In this book Ron Amundson examines two hundred years of scientific views on the evolution-development relationship from the perspective of evolutionary developmental biology. This perspective challenges several popular views about the history of evolutionary thought by claiming that many earlier authors had made history come out right for the Evolutionary Synthesis. The book starts with a revised history of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought. It then investigates how development became irrelevant with the Evolutionary Synthesis. It concludes with an examination of the contrasts (...) that persist between mainstream evolutionary theory and evo-devo. This book will appeal to students and professionals in the philosophy and history of science, and biology. (shrink)

Williams, Ron As I consider the list of previous AHOY recipients since the inaugural award in 1983, I can only say that this is an immeasurable honour. It means much to me because, for almost ten years now, Humanism has been there for my family. In 2005-2006, when separation of church and state school issues first crept into our lives, the Humanist Society of Queensland was to appear as the only beacon of secularist activism upon the deep northern horizon. So (...) in 2006 Andrea and I joined the HSQ. (shrink)

Ron Mallon explores how thinking and talking about kinds of person can bring those kinds into being. He considers what normative implications this social constructionism has for our understanding of our practices of representing human kinds, like race, gender, and sexual orientation, and for our own agency.

This article explores the idea that, just as the Jewish-Christian dialogue today benefits from the historical consciousness of critical biblical scholarship, so might the dialogue further benefit by a stronger engagement with the corporeal consciousness that permeates both Christian and Jewish traditions in relation to Sacred Scripture. That is, the well-attested 'turn toward history' is also a 'turn toward the body'. Attention to the corporeality of God's word enables a deeper reception of Scripture as 'body' and therefore, I argue, enables (...) Christians to recognise more clearly the word of God embodied in the Torah-centred traditions and living presence of the Jewish people today. The catalyst for my enquiry is Pope Benedict XVI's encouragement of a 'deeper understanding of the sacramentality of God's word' in the mystery of revelation.After examining this theme from the perspective of magisterial, theological and rabbinic sources, I consider its implications for Jewish-Christian relations. (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] 2002 Pnina Werbner recorded the micro-politics of first generation Muslims in Manchester, noting how these relatively new settlers drew upon ethnicity and race relations to create social capital and establish themselves within local political systems, whilst also creating the infrastructure necessary to develop their communities. Werbner notes that the settlers ‘felt sufficiently secure in Britain to (...) express their political opinions, however contentious’. Much has taken place over the last fifteen years, and the work under review develops our understanding, building admirably on Werbner’s beginnings.The book is an edited collection containing twelve essays written by a number of scholars ranging across several disciplines including political science, sociology, education and international relations. Unsurprisingly, the dominant discipline is political science. The majority of... (shrink)

The so-called "adaptationism" of mainstream evolutionary biology has been criticized from a variety of sources. One, which has received relatively little philosophical attention, is developmental biology. Developmental constraints are said to be neglected by adaptationists. This paper explores the divergent methodological and explanatory interests that separate mainstream evolutionary biology from its embryological and developmental critics. It will focus on the concept of constraint itself; even this central concept is understood differently by the two sides of the dispute.

Since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue in 1981, tensions inherent to the relationship between morally educative practices and the institutions that house them have been widely noted. We propose a taxonomy of the ways in which the pursuit of external goods by institutions undermines the pursuit of the internal goods of practices. These comprise substitution, where the institution replaces the pursuit of one type of good by another; frustration, where opportunities for practitioners to discover goods or develop new (...) standards of excellence are frustrated by institutional priorities and resource allocation; and injustice, which undermines the integrity of relationships within the organization and/or with partners. These threats, though analytically distinct, are often mutually reinforcing. This conceptual contribution is illustrated both by the extant literature and by a novel context, the three-ring circus. (shrink)

Marr (for whom the boundary of the visual module the cognitive impenetrability of the systems of.

The author defends a novel philosophical thesis about the nature and foundation of moral rights. The thesis maintains that rights-claims derive their credibility from a distinctive idea of equality according to which persons are not just equally valuable but equally invaluable. The egalitarian ideal derives its normative content from widely acknowledged norms of competence that are distinguishable from and conceptually prior to the norms of rationality and morality that have exercised contemporary theorists of rational choice and justice. When its nature (...) and foundation are appreciated, rights-based justice can be seen to be more powerful and, in an important sense, less ideological than alternative conceptions. In defending this view, the author considers how ideology corrupts thinking about justice and maintains that contemporary theorists are ideological in a sense that disqualifies them from setting credible normative standards. (shrink)

This paper briefly summarizes current thinking in engineering ethics education, argues that much of that ethical instruction runs the risk of being only superficially effective, and explores some of the underlying systemic barriers within academia that contribute to this result. This is not to criticize or discourage efforts to improve ethics instruction. Rather it is to point to some more fundamental problems that still must be addressed in order to realize the full potential of enhanced ethics instruction. Issues discussed will (...) include: intellectual engagement versus emotional engagement; the gravitational pull of curricular structures; the nature of engineering faculty; and the “engineer-ization” of ethics. (shrink)

It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such 'arguments from reference.' Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross-cultural work suggests that intuitions about reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture (Machery et al. 2004). We argue that accommodating this variation within a theory of reference undermines arguments from reference.

