uppose that the most fundamental and general principle of a science had been known for over a century and had long since become a main basis for understanding and research by scientists in that field. You would surely assume that the principle would be taken as a matter of course by everyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the science. It would obviously be taught everywhere as basic to the science at any level of education. If you think that about (...) biology, however, you are wrong. (shrink)

Is art a form of communication? If so, what does art express or represent? How should we interpret the meaning of works created by more than one artist? Is art an adaptation, via natural selection? In what ways is art similar to—and different from—language? Art as Communication: Aesthetics, Evolution, and Signaling employs information theory, the theory of evolution, and the newly developed sender-receiver model of communication to reason about art, aesthetic behavior, and its communicative nature. Shawn Simpson considers whether (...) art, from a biological point of view, is the province of only humans or whether animals might reasonably be said to create art. Examining the work of evolutionary biologists, art theorists, linguists, and philosophers—including Charles Darwin, Stephen Davies, H. Paul Grice, and others—he addresses how well different theories of communication explain meaning and expression in art and argues that art is much more continuous with other forms of communication than previously thought. (shrink)

The longstanding species problem in biology has a history that suggests a solution, and that history is not the received history found in many texts written by biologists or philosophers. The notion of species as the division into subordinate groups of any generic predicate was the staple of logic from Aristotle through the middle ages until quite recently. However, the biological species concept during the same period was at first subtly and then overtly different. Unlike the logic sense, which relied (...) on definitions of the essence of both genus and species, biological species from the time of Epicurus were consistently considered to involve a reproductive element: in short, living species relied not on essential definitions, but on the generative cause, which might not be definable. I term this the generative conception of species: species were the generation by reproduction of form. This undercuts the claim that species before Darwin were essentialist, and divorces the notion of a type from that of essence. In fact, as late as the end of the nineteenth century, logicians explicitly treated biological “species” as a homonym only of logical essentialist species, and permitted considerable deviation from the type or form. At every point, species in logic were thought to be a subset, in effect, of some more general notion. I sketch a history of both philosophical and biological traditions of the species concept, before turning to the current conceptions. These are reconsidered in the light of this history, and in particular Mayr’s changing views are shown to be somewhat Whiggish, historiographically. Of the many touted biological species concepts, only one of which (Mayr’s) is called _the_ Biological Species Concept, none appears to capture all the relevant facts, intuitions, and operational requirements of biology. Cladistic conceptions, however, have much in common with the older philosophical literature, in that the natural group of cladism is the clade, or monophyletic group. After considering the Individuality Thesis, and the metaphysics of species, we see that species are the most particular terminal taxa in a clade, and that they are “defined” in terms of the particular synapomorphies, or evolved characters, that are causally responsible for keeping the lineages that organisms form distinct from one another. In this way, we can remain within the generative conception of species that has been in play for over two millennia, and yet avoid the pitfalls of prior attempts to find a universal conception of species. (shrink)

Do traits evolve because they are good for the group, or do they evolve because they are good for the individual organisms that have them? The question is whether groups, rather than individual organisms, are ever “units of selection.” My exposition begins with the 1960’s, when the idea that traits evolve because they are good for the group was criticized, not just for being factually mistaken, but for embodying a kind of confused thinking that is fundamentally at odds with the (...) logic that Darwin’s theory requires. A counter-movement has arisen since the 1960’s, called multi-level selection theory, according to which selection acts at multiple levels, including the level of the group. After discussing the 1960’s attack on group selection and the concept’s subsequent revival, I examine Darwin’s views on the subject. I discuss what Darwin says about four examples: human morality, the barbed stinger of the honeybee, neuter workers in species of social insect, and the sterility of many interspecies hybrids. I argue that Darwin defended hypotheses of group selection in the first three problems, but rejected it in the fourth. I also discuss Darwin’s general views about the role of group selection in evolution. (shrink)

Abstract. Augustine, and following him some major theologians of the early Christian church, noted the apparent discrepancies between the first two chapters of Genesis and suggested an interpretation for these chapters significantly different from the literal. After examining a selection of the relevant texts, we shall follow the later fortunes of this interpretation in brief outline, figuring in particular an unlikely trio: Suarez, St. George Mivart, and Thomas Henry Huxley. Moral: Darwinian theory might plausibly be construed as implementing, unawares, a (...) suggestion from that other Christian tradition. (shrink)

