that professionalism was like the studs of a building—the occupants assume them to be present, supporting and defining the space in which they live or work, but no one talks much about them. Similarly, educators assumed that professional values would just “happen,” as trainees spent years working with mentors and role models, as had presumably been the case in the past. To continue (...) the metaphor, when educators did discuss ethics and values, they tended to focus more on external building codes than on the nature of construction materials. Building codes are designed to ensure the public's safety by establishing procedures and standards. Likewise, the “new” bioethics of autonomy and informed consent that entered the medical curriculum in the 1970s and 1980s was oriented primarily toward protecting human rights by codification. In fact, educators explicitly warned students against acting on their personal or professional values in a misguided way—that is, in the absence of adequate ethical constraints, a type of behavior that came to be labeled, pejoratively, as paternalism. (shrink)

Is it possible to remain a sports fan when prominent sports teams and events are utilized to “sportswash” human rights abuses and other controversies? Indeed, while there is an abundance of analyses critiquing different instances of sportswashing, the exploration of the role of sportswashing and its connection to the “sports fan” presents an essential and necessary area of investigation and theoretical inquiry. To unpick this dilemma, this article proposes the concept of “fetishistic disavowal” to help theorize the impact of sportswashing, (...) as well as its relation to the sports fan and critical sports academic. This argues that, as spectators and fans of sport—and, moreover, as critical academics—we often acknowledge and accept that sport is used to perpetuate and even maintain a variety of social, economic, and political inequalities. Yet, while we are aware of such knowledge, we nonetheless remain fully capable of disavowing this very knowledge as an accepted part of sport. Given this, it is argued that the fetishization of sport can provide a suitable conduit for the fetishistic disavowal that sportswashing requires, with the concept offering a unique way of approaching sport’s inherent contradictions, while also theorizing how subjects relate to these contradictions as part of their involvement in and with sport. Where sportswashing directly implicates the fan in its implementation—relying upon a level of fetishistic disavowal between the fan and their club and proffering a disavowed acknowledgement of the effects of sportswashing and its interpellation through sport—this article outlines how applications of fetishistic disavowal provide a unique theoretical lens through which analyses of sport, and its ethical significance, can be critiqued. (shrink)

In this paper, we will introduce a novel argument (the “Region Argument”) that objects do not have frame-independent shapes in special relativity. The Region Argument lacks vulnerabilities present in David Chalmers' argument for that conclusion based on length contraction. We then examine how views on persistence interact with the Region Argument. We argue that this argument and standard four-dimensionalist assumptions entail that nothing in a relativistic world has any shape, not even stages or the regions occupied by them. We also (...) argue that endurantists have viable ways of preserving shape despite the Region Argument. The upshot of these arguments is that contrary to conventional wisdom, considerations about shape in relativity support endurantism rather than four-dimensionalism. We conclude by examining the implications of our discussion for the debate over Edenic shapes, noting that endurantists have a satisfying response to skeptical arguments about Edenic shapes similar to the one they have against the Region Argument. (shrink)

Recently, Andrew Ter Ern Loke has provided a new deductive formulation of the Moral Argument for the existence of God, which states that if one believes in moral realism (the metaethical view that there are objective moral truths), then they should also believe in theism. We demonstrate how his New Moral Argument does not guarantee the conclusion that objective moral truths are metaphysically grounded in a divine personal entity. Next, we reconstruct the argument in a way that is logically exhaustive. (...) However, even once we do this, the argument remains unsuccessful, since it ignores at least one metaethical view that admits there are objective moral truths, but they are not metaphysically substantive: relaxed realism. We find five ways Loke could be motivating the claim that if there are objective moral truths, then they are metaphysically substantive truths, but we argue that these motivations do not succeed or are consistent with relaxed realism. (shrink)

One of the more important and under-thematized philosophical disputes in contemporary European philosophy pertains to the significance that is given to the inter-related phenomena of habituality, skilful coping, and learning. This paper examines this dispute by focusing on the work of the Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger-inspired phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfus, and contrasting his analyses with those of Gilles Deleuze, particularly in Difference and Repetition. Both Deleuze and Dreyfus pay a lot of attention to learning and coping, while arriving at distinct conclusions about (...) these phenomena with a quite different ethico-political force. By getting to the bottom of the former, my hope is to problematize aspects of the latter in both philosophers' work. In Deleuze's case, it will be argued that he adopts a problematic position on learning that is aptly termed 'empirico-romanticism'. While I will agree with the general thrust of Dreyfus' foregrounding of habit and skilful coping, even in the political realm, it will also be argued that there are some risks associated with his view, notably of devolving into a conservative communitarianism. (shrink)

Drawing on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Turner offers an original reconstruction of democratic individualism in American thought.

