An analysis of two heuristic strategies for the development of mechanistic models, illustrated with historical examples from the life sciences. In Discovering Complexity, William Bechtel and Robert Richardson examine two heuristics that guided the development of mechanistic models in the life sciences: decomposition and localization. Drawing on historical cases from disciplines including cell biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, they identify a number of "choice points" that life scientists confront in developing mechanistic explanations and show how different choices result in (...) divergent explanatory models. Describing decomposition as the attempt to differentiate functional and structural components of a system and localization as the assignment of responsibility for specific functions to specific structures, Bechtel and Richardson examine the usefulness of these heuristics as well as their fallibility—the sometimes false assumption underlying them that nature is significantly decomposable and hierarchically organized. When Discovering Complexity was originally published in 1993, few philosophers of science perceived the centrality of seeking mechanisms to explain phenomena in biology, relying instead on the model of nomological explanation advanced by the logical positivists (a model Bechtel and Richardson found to be utterly inapplicable to the examples from the life sciences in their study). Since then, mechanism and mechanistic explanation have become widely discussed. In a substantive new introduction to this MIT Press edition of their book, Bechtel and Richardson examine both philosophical and scientific developments in research on mechanistic models since 1993. (shrink)

William Galston is a distinguished political philosopher whose work is informed by the experience of having also served from 1993–5 as President Clinton's Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy. He is thus able to speak with an authority unique amongst political theorists about the implications of advancing certain moral and political values in practice. The foundational argument of this 2002 book is that liberalism is compatible with the value pluralism first espoused by Isaiah Berlin. William Galston defends a version (...) of value pluralism - liberal pluralism - and argues, against the contentions of John Gray and others, that it undergirds a kind of liberal politics that gives weight to the ability of individuals and groups to live their lives in accordance with their deepest beliefs about what gives meaning and purpose to life. (shrink)

Autobiography and Teacher Development in China investigates the roles of autobiography in teacher education, as several scholars in China recontextualize Western conceptions of teacher development, combining them with uniquely Chinese cultural conceptions to articulate a reconceptualization of teacher development that holds worldwide significance. Framed by the work of Zhang Hua and William F. Pinar, these theoretical and practical essays point to an internationally inflected reconceptualization of teachers' professional development, pre-service and in-service. This volume addresses multiple movements of teacher education (...) reform worldwide, focused on crafting a nationally distinctive course not only internationally, but also culturally, historically, and locally. (shrink)

Analytic theology can flourish in the secular academy, and flourish as authentically Christian theology. Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion explains analytic theology to other theologians and scholars of religion, while simultaneously explaining those other fields to analytic theologians. William Wood defends analytic theology from some common criticisms, but also argues that analytic theologians have much to learn from other forms of inquiry. Analytic theology is a legitimate form of theology, and a legitimate form of academic inquiry, (...) and it can be a valuable conversation partner within the wider religious studies academy. Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion articulates an attractive vision of analytic theology, fosters a more fruitful inter-disciplinary conversation, and enables scholars across the religious studies academy to understand one another better. (shrink)

Divine Nature and Human Language is a collection of twelve essays in philosophical theology by William P. Alston, one of the leading figures in the current renaissance in the philosophy of religion. Using the equipment of contemporary analytical philosophy, Alston explores, partly refashions, and defends a largely traditional conception of God and His work in the world a conception that finds its origins in medieval philosophical theology. These essays fall into two groups: those concerned with theological language and those (...) that deal with the nature, status, and activity of God. In Part 1, Alston develops a conceptual scheme for discussing the topic of theological language. He also argues that there is a core of literal talk about God and even a core of predicates univocally applicable to God and creatures. Furthermore, he shows that God can be referred to directly as well as descriptively. In Parts II and III, the author sketches out a middle way between a classical conception of God exemplified by Aquinas and the more recent “process” or “panentheist” conception exemplified by Hartshorne. Alston argues that such a God can act so as to have real effects in the world and can enter into genuine dialogue and otherwise interact with human beings. In addition, he defends the idea that God provides a foundation for morality. The first collection of Alston's ground breaking work in the philosophy of religion, Divine Nature and Human Language will be welcomed by scholars and students of the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, theology, and religious studies. (shrink)

Reprint of the original, first published in 1860.