How can there be so much apparent disagreement about what race is, when there is so much agreement on the facts surrounding race? In this paper, I develop this puzzle and consider several interpretations of work in the philosophy of race to try to answer it, several ways of understanding what the metaphysics of race is doing. I consider and reject the possibility that apparent disagreement is metaphysically substantive, and I also consider and reject the view that apparent disagreement primarily (...) reflects semantic disagreements. Instead, I suggest that apparent first-order disagreement over the existence and character of race is a part of a broader, metalinguistic negotiation or conversation about how racial terms can or ought to be used, and I note a range of considerations—including semantic, pragmatic, epistemic, and ethical—that properly play a role in this discussion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article deploys Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian virtue ethics, in which meaningfulness is understood to supervene on human functioning, to bring empirical and ethical accounts of meaningful work into dialogue. Whereas empirical accounts have presented the experience of meaningful work either in terms of agents’ orientation to work or as intrinsic to certain types of work, ethical accounts have largely assumed the latter formulation and subjected it to considerations of distributive justice. This article critiques both the empirical and ethical literatures from (...) the standpoint of MacIntyre’s account of the relationship between the development of virtuous dispositions and participation in work that is productive of goods internal to practices. This reframing suggests new directions for empirical and ethical enquiries. (shrink)

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) can be characterized as the investigation of computational systems that exhibit intelligent behavior (including algorithms and models used in these systems). The emphasis is not so much on understanding (human) cognitive processes as on producing models, algorithms, and systems that are capable of apparently intelligent behavior by whatever means available. The idea of AI has had a long history that can be traced all the way back to, for example, Leibniz. The idea was furthered (...) through the development, early in this century, of mathematical logic, cybernetics, and information theory, all of which contributed to AI theorizing. Alan Turing's bold claim that machines can think, advanced in his famous 1950 paper, and the “Turing test” he proposed therein as a means to test the intelligence of machines predated and prompted the formation of AI. Six years later, the Dartmouth conference in 1956, the participants of which included Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky, and John McCarthy, inaugurated AI as an academic discipline. This contemporary version of AI was facilitated by the invention and rapidly widening use of digital computers. AI embodies an extremely diverse set of ideas that are often mutually conflicting (as in the case of symbolism versus connectionism), and its relationship with other fields studying cognition (such as psychology and linguistics) has been a close but uneasy one. (shrink)

Corporate management is torn between either focusing solely on the interests of stockholders or taking into account the interests of a wide spectrum of stakeholders. Of course, there need be no conflict where taking the wider view is also consistent with maximising stockholder wealth. In this paper, we examine the extent to which a conflict actually exists by examining the relationship between a company's positive and negative corporate social responsibility activities and equity performance. In general, we find little evidence to (...) suggest that managers taking a wider stakeholder perspective will jeopardise the interest of its stockholders. However, our findings do suggest that the market is not only influenced by the independent CSR activities, but also the totality of these activities and that the facets that they value do vary over time. It seems that most recently, the market has valued most firms that satisfied minimum requirements in the areas of diversity and environmental protection but were most proactive in the area of employee-relations. (shrink)

Not all research in machine consciousness aims to instantiate phenomenal states in artefacts. For example, one can use artefacts that do not themselves have phenomenal states, merely to simulate or model organisms that do. Nevertheless, one might refer to all of these pursuits -- instantiating, simulating or modelling phenomenal states in an artefact -- as 'synthetic phenomenality'. But there is another way in which artificial agents (be they simulated or real) may play a crucial role in understanding or creating consciousness: (...) 'synthetic phenomenology'. Explanations involving specific experiential events require a means of specifying the contents of experience; not all of them can be specified linguistically. One alternative, at least for the case of visual experience, is to use depictions that either evoke or refer to the content of the experience. Practical considerations concerning the generation and integration of such depictions argue in favour of a synthetic approach: the generation of depictions through the use of an embodied, perceiving and acting agent, either virtual or real. Synthetic phenomenology, then, is the attempt to use the states, interactions and capacities of an artificial agent for the purpose of specifying the contents of conscious experience. This paper takes the first steps toward seeing how one might use a robot to specify the non- conceptual content of the visual experience of an (hypothetical) organism that the robot models. (shrink)