Understandings of play are frequently tied to a sense of instinctual gratification—a something that must be completed, that all humans, young or old, should or need to partake in. Indeed, for many, play is characterised as a unique activity that stands apart from the ordinary and every day. While such assessments prefigure a clear demarcation between the fun of play and the more laborious, boring aspects of profane life, what this distinction alludes to is a greater sense of the creativity (...) that underlies play. Drawing from a Lacanian perspective, the following chapter will determine that an essential aspect of play and sport is the creativity it provides, namely, by considering how the act of creativity is intricately tied to the very lack that constitutes the Lacanian subject. To do so, the concept of sublimation is used to consider how the codified rules and regulations that sport both asserts and requires renders apparent the importance of the limit. Rather than conceiving of this limit as a barrier to creativity, what is revealed in sublimation is how this limit proves constitutive of our very creativity. That is, the ability to sublimate—to creatively perform unique displays of physical or artistic expression— lies in the mundanity and utter importance of the playful and sporting activity and, more importantly, the inherent restrictions and constraints these activities impose. It is in accordance with the limit that one’s creativity can expose an emancipatory potential in the context of play and sport. (shrink)

In recent years, a considerable amount of interest has arisen in the topic of existential inertia (henceforth EIT) and its relation to the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas. While contemporary Thomists have engaged with proponents of EIT, strangely enough, no literature has focused on Aquinas’s own response to the objection(s) from an EIT-like position. The intention of this article is to (1) lay out the basic thrust of EIT and then (2) articulate how Aquinas’s own metaphysical commitments dissolve the problems (...) that EIT raises. After formulating an argument based on Aqunias’s own texts and paying attention to the metaphysical commitments it involves, I then level three objections and respond to them. (shrink)

Operational definitions of biological altruism in terms of actual fitness exchanges will not work because they include accidental acts as altruistic and exclude altruistic acts that have gone awry. I argue that the definition of biological altruism should contain an analogue of the role intention plays in psychological altruism. I consider two possibilities for this analogue, selected effect functions and the proximate causes and effects of behavior. I argue that the selected-effect function account will not work because it confuses the (...) explanation of some altruistic behavior with the definition of all of it and the information needed to justify a selected effect account of function is too often inaccessible. Close attention to the proximate explanations of a behavior is all that is needed to determine if an act is biologically altruistic, returning biological altruism to descriptive ethology, where it belongs. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to develop a largely non-empirical case for the compatibility of phenomenology and naturalism. To do so, I will criticise what I take to be the standard construal of the relationship between transcendental phenomenology and naturalism, and defend a ‘minimal’ version of phenomenology that is compatible with liberal naturalism in the ontological register and with weak forms of methodological naturalism, the latter of which is understood as advocating ‘results continuity’, over the long haul, with the relevant (...) empirical sciences. Far from such a trajectory amounting to a Faustian pact in which phenomenology sacrifices its soul, I contend that insofar as phenomenologists care about reigning in the excesses of reductive versions of naturalism, the only viable way for this to be done is via the impure and hybrid account of phenomenology I outline here. (shrink)

MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHERS HAD NO SINGLE RESPONSE to the difficult question of how souls are related to the bodies they animate. In this respect, the theory of psychological inherence advanced by the noted Parisian philosopher John Buridan is a case in point. Buridan offers different accounts of the soul-body relation, depending upon which of two main varieties of natural, animate substance he is explaining. In the case of human beings, he defends a version of immanent dualism: the thesis that the soul (...) is an immaterial, everlasting, and created entity, actually inhering in each and every body it animates, and thus numerically many. But when his explanandum is the relation between nonhuman animal or plant souls and their bodies, Buridan is a materialist; that is, he regards the sensitive and vegetative souls of such creatures as no more than collections of material, extended powers exhaustively defined by their biological functions, and hence as corruptible as the particular arrangements of matter they happen to animate. (shrink)