En obras fundamentales como On the Origin of Species (1859), The Descent of Man (1871) y The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin establece un claro posicionamiento anti-antropocéntrico basado en la continuidad evolutiva entre animales-humanos, y entre todos los organismos incluyendo a la especie humana. No obstante, diversos teóricos de la síntesis evolutiva moderna, los neodarwinistas, entre ellos George Gaylord Simpson y Bernhard Rensch, vuelven a instaurar el antropocentrismo en el corazón de la (...) teoría de la evolución, aun a expensas de ideas darwinianas fundacionales, restauradas por Stephen Jay Gould. Analizaré el caso para intentar comprender cómo lo que se ha llamado la “segunda herida narcisista” infringida por Darwin a la humanidad opera en este intento que busca hacer coincidir biología y antropocentrismo en el siglo XX, a costa del propio pensamiento del padre de la biología. Para dar sentido a esta reformulación del antropocentrismo contemporáneo, seguiremos algunas pistas para comprender cómo en la cultura occidental se produce una antinomia entre dos ideas producidas en diferentes momentos de su historia intelectual: que el hombre es el centro de la naturaleza y que no lo es, escapando en ciertos aspectos a su biología mediante la excepcionalidad. La tesis de la continuidad biológica presentada por Darwin es una de las marcas más importantes de la revolución epistemológica que lleva su nombre, y aun así los herederos de su revolución la traicionan. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the ’45 Rising, the jurist and man of letters, Lord Kames, recruited Adam Smith to come to Edinburgh, Scotland's capital—notable for its superb views, historic buildings, and noisome streets— to deliver to young professionals, from 1748–51, freelance courses of lectures on rhetoric and criticism. Smith's course included a theory of communication, distinguishing between scientific discourse based on reason and the rhetorical kind meant to persuade by moving the passions. Another part of the course was devoted to (...) the origin and progress of language, an example of the philosophical or natural type of history prevalent among the Scottish literati, which Smith adopted for all his works, moral, political, and literary. (shrink)

Global expressivism is the radical view that we should never think of any of our language and thought as representing the world. While interesting, global expressivism has not yet been clearly formulated, and its defenders often use unexplained terms of art to characterise their view. I fix this problem by carefully and clearly exploring the different ways in which we can interpret globalism. I reject almost all of them either because they are implausible or because they are bad interpretations of (...) actual globalist views. I then argue that the most promising version of globalism, which we can find in the work of Huw Price, turns out to be completely compatible with the view of so-called ‘local’ expressivists. The debate between globalists and localists is therefore empty: the real interest in this topic lies not in this debate but in whether globalism is true and if so what follows from it. (shrink)

I perform an economic and ethical analysis on wealth and income inequality. Economists have performed many statistical studies that reveal a number of, often contradictory, findings in connection with the distribution of wealth and income. Hence, the statistical findings leave us with no better knowledge of the effects that inequality has on economic progress. At the same time, the existing theoretical results have not provided us with a definitive answer concerning the effects of inequality on progress. By gaining knowledge of (...) the nature of inequality, and bringing basic economic principles to bear on the subject, we can come to an understanding of what the causal relationship is between inequality and economic progress. Furthermore, I apply a new theory of ethics – rational egoism – to assess economic inequality. I show that, in the right context, economic inequality is both economically and morally desirable. (shrink)

There are several important conceptual issues and questions about the practice of healthcare ethics that can, and should, inform the development of any practice standards. This paper provides a relatively short overview of seven of these issues, with the invitation for further critical reflection and examination of their relevance to and implications for practice standards. The seven issues described include: diversity (from the perspective of training and experience); moral expertise and authority/influence; being an insider or outsider; flexibility and adaptability (for (...) local contexts of practice); the relative weighting of procedural and normative aspects of ethics practice; making mistakes or errors; and conflicts of interest in practice. (shrink)