This article traces the career arc of Dutch psychoanalyst Joost A. M. Meerloo by examining his biography and his psychology of interrogation and confession. His life story, particularly his experiences during the German occupation of the Netherlands and his escape to England during World War II, shaped his views on these issues, as well as his rise to prominence as an expert on these topics in the United States. His psychoanalytic perspectives on interrogation and confession, including false confession, reflected the (...) zeitgeist of the First Wave of Cold War interrogation tactics and related scholarship. His career as a scholar of interrogation faded with the study of distinct interrogation tactics used by communists during the Korean War, the emergence of experimental social psychology, and a growing cohort of scholars who rejected his psychoanalytic views in favor of more contemporary approaches. For these reasons, his work remains undervalued, increasing the risks that today’s scholars will fail to recognize his larger contributions and his warnings about vulnerability and psychologists’ roles in military interrogations. The article reviews the rise and fall of the career of Joost A. M. Meerloo as a scholar of Cold War interrogation, including his contributions and his unheeded warnings about vulnerability and psychologists’ roles in military interrogations. (shrink)

The endowment of religious, charitable, and educational enterprises by the establishment of trusts in land, the income from which could be devoted to such uses, was an immensely popular form of pious expression in both medieval Christendom and the Islamic world. The motives for, and applications of such endowments differed markedly, however, between the two religious cultures. The endowment of prayers and masses for beneficiaries, living and dead, exemplified the sacramental and sacerdotal quality of pre-Reformation Christianity. This ritualistic and ecclesiastical (...) use of endowments in Latin Christian Europe and the Orthodox East, a use dependent on the existence of a sacramental system and an institutional church, contrasted sharply with the broader application of the Muslim waqf, by means of which pious individuals and groups sponsored a wide variety of charities, explicitly life-oriented and quite unconnected with a corporate clerical establishment. The infinite multiplication of private acts of charity by devout Muslims manifested the moralistic bent of Islam, which aspired to recast society according to the norms of the Qur'an and sacred law. The contrasting uses to which the two religious systems put the gifts and legacies of the faithful reflected the operation of fundamentally different religious premises, whereas the institutionalization of these premises in a shared legal fiction, the trust, assured their enforcement in society and life. (shrink)

Charity is not only about giving to those in need, but in a broader sense about loving your neighbor and doing good things for other people without thought of reward. So wrote Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, who believed that charity, along with faiths, was part of the foundation of spiritual practice. This work combines two of Swedenborg's unpublished manuscripts to form a practical, inspirational handbook for appying the principle of doing good to daily life.

One of the world's great philosophers, William of Ockham's On the Connection of the Virtues (De connexione virtutum) provides insightful perspectives on ordinary issues of human conduct. Written in reasonably simple and nontechnical language, it is translated into English here for the first time. Ockham's views on many subjects have been misunderstood, his views on ethics as much as any. This book is designed to avoid some pitfalls that arise in reading medieval philosophy generally and Ockham in particular. Wood (...) begins her introduction with an account of what is known about Ockham's life and works and with a discussion of his place in the history of philosophy, followed by a brief general guide to his views. Finally, there is a historical account of the medieval debate on the connection of the virtues, to which Ockham's treatise is an important contribution. Problems of interpretation are addressed in the commentary, which follows the translation. Translation, commentary, and introduction provide students of Ockham's treatise with what they need to appreciate his stance on ethical issues and to approach his arguments critically. (shrink)

This article defends epiphenomenalism against criticisms raised in Dwayne Moore’s “On Robinson’s Response to the Self-Stultifying Objection”.