Does Henry Thoreau have a positive politics? Depending on how one conceives of politics, answers will vary. Hannah Arendt famously portrayed Thoreau's commitment to the sanctity of individual conscience as distinctly unpolitical. More recent commentators grant that Thoreau has a politics, but they characterize it as profoundly negative in character. This essay argues that Thoreau indeed sponsors a positive politics-a politics of performing conscience. The performance of conscience before an audience transforms the invocation of consciencefrom a personally political act into (...) a publicly political one. The aim of the performance is to provoke one's neighbors into a process of individual self-reform that will make them capable of properly vigilant democratic citizenship and conscientious political agitation. I establish this claim through a sustained reading of a relatively neglected text that deserves wider attention in political theory: Thoreau's 1859 lecture defending insurrectionary activities by radical abolitionist John Brown. (shrink)

Alan Turing, pioneer of computing and WWII codebreaker, is one of the most important and influential thinkers of the twentieth century. In this volume for the first time his key writings are made available to a broad, non-specialist readership. They make fascinating reading both in their own right and for their historic significance: contemporary computational theory, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and artificial life all spring from this ground-breaking work, which is also rich in philosophical and logical insight.

Veridically perceiving puts us in a better epistemic position than, say, hallucinating does, at least in that veridical perception affords knowledge of our environment in a way that hallucination does not. But is there any _further_ epistemic advantage? Some authors have recently argued that veridical perception provides a superior epistemic benefit over hallucination not just concerning knowledge, but concerning justification as well. This contrasts with a traditional view according to which experience provides justification irrespective of whether it’s veridical or hallucinatory. (...) I think both views are mistaken. Although this traditional view should be rejected in favor of one on which _some_ hallucinations are epistemically worse than veridical perceptions (and some are not), I don’t believe there is good reason to think that the mere fact of hallucination—or factivity more generally—has any consequences for justification. Susanna Schellenberg has endorsed both the traditional and the factive views (for different elements or kinds of perceptual justification), and I critique her views in detail, though I also draw out more general epistemological lessons about factivity and evidence. (shrink)

This essay examines the relationship that obtains between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida through exploring an interesting point of dissension in their respective accounts of decision-making. Merleau-Ponty's early philosophy emphasizes the body-subject's tendency to seek an equilibrium with the world (by acquiring skills and establishing what he refers to as 'intentional arcs'), and towards deciding in an embodied and habitual manner that minimizes any confrontation with what might be termed a decision-making aporia. On the other hand, in his later writings, Derrida frequently (...) points towards a constitutive 'undecidability' involved in decision-making. He insists that a decision, if it is genuinely to be a decision, must involve a leap beyond all prior preparations, and this ensures that an aporia surrounds any attempt to decide. One must always decide without any equilibrium or stability, and yet these are precisely the things that Merleau-Ponty claims that our body moves us towards. Most of this essay will explore the significance of this disparity, and it will be argued that many of Merleau-Ponty's insights challenge the Derridean conception of the undecidability involved in decision-making. This becomes most obvious when comparing the decision-making processes of those expert in a particular field to those who are merely competent (for example chess), and this essay will attempt to establish that the aporia that Derrida discerns can actually be seen to constrict. (shrink)

Ralph Ellison offers crucial insight into the meaning of conscientious citizenship in American democracy. In doing so, he follows his nineteenth-century Transcendentalist forebears--Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman--who have become key figures in contemporary efforts to theorize liberal democratic character. At the center of Emersonian ethics is the idea of " awakening." " Awakening " is the Emersonians' name for honest and courageous confrontation with reality. Ellison broadens the Emersonians' vision by insisting that one cannot be "well awake" in America without confronting (...) the ways historical white supremacy shapes one's identity and chances in life. Political theorists who draw inspiration from the Emersonians in theorizing democratic individuality need to pay attention to Ellison--for he demonstrates that one cannot achieve democratic individuality without awakening to race. (shrink)