The Modern Synthesis has been receiving bad press for some time now. Back in 1983, in an article entitled “The Hardening of the Modern Synthesis” Stephen Jay Gould criticized the way the Modern Synthesis had developed since its inception in the 1930s and early 1940s (Gould 1983). Back then, those who would later become known as ‘architects’ of the synthesis were united in their call for explaining evolution at all levels in terms of causation at one level: genetics. What drove (...) changes in gene frequency remained an open question. It could be mainly selection, or drift, or some (other) form of constraint. But in the two decades that followed, the synthesis underwent a major change. By the late 1940s the synthesis had ‘hardened’ around adaptationism, according to Gould. Influential contributors like Dobzhansky, Simpson and Wright had increasingly expressed adaptationist views in the later editions of their landmark books. Not because evidence had piled up, showing that selection was in fact pervasive. Instead, Gould argued, adaptationist tendencies had been preserved by some kind of cultural inertia, and were now being revived. “Certain ‘national styles’ persisted from the eighteenth century, through Darwin’s era, and into our own time. Views on adaptation provide a good example” (Gould 1983). Gould did not just argue that some form of adaptationism had resurfaced. He became well-known for his efforts to intervene on this status quo by attempting to make evolutionary biology more ‘pluralistic’. In collaborative work with Richard Lewontin (Gould and Lewontin 1979), Elisabeth Vrba (Gould and Vrba 1982; Vrba and Gould 1986) and Niles Eldredge (Eldredge and Gould 1972; Gould and Eldredge 1977) he criticized the synthesis for its adaptationism and its lack of appreciation for hierarchical perspectives. Gould exerted his influence in a different way as well. Together with Eldredge, he had facsimiles reprinted of the first editions of two books that had shaped synthesis, but with their own critical introductions (Eldredge 1982; Gould 1982). Dobzhansky’s Genetics and the Origin of Species and Mayr’s Systematics and the Origin of Species appeared as reprints in the ‘Columbia Classics in Evolution’ series, sending an unambiguous message to the readers: these are foundational works, but they have been superseded. In the summer of 2008, some 25 years after Gould made his point about the hardening of the Modern Synthesis, a group of sixteen biologists and philosophers gathered at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) near Vienna, Austria, to discuss cutting-edge research that reaches beyond the synthesis framework. Before it even started, this workshop on the ‘Extended Synthesis’ had already attracted a fair share of attention in the blogosphere and had resulted in a news feature in Science (Pennisi 2008). After the meeting, Nature weighed in on the matter (Whitfield 2008). The results of over 3 days of presentations and extensive discussion have now been published as Evolution—The Extended Synthesis. 1 The publication of this collection of sixteen essays is accompanied by the republication of Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis; the book that introduced the term ‘Modern Synthesis’. Both books are introduced by the organizers of the KLI workshop, Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd Müller. Like Gould and Eldredge before them, Pigliucci and Müller did not reissue one of the canons of the Modern Synthesis without giving the readers some ‘guidance’. Starting with the cover, the editors proclaim boldly that this is ‘the definitive edition’ of Huxley’s book. In a new foreword, they sketch the context in which the book was written and assess some of its features. They voice some mild criticism of alleged ‘adaptationism’. But their tone is different from that of Gould and Eldredge. Pigliucci and Müller praise Huxley for his pluralistic outlook, which has again become essential in the forging of an Extended Synthesis. That makes Huxley’s book more than just an interesting but obsolete classic. Instead, it can teach valuable lessons about how to ‘soften up’ a synthesis that has become hardened over time. (shrink)

The field of `science and religion' is exploding in popularity among both academics and the reading public. This is a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to the debate, written by the leading experts yet accessible to the general reader.

Despite the growing interest in Aristotelian approaches to contemporary philosophy of science, few metaphysicians have engaged directly with the question of how a neo-Aristotelian metaphysics of nature might change the landscape for theological discussion concerning theology and naturalism, the place of human beings within nature, or the problem of divine causality. The chapters in this volume are collected into three thematic sections: Naturalism and Nature, Mind and Nature, and God and Nature. By pushing the current boundaries of neo-Aristotelian metaphysics to (...) recover the traditional notion of substantial forms in physics, reframe the principle of proportionality in biology, and restore the hierarchy of being familiar to ancient philosophy, this book advances a metaphysically unified framework that accommodates both scientific and theological knowledge, enriching the interaction between science, philosophy and theology. Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Theology of Nature will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of science, natural theology, philosophical theology, and analytic theology. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading.

Fraser MacBride has argued that deflationism about truth makes the truthmaker principle, that every truth has a truthmaker, implausible. This is because on a deflationary view, the truthmaker principle is a mere abbreviation of a conjunction of claims which have no independent motivation. In this article, I argue that this claim is false: deflationism does not entail that the truthmaker principle is a mere abbreviation of such a conjunction, because the claims MacBride focuses on are in fact irrelevant to the (...) motivations for truthmaker theory. Moreover, deflationists can consistently articulate and accept such motivations. Deflationism has no bearing on the plausibility of the truthmaker principle. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this journal, McIntosh (2021) argues that a modalized version of an epistemic principle of phenomenal conservativism can be used to successfully defend the key possibility premise of the modal ontological argument for the existence of God. I argue, however, that such a defense of the possibility premise is not going to be successful even if one concedes a number of contentious claims to McIntosh.

In this paper we examine the ethical implications of emerging Nanotechnologically Enhanced Combat Systems (or 'NECS'). Through a combination of materials innovation and biotechnology, NECS are aimed at making combatants much less vulnerable to munitions that pose a lethal threat to soldiers protected by conventional armor. We argue that increasing technological disparities between forces armed with NECS and those without will exacerbate the ethical problems of asymmetric warfare. This will place pressure on the just war principles of jus in bello, (...) by encouraging the resort to tactics that either (i) make it more difficult to respect these principles or (ii) directly violate them, by virtue of attacking non-combatants or creating disproportionate numbers of casualties without a clear military goal. (shrink)

This article identifies both prudence and antiprudence as options for rational people. Building upon Wiggins's "sensible subjectivism," the account offers an analysis of prudential emotions which are not rationally required but whose reasonableness need not be doubted. One result is that skepticism about prudence is avoidable. Another, as shown through examination of some of Parfit's worries about replication, is that prudence is autonomous from metaphysical theories of persons. It is also autonomous from morality, neither prudence nor morality being appropriately subordinated (...) to the other in a theory of rational choice. (shrink)

