Recent years have witnessed growing concerns about how we should conduct conservation activities in a world of human-altered biophysical conditions. The ‘novel ecosystems’ perspective has emerged as a way to meet this challenge. Yet its focus on accepting ‘new natures’ as the ‘new normal’ has drawn much criticism from those wedded to conventional forms of conservation, such as ‘ecological restoration’. This paper: 1) provides a much needed review of this dispute; 2) formulates and deploys an original analytical framework, which draws (...) on Thomas Kuhn's ‘theoretical history’ of science and Charles Taylor's moral philosophy to extricate the entangled moral and material ontologies of nature which conflate facts with values in the world-building activities of disputants; and 3) identifies and examines the processes underlying these world-building activities. The paper closes by offering an initial suggestion on how to explore options for resolving this highly contentious debate. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction The Importance of Character Sympathy, the Indirect Passions, and Moral Sentiment Sympathy, Sentiment and Impartial Evaluation of Character The Errors of Remoteness and Countervailing Interest The Consequentialist Error The Authority of the Moral Sentiments Moral Knowledge as a Shared Resource Note References Further reading.

This lucid and wide-ranging volume constitutes a self-contained introduction to the elements and key issues of the philosophy of language.

In a highly original and provocative essay entitled “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology”, published a few years ago, Professors Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow attempt to indicate the scientific importance and usefulness of the concepts of purpose and teleology. Since this essay appeared the suggestions it contains seem to have acquired a significance which was not wholly apparent at that time. This is due primarily to the fact that a somewhat novel and, it appears to some, revolutionary approach to (...) certain problems has arisen in the sciences, an approach which is more or less loosely referred to as “cybernetics,” and among whose outstanding spokesmen are to be found the very authors of this essay—particularly Professor Wiener, whose recently published Cybernetics has been claiming the attention of an increasing number of scientists and non-scientists alike. In his book, it may be noted, Professor Wiener, in tracing the development of cybernetics over the past few years, gives a good indication of the importance he attaches to the earlier essay. He writes, with reference to it: “The three of us [Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow] felt that this new point of view merited a paper, which we wrote up and published. Dr. Rosenblueth and I foresaw that the paper could only be a statement of program for a large body of experimental work, and we decided that if we could ever bring our plan for an interscientific institute to fruition, this topic would furnish an almost ideal center for our activity”. It would seem, then, that an examination of the contents of this essay should not be without interest at this time. (shrink)

One On addressing understanding People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does. ...

After the Human explores how the strategies and methods of scientific as well as humanistic inquiry are converging to construct a relational view of the world. It evaluates Einstein's theory of relativity, quantum theory, information theory, cognitive neuropsychology, and evolution alongside the history of modern western philosophy, arguing that presumptions such as human exceptionalism and individualism are not only out of sync with scientific knowledge but also root causes of the critical issues facing the world--climate change, machine intelligence, ideological political (...) oppositions. How to think beyond anthropocentrism and binary oppositions--human/animal, sacred/profane--and acknowledge ourselves as entangled parts of larger ecologies is the aim of the book. The distinctive character of the book is its wealth of scientific insight; the opening chapter reveals the complex worlds of dirt, water, air, and fire and how humans have deformed them beyond recognition. Extraordinary advances in technology, with their promise of furthering a global village, have been derailed by economic individualism and hierarchy, prefigured in the atomism of Descartes and Newton. Not until Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg introduced relativity and quantum mechanics--less than a century after Hegel first proposed his dialogical worldview--did a relational account of reality begin to develop. The study of the natural world revealed a micro-universe of relations in which organisms and environments constantly adapt to one another; as Lynn Margulis puts it, "life is a verb," webs and networks of intelligences and emotions communicating within and across species and nonbiological life forms including AI. We have only to change not the world but how we see ourselves in it. (shrink)

Historically, it has been presumed that being an experienced researcher was enough in itself to guarantee effective supervision. This has always been a dubious presumption, and it has become an untenable one in the light of global developments in the doctorate itself and in the candidate population which have transformed demands upon expectations of supervisors. This handbook will assist both new and experienced supervisors to respond to these changes. Divided into six parts the book looks at the following issues: * (...) Changing contexts of doctoral supervision * Recruiting, selecting and working with doctoral candidates * Supporting the research project * Supporting candidates of all nationalities and academic backgrounds * Supporting completion of projects and examination * Evaluation and dissemination of practice. A Handbook for Doctoral Supervisors focuses on the practical needs of supervisors, draws examples from a wide range of countries and uses self-interrogation as a means of encouraging readers to reflect upon their practice, making it an essential read for anyone involved in doctoral supervision. (shrink)

In the scientific literature on religious evolution, two competing theories appeal to group selection to explain the relationship between religious belief and altruism, or costly, prosocial behavior. Both theories agree that group selection plays an important role in cultural evolution, affecting psychological traits that individuals acquire through social learning. They disagree, however, about whether group selection has also played a role in genetic evolution, affecting traits that are inherited genetically. Recently, Jonathan Haidt has defended the most fully developed account based (...) on genetic group selection, and I argue here that problems with this account reveal good reasons to doubt that genetic group selection has played any important role in human evolution at all. Thus, considering the role of group selection in religious evolution is important not just because of what it reveals about religious psychology and religious evolution, but also because of what it reveals about the role of group selection in human evolution more generally. (shrink)

A complete bibliography of Collingwood's publications and manuscripts. Very complete summaries of Collinwood's reflection on Art and History.

I. Language constructing language: the implications of reflexivity for linguistic theory -- II. Language in its own image: on epilinguistic and metalinguistic knowledge -- III. Folk-linguistic fictions and the explananda of the language sciences -- IV. Why we need a theory of language -- V. Folk psychology and the Language Myth -- VI. Talking about what happened -- VII. Metalinguistic truisms and the emancipation of the language sciences.