The present article examines Contra Academicos 2.5 in which Augustine seems to detail the influence of the libri Platonicorum on his conversion. In the first part of the paper, I argue that Michael P. Foley is correct to interpret Augustine’s phrase “libri quidam pleni” as a reference to the libri Platonicorum. I advance the further claim that Augustine primarily has in mind Ennead I.6. This is in contrast to the argument alluded to by Pierre Courcelle and formally given by John (...) J. O’Meara where such a reading of Contra Academicos misconstrues the relationship between Augustine and Plotinus. In response to O’Meara, I advance a threefold argument, a corollary of which is a novel reading of a Latin phrase (bonas res Arabicas) that has perplexed scholars. In the second part of the paper, I use my reading of Contra Academicos along with two considerations from Ennead I.6 to motivate a deeper understanding of Augustine’s conversion. The present study develops recent lines of thought in Augustine scholarship and seeks to open new avenues for understanding the libri Platonicorum and their influence on Augustine’s conversion. (shrink)

This essay attempts to rethink what is here called “the Socratic Moment” in Western philosophy, that is, the unique turn that philosophy takes in the early Socratic dialogues of Plato. The essay begins by contesting the traditional view that the goal of Socratic inquiry is to gain irrefutable knowledge of ethical concepts such as courage, justice, friendship, and the holy for the purposes of future action. It argues instead, through a close reading of key passages from Plato’s Apology and Euthyphro, (...) that Socratic inquiry actually begins with the concept under consideration in order to put the interlocutor themself—their beliefs and their actions—into question. (shrink)

The prevalence, course and prognosis of diseases in patients referred to tertiary medical centers frequently differ from those treated in primary care settings. Extrapolation of findings from one population to another may therefore be unwarranted. Other factors that contribute to misinterpretation of medical literature include failure to distinguish statistical from clinical significance and advocacy of medical interventions prior to adequate clinical trials.

Are humans naturally predisposed to religion and supernatural beliefs? If so, does this naturalness provide a moral foundation for religious freedom? This volume offers a cross-disciplinary approach to these questions, engaging in a range of contemporary debates at the intersection of religion, cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, political science, epistemology, and moral philosophy. The contributors to this original and important volume present individual, sometimes opposing points of view on the naturalness of religion thesis and its implications for religious freedom. Topics include (...) the epistemological foundations of religion, the relationship between religion and health, and a discussion of the philosophical foundations of religious freedom as a natural, universal right, drawing implications for the normative role of religion in public life. By challenging dominant intellectual paradigms, such as the secularization thesis and the Enlightenment view of religion, the volume opens the door to a powerful and provocative reconceptualization of religious freedom. (shrink)

Those who are optimistic about the prospects of a science of consciousness, and those who believe that it lies beyond the reach of standard scientific methods, have something in common: both groups view consciousness as posing a special challenge for science. In this paper, we take a close look at the nature of this challenge. We show that popular conceptions of the problem of consciousness, epitomized by David Chalmers’ formulation of the ‘hard problem’, can be best explained as a cognitive (...) illusion, which arises as a by-product of our cognitive architecture. We present evidence from numerous sources to support our claim that we have a specialized system for thinking about phenomenal states, and that an inhibitory relationship exists between this system and the system we use to think about physical mechanisms. Even though the ‘hard problem’ is an illusion, unfortunately it appears that our cognitive architecture forces a closely related problem upon us. The ‘genuine problem’ of consciousness shares many features with the hard problem, and it also represents a special challenge for psychology. Nonetheless, researchers should be careful not to mistake the hard problem for the genuine problem, since the strategies appropriate for dealing with these problems differ in important respects. (shrink)

Theory and evidence from the behavioral science literature suggest that the widespread and rising use of _lingua francas_ in the workplace may impact the ethical decision-making of individuals who must use foreign languages at work. We test the impact of foreign language usage on individuals’ susceptibility to bribery in workplace settings using a vignette-based randomized controlled trial in a Dutch student sample. Results suggest that there is not even a small foreign language effect on workplace bribery susceptibility. We combine traditional (...) null hypothesis significance testing with equivalence testing methods novel to the business ethics literature that can provide statistically significant evidence of bounded or null relationships between variables. These tests suggest that the foreign language effect on workplace bribery susceptibility is bounded below even small effect sizes. Post hoc analyses provide evidence suggesting fruitful further routes of experimental research into bribery. (shrink)