The ArgumentMany of the epistemological issues that occupied natural philosophers of the seventeenth century were expressed visually in title-page engravings. One of those issues concerned the relative status to be accorded to evidence of the senses, as compared to knowledge gained by faith or reason. In title-page illustrations, the various arguments were often waged by a series of light metaphors: the Light of Reason, the Light of Nature, and the Lights of Sense, Scripture, and Grace. When such illustrations are examined (...) with the authors' theological views in mind, it becomes apparent that in the first half of the seventeenth century, Catholic authors favored the Light of Reason as a source of truth, while Protestant authors favored the Light of Nature. Since by the end of the century it was widely accepted by scientists of all religious persuasions that certain knowledge must be grounded in sense evidence and the direct study of nature, one might argue that in this instance Protestantism was responsible for nurturing an important development of the Scientific Revolution. However, the skewed nature of the sample and the large number of counterexamples available mitigate against taking this offshoot of the Merton thesis too seriously. (shrink)

“The object of this book,” writes William C. Dowling in his preface, “is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur’s _Time and Narrative_ available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument.” The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur’s famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is (...) the extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur’s argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian surface of Ricoeur’s _Temps et récit_, Dowling reveals a single extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant to be understood in systematic terms. __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative_ _presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a way that will be enlightening both to readers new to Ricoeur and those who may have felt themselves adrift in the complexities of _Temps et récit,_ Ricoeur’s last major philosophical work. Dowling divides his discussion into six chapters, all closely involved with specific arguments in _Temps et récit_: on mimesis, time, narrativity, semantics of action, poetics of history, and poetics of fiction. Additionally, Dowling provides a preface that lays out the French intellectual context of Ricoeur's philosophical method. An appendix presents his English translation of a personal interview in which Ricoeur, having completed _Time and Narrative, _looks back over his long career as an internationally renowned philosopher. __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative___ _communicates to readers the intellectual excitement of following Ricoeur’s dismantling of established theories and arguments—Aristotle and Augustine and Husserl on time, Frye and Greimas on narrative structure, Arthur Danto and Louis O. Mink on the nature of historical explanation—while coming to see how, under the pressure of Ricoeur’s analysis, these ideas are reconstituted and revealed in a new set of relations to one another. "The scholarship in William C. Dowling's __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative____ __is impeccable; Dowling knows Ricoeur inside out. He highlights Ricoeur's most important arguments, presents them in a limpid, concise language, and links them to the relevant nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical developments. Dowling's book provides us with a lucid, intelligible version of Ricoeur's major work, one that will be of considerable significance to philosophers, historians, and literary theorists." —_Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor of French Literature, and the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago_ "William C. Dowling's __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative___ _is a subtle and remarkably well-sustained piece of work. It provides a detailed introduction to a major work of philosophy and narrative theory—already a considerable achievement, given the difficulty of Ricoeur's text. However, Dowling also shows us, sometimes explicitly, sometimes simply through the way he conducts his argument, why we should bother with Ricoeur—what we have to gain from knowing him better than we do, however well we may think we know him." —_Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University _. (shrink)

Scientific models may be more useful for false assumptions they make than true ones when one is interested not in the fit of the model, but in the form of the residuals. Modeling Darwin’s “blending” theory of inheritance shows how it illuminates features of Mendelian theory. Insufficient understanding of it leads to incorrect moves in modeling population structure. But it may prove even more useful for organizing a theory of cultural evolution. Analysis of “blending” inheritance gives new tools for recognizing (...) population structure for culture and for understanding differences between biological and cultural inheritance. (shrink)

William G. Lycan; XII*—Two—No, Three—Concepts of Possible Worlds, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 91, Issue 1, 1 June 1991, Pages 215–228, https.