Scholars have generally held that Xenophon the Athenian favoured oligarchic constitutions and was therefore opposed to the Athenian democracy. Yet Xenophon's writings often seem to display remarkable sympathy for the democracy, and the issue is complicated by the difficulty of assigning any ancient author to a definite place on the political spectrum. Using the categories that M. Walzer employs to analyse modern social critics, this study finds that although Xenophon can take an external/rejectionist approach to the criticism of the Athenian (...) democracy, he more commonly takes an internal/immanent stance. Moreover, his works sometimes seem to express a sympathy for the democracy that extends beyond a patriotic desire for the betterment of his native city regardless of constitution to a solidarity with the foundational ideology of the democratic regime. This suggests, among other things, that the ideological hegemony of the people over the traditional aristocracy in fourth-century Athens was wider than is usually thought; it is reflected not only in the speeches of the active politicians, the orators, who needed the approval of the masses to win honour in the city, but also in the writings of a politically uninvolved philosopher, who had no clear, practical motivation for supporting democratic ideology. (shrink)

The Reliquary of the Manger in the Church of São Roque in Lisbon was created in the early seventeenth century to house supposed fragments of the crib in Bethlehem, given to the Jesuits in Lisbon by Pope Clement VIII. The gilded and silvered bronze reliquary was paid for in part by a donation of c. 1615 from Donna Maria Rolim de Moura, wife of Luís da Gama, a great-grandson of Vasco da Gama. The size of the donation—specifically, the coin involved--has (...) been variously reported and this investigation argues for a correct value, as well as presenting its equivalence in modern currency. The argument is backed up by the discovery in Lisbon of an early seventeenth-century inventory which records the donation. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a flurry of work on the metaphysics of race. While it is now widely accepted that races do not share robust, bio-behavioral essences, opinions differ over what, if anything, race is. Recent work has been divided between three apparently quite different answers. A variety of theorists argue for racial skepticism, the view that races do not exist at all.[iv] A second group defends racial constructionism, holding that races are in some way socially constructed.[v],[vi] And (...) a third group maintains racial population naturalism, the view that races may exist as biologically salient populations albeit ones that do not have the biologically determined social significance once imputed to them.[vii] The three groups thus seem to disagree fundamentally upon the metaphysical character of race. (shrink)

Some psychologists aim to secure a role for psychological explanations in understanding contemporary social disparities, a concern that plays out in debates over the relevance of the Implicit Association Test. Meta-analysts disagree about the predictive validity of the IAT and about the importance of implicit attitudes in explaining racial disparities. Here, I use the IAT to articulate and explore one route to establishing the relevance of psychological attitudes with small effects: an appeal to a process of “accumulation” that aggregates small (...) effects into large harms. After characterizing mechanisms of accumulation and considering some candidate examples, I argue that such mechanisms suggest how a contemporary attitude with small effects could figure in the explanation of large disparities, but they do not vindicate the importance of such an attitude since such mechanisms are typically also determined by competing causes. I close by sketching several strategies for advancing a defense of the relevance of attitudes with small effects. (shrink)

Many research fields concerned with the processing of information contained in human faces would benefit from face stimulus sets in which specific facial characteristics are systematically varied while other important picture characteristics are kept constant. Specifically, a face database in which displayed expressions, gaze direction, and head orientation are parametrically varied in a complete factorial design would be highly useful in many research domains. Furthermore, these stimuli should be standardised in several important, technical aspects. The present article presents the freely (...) available Radboud Faces Database offering such a stimulus set, containing both Caucasian adult and children images. This face database is described both procedurally and in terms of content, and a validation study concerning its most important characteristics is presented. In the validation study, all frontal images were rated with respect to the shown facial expression, intensity of expression, clarity of expression, genuineness of expression, attractiveness, and valence. The results show very high recognition of the intended facial expressions. (shrink)

Recent work proclaims a dominant role for automatic, intuitive, and emotional processes in producing ordinary moral judgment, despite the fact that we have little direct evidence about moral judgment “in the wild.” Indirect support comes via an assumption of dual-process theory: that conscious, reasoning processes are resource intensive. We argue that reasoning that employs consciously available moral rules undermines this assumption, but this has not been appreciated because of a failure to distinguish between explanation and justification. We conclude that it (...) remains unclear what sorts of cognitive processes are dominant in ordinary moral judgments. (shrink)

Social constructionism about race is a common view, but there remain questions about what exactly constitutes constructed race. Some hold that our concepts and conceptual practices construct race, and some hold that the causal consequences of these concepts and conceptual practices also play a role. But there is a third option, which is that the causal effects of our concepts and conceptual practices constitute race, but not the concepts and conceptual practices themselves. This paper reconsiders an argument for the reality (...) of race that grows out of the role of racial kinds in social scientific generalizations. It then uses recent work on the correlation of racial attitudes with behaviors to raise questions about the sufficiency, and perhaps also the necessity, of our concepts and conceptual practices in constituting constructed race, thus understood. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Questioning Ourselves A Twice‐Told Tale What Makes Us Different? Whose Blues? Our Blues Unfinished Business Notes.