"This book does not treat Smith as an historical curiosity who has accomplished all that he was capable of. It treats Smith as someone with a contemporary message. That capitalism is the dominant political system in the contemporary world is almost without doubt. That capitalism is succeeding, however, is much more contentious. I will argue that Smith would challenge such claims of success. As the standard of living rises in most of the world, few could challenge the notion that vast (...) numbers of people are being left behind. While some countries gorge themselves into obesity, others starve. Furthermore, while the information revolution has made access to recorded knowledge easier than ever, global cultural experience is becoming whitewashed in a money- and media-driven frenzy of homogeneity. Every generation has complained that their successors are intellectually inferior and poorly educated. Sometimes the weaker of us are forced to wonder whether this time it might be true.". (shrink)

F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order (1952) is often considered to be a theory of cognitive psychology. While it contains a theory on the psychology of perception, it has the function of illustrating Hayek’s solution to the mind–body problem. The solution, which has been strongly influenced by Moritz Schlick’s epistemology, takes the form of a physicalist identity theory. An attempt is made to trace Schlick’s influence on Hayek to the latter’s stay in Zürich, which resulted in a manuscript (1920) that (...) contains the main features of the 1952 book. One of the consequences of Hayek’s theory is that we cannot describe the functioning of our mind completely without using expressions that refer to subjective experiences. For Hayek this is not a fundamental problem but a practical one that does not jeopardize his physicalist identity theory. Unlike the manuscript, The Sensory Order contains a rudimentary sketch of an evolutionary research program. When Hayek elaborated that program later, though, he focused on cultural evolution rather than on the evolution of the mind. (shrink)

Commentators have long been fascinated by the problem of freedom in Leibniz's system. Many of the recent studies begin with Leibniz's views on modality, truth, and so-called superessentialism, and then investigate whether these doctrines are compatible with freedom and contingency. There is, however, another dimension to Leibniz's thinking about freedom that has been largely overlooked in the recent literature. ;Leibniz inherited a medieval debate about God's foreknowledge of and providence over human free actions, and unlike the other great philosophers of (...) the early modern period, set out to solve it. This means the problem of human freedom for Leibniz was nested in the larger problem of God's creation, preservation, and governance of the entire created order. ;In this dissertation I set out the late medieval debate and Leibniz's adjudication of it. I argue that Leibniz offers a strong notion of providence that is a via media between the two competing paradigms of the late seventeenth century, Molinism and Banezianism. In light of these theological commitments, I offer a new assessment of Leibniz's views of divine and human freedom. (shrink)

Professor S. F. Barker has recently argued that the theory of the status of theoretical concepts in natural science put forward by Hempel and Braithwaite is mistaken. Essentially this "formalistic" theory says that these concepts "take on" meaning from their place in a total theoretical system which as a whole implies testable observation statements. In the paper it is argued that Barker's criticism of the Hempel-Braithwaite theory is mistaken because (a) he does not sufficiently consider the operative empirical restrictions on (...) concept formation in scientific theorizing, and (b) his criticisms are based on an acceptance of a narrow empiricism which would reject most existing theoretical natural science as empirically meaningless. (shrink)