This paper discusses using the Chernobyl Incident as a case study in engineering ethics instruction. Groups of students are asked to take on the role of a faction involved in the Chernobyl disaster and to defend their decisions in a mock debate. The results of student surveys and the Engineering and Science Issues Test indicate that the approach is very popular with students and has a positive impact on moral reasoning. The approach incorporates technical, communication and teamwork skills and has (...) many of the features suggested by recent literature. (shrink)

This paper argues that we ought to conceive of the Dark Energy problem—the question of how to account for observational data, naturally interpreted as accelerated expansion of the universe—as a crisis of underdetermined pursuit-worthiness. Not only are the various approaches to the Dark Energy problem evidentially underdetermined; at present, no compelling reasons single out any of them as more likely to be true than the other. More vexingly for working scientists, none of the approaches stands out as uncontroversially preferable over (...) its rivals in terms of its rationally warranted promise, i.e. the reasons to further work on, explore, and develop it. We demonstrate this claim by applying a Peircean economic model of pursuit-worthiness in terms of a cognitive cost/benefit estimate—with the instantiation of theory virtues as key indicators of cognitive gains—to the four main Dark Energy proposals (the cosmological constant approach, modified gravity, quintessence, and inhomogeneous cosmologies). According to our analysis, these approaches do not admit of an unambiguous, or uncontroversial, ranking with respect to which ansatz deserves distinguished attention and research efforts. The overall methodological counsel that our analysis underwrites recommends a pragmatic double research strategy forward: to encourage and foster theory pluralism and the search for tests—with the goal of enhancing the testability of the \(\Lambda \) CDM model and “testing it to destruction". (shrink)

The role of pictures and visual modes of presentation of data in science is a topic of increasing interest to workers in artificial intelligence, problem solving, and scientists in all fields who must deal with large quantities of complex multidimensional data. Drawing on studies of animal motion, aerodynamics, morphological transformations, the history of linkage mapping, and the analysis of deterministic chaos, I focus on the strengths and limitations of our visual system, the analysis of problems particularly suited to visualization-the analysis (...) of similarities and differences between complex objects, and problems making conjoint use of information from several complex images. (shrink)

The Christian Tradition has Consistently claimed that, somehow, God may be identified with the truth as such. The claim has a fine biblical pedigree: John’s gospel asserts that Christ, and therefore God, is truth (John 14:6, 16:13). It is prominent in the early church fathers, especially Augustine; and the medievals, including Anselm, largely followed his lead. Nor is the claim confined to the pre-Reformation era. It is also found in the Reformed Church’s Westminster Confession, for example.1 Despite its pedigree, the (...) claim that God is truth strikes modern sensibilities as bizarre, a gross category mistake. For example, many contemporary philosophers treat truth as a property of statements or .. (shrink)

After an initial discussion of the character of interdisciplinary linkages between complex disciplines, I consider an area with confluences of many diverse disciplines—the study of cultural evolution. This must embrace not only the traditional biological sciences, but also the multiple often warring disciplines of the human sciences. This interdisciplinary articulation is in its early stages compared, e.g., to that of evolutionary biology or evolutionary developmental biology, and I try to lay out major axes along which its articulation should plausibly occur, (...) given the relevant causal processes acting at different levels. One cannot have an adequate account of cultural evolution without recognizing a central role for cognitive and social development and the social and cultural organizations and institutions and artifactual tools and infrastructure that support and structure these developmental processes. These induce a population structure that mediates the transmission, expression, and elaboration of culture, and in particular the different ways in which they scaffold learning and the development and articulation of complex skills. I consider how these elements should articulate the disciplines that tend to focus separately on them. Intentions and the market are not explicitly included in this account, and I consider ways in which these perspectives might enter. (shrink)