Aristotle's Ethica Eudemia and Ethica Nicomachea, as is well known and much discussed, contain three books in common. Less well known, at least until Dieter Harlfinger alerted scholars to the fact in 1971, is that some of the manuscripts of Eth. Eud. do, contrary to the then prevailing consensus, contain the text of these common books. Even less well known is that Harlfinger's discovery was anticipated some 50 years before by Walter Ashburner, who had uncovered this fact about Eth. Eud. (...) MSS in the Laurentian library of Florence. Ashburner's anticipation of Harlfinger, however, is not the real value of his article. Its value rather is that it contains collations of readings for the common books, and thereby gives us an excellent resource for examining the text of the common books as this text is contained in exclusively Eth. Eud. MSS. The Eth. Eud. tradition of the common books has hitherto received little attention. Modern editions of Eth. Eud. do not include these books, and editions of Eth. Nic. have other MSS for the purpose. Ashburner's collations are the more valuable because they are taken from the one MS that, in Harlfinger's learned stemma, appears as the archetype for all the rest. (shrink)

Moral philosophers continue to divide on the conundrum of Marx and morality— how a ferocious moral critic of nineteenth-century capitalism could also denounce morality as an ideological snare and delusion. In Marxism and the Moral Point of View, Kai Nielsen brings together many years of thought on both terms of the question, rightly seeking a balance between Marx's moralism and Marx's anti-moralism.

Fallibilism is typically taken to face a problem from the apparent infelicity of concessive knowledge attributions. CKAs are of the form: “S knows that p, but it’s possible that q,” where q obviously entails not-p. CKAs sound to the ears of many philosophers as contradictory or infelicitous. But CKAs look to be overt statements of fallibilism, since if S fallibly knows that p, then she can’t properly rule out some possibility in which not-p. Do fallibilists, then, have some way of (...) explaining the seeming infelicity of CKAs that doesn’t impugn the truth of fallibilism? Fallibilists think so. In this connection, there are two well-known responses to the problem: Patrick Rysiew’s pragmatic strategy and Jason Stanley’s semantic strategy. While both strategies have real virtues, there are aspects of each strategy that face certain complications. In this paper, I’ll outline those complications and I’ll develop some remedies to them. The aim of this paper will be to show that the challenge posed by CKAs isn’t a grave problem at all. In particular, I’ll argue that if the semantic strategy fails because CKAs really are overt statements of fallibilism, then there’s good reason to think that the pragmatic strategy succeeds, but if the pragmatic strategy fails because CKAs are obviously false or aren’t overt statements of fallibilism, then the semantic strategy succeeds. Thus, I’ll conclude that the problem for fallibilism posed by CKAs isn’t a grave problem at all. (shrink)

This paper investigates aspects of measure and randomness in the context of locale theory . We prove that every measure μ, on the σ-frame of opens of a fitted σ-locale X, extends to a measure on the lattice of all σ-sublocales of X . Furthermore, when μ is a finite measure with μ=M, the σ-locale X has a smallest σ-sublocale of measure M . In particular, when μ is a probability measure, X has a smallest σ-sublocale of measure 1. All (...) σ prefixes can be dropped from these statements whenever X is a strongly Lindelöf locale, as is the case in the following applications. When μ is the Lebesgue measure on the Euclidean space Rn, Theorem 1 produces an isometry-invariant measure that, via the inclusion of the powerset P in the lattice of sublocales, assigns a weight to every subset of Rn. When μ is the uniform probability measure on Cantor space {0,1}ω, the smallest measure-1 sublocale, given by Theorem 2, provides a canonical locale of random sequences, where randomness means that all probabilistic laws are satisfied. (shrink)

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. 178.Hb. £15.95.

These essays deal with central and controversial issues in jurisprudence. This volume emphasizes legal theory, and the collection will be of interest to students of and others involved with political philosophy as well as law students and philosophers.

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 1 Seiten: 179-206.

Voluntary management standards for social and environmental performance ideally help to define and improve firms’ related capabilities. These standards, however, have largely failed to improve such performance as intended. Over-emphasis on institutional factors leading to adoption of these standards has neglected the role of firms’ existing capabilities. External pressures can drive firms to adopt standards more than their technical capacity to employ them. This can lead to problems of “fit” between institutional requirements and a firm’s existing capabilities . We describe (...) a conceptual model that considers the impact of an interaction between a firm’s institutional requirements and its existing capabilities on standards failure. We suggest solutions that align institutional requirements to appropriate governance forms as a means to improve standards success. We contribute to theory by describing the role of firms’ internal capabilities to the success of voluntary management standards and the reliability of self-regulation generally. (shrink)