This paper aims at a partial rehabilitation of E. A. Moody''s characterization of the 14th century as an age of rising empiricism, specifically by contrasting the conception of the natural science of psychology found in the writings of a prominent 13th-century philosopher (Thomas Aquinas) with those of two 14th-century philosophers (John Buridan and Nicole Oresme). What emerges is that if the meaning of empiricism can be disengaged from modern and contemporary paradigms, and understood more broadly in terms of a cluster (...) of epistemic doctrines concerned with the methodology of knowing, it characterizes very appropriately some of the differences between the ways in which late-medieval thinkers both understood and practised the science of psychology. In particular, whereas Aquinas thinks psychology is about reasoning demonstratively to the real nature of the soul from its evident operations (thereby assimilating psychology to metaphysics), Buridan and Oresme, both of whom doubt whether real animate natures can be known empirically, focus on giving detailed accounts of those operations themselves (thereby assimilating psychology to physics). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Natural Philosophy: On Retrieving a Lost Disciplinary Imaginary by Alister E. McGRATHJack ZupkoMcGRATH, Alister E. Natural Philosophy: On Retrieving a Lost Disciplinary Imaginary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. viii + 248 pp. Cloth, $39.95This book attempts to retrieve and reimagine the tradition of natural philosophy as an antidote for what the author sees as the fragmented, instrumentalized, and ethically disengaged understanding of the natural world most of us (...) have today. The idea is not to reinstate the older vision of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, with its final causes and animated spheres, or even the early modern culmination of natural philosophy in Newton’s universe of mathematically fixed natural laws; rather, the author hopes to engender a newer and deeper understanding of nature that is at once scientific, ethical, and poetic, which he explains in terms of the conceptual framework of Popper’s “Three Worlds”: objective, subjective, and theoretical. What is recovered thereby is said to be a “lost conceptual space” wherein human beings learn both about and from nature, modes of knowing rendered obsolete by disciplinary specialization in the sciences as well as our commitment to objective methods that leave no room for ethical or spiritual approaches to understanding the natural world and our place in it.The author covers quite a bit of ground on the historical side, from the ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages, moving on to the idea of natural philosophy as it was gradually transformed during the early modern period by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Boyle, and Newton—a picture finally eclipsed by the objective, empirical concept of natural science familiar to us today. Curiously, the book says very little about the Platonic tradition of natural philosophy that grew up around the Timaeus. Because it was available in Latin (or the first half of it, anyway, in a Latin translation by the Roman Neoplatonist Calcidius, who also wrote an influential commentary on the work), the Timaeus was, for almost a millennium, the authoritative text in natural philosophy in the West, at least until Aristotle’s nonlogical and scientific writings were recovered in the twelfth century. The Timaeus was the subject of many commentaries and philosophical discussions, from Calcidius in the fourth century to Bernardus Silvestris, William of Conches, and Alan of Lille in the twelfth. It fell out of favor among philosophers with the rise of Aristotle’s Physics and Aristotelian natural philosophy, though it continued to shape the popular imagination of nature in other genres, such as art and literature—recall, for example, the well-known image of “God the Geometer” (c. 1230), measuring the cosmos with a compass. If the author’s project is about “retrieving” natural philosophy “as a lost disciplinary imaginary” (the book’s subtitle), then surely the Platonic vision of the universe deserves equal billing with the Aristotelian. [End Page 158]That said, there is much to like in the project sketched here. The author’s diagnosis of the epistemic malaise of modern-day science sounds right to anyone familiar with the history of philosophy and natural science. So, even though we can now correctly describe the velocity constant of earth’s gravity as 9.8 m/s2, among other scientific achievements, we take ourselves to be wearing a different hat when we wax poetic at the beauty of the sky and the stars. Early-and pre-modern authors were more adept at bringing together science and poetry, but that might be because their epistemic position was radically different from our own. Calcidius, for example, finds it easy to draw moral and aesthetic conclusions from the motions of the cosmos because he really believed heavenly bodies are, like us, animated by souls. Even a materialist like Lucretius accepts that the gods exist; his (still) very radical thesis is that they don’t care about us. (And why should they? The Pythagorean theorem is much more beautiful and edifying to consider than the troubles of ignorant and weak-willed mortals.) Enlightened moderns that we are, we no longer believe the heavens are populated by super-intelligent beings; yet we continue to marvel at Van Gogh’s Starry Night and feel it is wrong to cause gratuitous... (shrink)

This paper provides a background to, detailed exploration, and then critique of, the influential notion of economic performativity. It begins with a broad sweep of the theoretical developments in economic sociology in the years before the advance of the performativity program. In doing so it outlines the theoretical quandary that performativity sought to move beyond. Having set the scene, it then looks at the performativity thesis in detail, explaining how it seeks to do away with modern ontological binaries like the (...) object/subject dichotomy. Once the performativity thesis has been unpacked, it is critiqued. Leading to the conclusion, that while there have been some benefits to the performative approach, especially in research looking at finance, the performativity thesis ultimately fails in its attempt to move beyond the ontology of “the moderns”, and does little to shift the debates in economic sociology that predated its popularity. (shrink)