Ecologists use a remarkable range of methods and techniques to understand complex, inherently variable, and functionally diverse entities and processes across a staggering range of spatial, temporal and interactive scales. These multiple perspectives make ecology very different to the exemplar of science often presented by philosophers. In Philosophical Foundations for the Practices of Ecology, designed for graduate students and researchers, ecology is put into a new philosophical framework that engages with this inherent pluralism while still placing constraints on the ways (...) that we can investigate and understand nature. The authors begin by exploring the sources of variety in the practice of ecology and how these have led to the current conceptual confusion. They argue that the solution is to adopt the approach of constrained perspectivism and go on to explore the ontological, metaphysical, and epistemological aspects of this position and how it can be used in ecological research and teaching"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In one of its versions, the principle of sufficient reason maintains that every true proposition has a sufficient reason for its truth. Recently, a number of philosophers have argued against the principle on the ground that there are propositions such as the conjunction of all truths that are ‘too big’ to have a sufficient reason. The task of this article is to show that such maximal propositions pose no threat to the principle. According to what is perhaps the most ‘popular’ (...) version of the principle to sufficient reason (PSR), every true proposition has a sufficient reason why it is true. Peter van Inwagen formulates the principle as follows: ‘for every truth, for everything that is so, there is a sufficient reason for its being true or being so.’ Like many contemporary philosophers, however, he rejects the principle. My purpose here is to show that the main philosophical argument against PSR rests on a mistaken assumption. There is also a ‘scientific’ argument against PSR that turns on considerations of quantum indeterminacy; but that argument lies beyond the scope of this discussion. (shrink)

This book introduces the work of an important medieval Islamic philosopher who is little known outside the Persian world. Afdal al-Din Kashani was a contemporary of a number of important Muslim thinkers, including Averroes and Ibn al-Arabi. Kashani did not write for advanced students of philosophy but rather for beginners. In the main body of his work, he offers especially clear and insightful expositions of various philosophical positions, making him an invaluable resource for those who would like to learn the (...) basic principles and arguments of this philosophical tradition but do not have a strong background in philosophy. Here, Chittick uses Kashani and his work to introduce the basic issues and arguments of Islamic philosophy to modern readers. (shrink)

Frege begins his exposition of the symbol system employed in his Begriffsschrift by introducing the sign ⟝, whereby, he says, “[a] judgment is always to be expressed”.[The judgment sign] stands to the left of the sign or complex of signs in which the content of the judgment is given. If we omit the little stroke at the left of the horizontal stroke, then the judgment is to be transformed into a mere complex of ideas; the author is not expressing his (...) recognition or nonrecognition of the truth of this. (shrink)

William Desmond - Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico's New Science and Finnegans Wake - Journal of the History of Philosophy 43:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.3 362-363 Donald Phillip Verene. Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico's New Science and Finnegans Wake. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 264. Cloth, $45.00. This is an outstanding book written with elegance and verve, packed with erudition and delivered with wit. It offers insight into both (...) Joyce and Vico in their distinctiveness and in the mutual light they throw on each other. Verene outlines what is peculiar to his own approach in the following way. In the early part of the twentieth century the influence of Croce on the study of.. (shrink)

Roman Frigg and others have developed a general epistemological argument designed to cast doubt on the capacity of a broad range of mathematical models to generate “decision relevant predictions.” In this article, we lay out the structure of their argument—an argument by analogy—with an eye to identifying points at which certain epistemically significant distinctions might limit the force of the analogy. Finally, some of these epistemically significant distinctions are introduced and defended as relevant to a great many of the predictive (...) mathematical modeling projects employed in contemporary climate science. (shrink)

This paper analyzes business people's attitudes towards the tactics used for gathering competitive corporate intelligence both within their own and their competitors' corporations. Business people in large corporations are highly motivated to gather such intelligence. Their attitudes towards the ethicality of specific practices, however, are influenced by the corporate culture, their perceived effectiveness of the techniques, and their perception of the competitors' tactics. Interestingly enough, the most popular technique for securing information is socializing with competitors in nonbusiness settings. Business people (...) generally view their competitors negatively, believing that they go to much further lengths than does their own corporation in gathering competitive intelligence. (shrink)