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10156.136034
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and begin all over again. – Andre Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse
Thus reads one of the very few epigraphs that I remember well. …
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67853.136105
The article contrasts the way that laws are regarded by some philosophers of science with the way that they are regarded by scientists and science educators. After a brief review of the Humean and necessitarian views of scienfic laws, I highlight difference between scientists who regard laws as being merely descriptive and philosophers who generally regard them as being explanatory and, in some cases, as being necessary. I also discuss the views of two prominent philosophers of science who deny any role for scienfic laws. I conclude that science educators should be wary of adopng the necessitarian view of scienfic laws.
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67872.136123
In this article I examine several related views expressed by Robin Hendry concerning molecular structure, emergence and chemical bonding. There is a long- standing problem in the philosophy of chemistry arising from the fact that molecular structure cannot be strictly derived from quantum mechanics. Two or more compounds which share a molecular formula, but which differ with respect to their structures, have identical Hamiltonian operators within the quantum mechanical formalism. As a consequence, the properties of all such isomers yield precisely the same calculated quantities such as their energies, dipole moments etc. The only means through which the difference between the isomers can be recovered is to build their structures into the quantum mechanical calculations, something that is carried out by the application of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation.
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125571.136133
It has been over 60 years since Ernst Mayr famously argued for the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes in biology. In the following decades, Mayr’s proximate-ultimate distinction was well received within evolutionary biology and widely regarded as a major contribution to the philosophy of biology. Despite its enormous influence, there has been a persistent controversy on the distinction. It has been argued that the distinction is untenable. In addition, there have been complaints about the pragmatic value of the distinction in biological research. Some even suggest that the distinction should better be abandoned. In contrast, Mayr had consistently maintained the significance of the proximate-ultimate distinction in biology. There are also other attempts to defend the distinction. The paper examines the debate by taking an integrated History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) approach and argues for a functional approach to causal concepts in scientific practice.
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125603.136142
Very few researchers will have failed to notice that computing technology has been advancing rapidly, so that the landscape of computational tools and resources at our disposal looks completely di erent than a generation ago. Some researchers from the humanities and social sciences have embraced new ways of doing research, while many others have only a partial or passing awareness of the emerging computational research programmes within their elds. This book provides a fairly gentle and broad introduction to the new possibilities. This is a valuable contribution, since it would be a shame for the signi cant potential of computers to go untapped simply because people aren’t aware of this potential. For some sub- elds (such as social epistemology), computers have already been a game-changer.
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125619.136152
Sepkoski has written a history of the ‘extinction imaginary’, the immense variety of cultural ideas and expectations surrounding what has happened and what could (catastrophically) happen to life on Earth. As he skilfully argues, this has enabled ‘Western culture’s imaginary’ more broadly to seamlessly connect present ecological worries with narratives about ‘deep time’, from the earliest discovery of extinction to the contemporary claim, now taken to be self-evident, that biodiversity conservation is a good thing.
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125635.13616
In Science on a Mission, Naomi Oreskes aims to document how US Navy funding shaped research in oceanography from the twentieth century through to the present. The book seeks ‘to determine whether Navy patronage a ected the content of the scienti c work that was done and, if so, how’ (p. 9). Oreskes’s short answer to this question is ‘yes’. Her long answer consists of meticulous case studies on how the Navy’s interests came to shape the priorities and practices of American oceanography.
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125683.136169
For many years any mention of consciousness in the context of quantum physics was generally restricted to those popular accounts that might be found on the ‘New Age’ or ‘Spiritual’ bookshelves. Certainly, in ‘mainstream’ philosophy of physics, the concept was regarded as de nitely non grata, following Putnam’s ([1961]) and Shimony’s ([1963]) famous set of critiques of the ‘consciousness causes collapse’ solution to the measurement problem in the early 1960s. Recently, however, consciousness has begun to tiptoe back into the limelight, as both explanans and explanandum. Here Shan Gao has collected seventeen contributions from prominent philosophers and physicists (including one Nobel Prize winner), which o er a disparate set of accounts of the role it might play. Following a helpful introductory orientation, these essays are grouped into three sections: ‘Consciousness and Wave Function Collapse’, ‘Consciousness in Quantum Theories’, and ‘Quantum Approaches to Consciousness’, although there is a certain degree of arbitrariness in the placement of some of the papers both within and between these divisions.
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125717.13618
Baxter, J. [2023]: ‘Kolja Ehrenstein’s Causal Pluralism in the Life Sciences’, BJPS Review of Books, 2023 The last century of philosophical work has seen a proliferation of competing causal theories: regularity theory, probabilistic causality, counterfactual analyses, interventionism, process theory. It’s common to nd authors expressing the attitude that there is no single, universal theory of causation. Yet, these authors often mean di erent things by the term ‘pluralism’. With this book, Ehrenstein aims to achieve greater clarity and rigor concerning claims of causal pluralism in the philosophy of science literature. Ehrenstein is sceptical of numerous claims of pluralism about causality in the life sciences. He argues that some causal distinctions, such as Mayr’s ultimate and proximate cause, are inherently incoherent and do not amount to a meaningful pluralism. Other claims to pluralism, such as Elliot Sober and Stuart Glennan’s analyses of causal relevance and causal production, are not helpful in resolving the disputes they were purported to address. Still other proposed causal concepts, notably the concepts of permissive and instructive causes, are not genuine cases of causal pluralism.
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125735.136196
There is a story told over history and philosophy of biology camp res of a terror that once roamed these parts and scared biologists and philosophers alike: the essence monster. This was an ironic name, since if things have essences, monsters are the things that don’t, so the philosophers especially appreciated the paradox. However, like a good number of camp re stories, it is a fairy tale, mostly useful for scaring younglings. The essence monster is supposed to have killed progress in biology until Darwin freed us from the misperception that it was real. After that, the essence monster was itself killed o by the knights of the modern synthesis, until Michael Devitt revived it. Or so the new story goes. But you shouldn’t believe everything you hear over a camp re.
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125796.13621
Mathematics is the “language of nature,” a privileged mode of expression in science. We think it latches onto something essential about the physical universe, and we seek theories that reduce phenomena to mathematical laws. Yet, this attitude could not arise from the philosophies dominant before the early modern period. In orthodox Aristotelianism, mathematical categories are too impoverished to capture the causal structure of the world. In the revived Platonism of its opponents, the natural world is too corrupt to exemplify mathematical perfection. Modern mathematical science required a novel tertium quid, due to Pietro Catena.
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137174.136224
Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) was the most prominent
rationalist of the black American enlightenment thinkers in the
nineteenth-century. He stands out among his
contemporaries—Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T.
Washington, most notably—for his robust defense of the central
place of reason in moral agency. His attempts to work out the
consequences of that view for the nature of language and history lends
his philosophy a breadth and depth not matched by other enlightenment
thinkers. The prominence of his protégé, W. E. B. Du
Bois, helped ensure Crummell’s continuing influence during the
rise of pragmatism, but he eventually fell out of favor as such
relativistic thinkers as Alain LeRoy Locke and Zora Neale Hurston
emerged.
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289260.136234
The received view is that Kant denies all moral luck. But I show how Kant affirms constitutive moral luck in passages concerning radical evil from Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. First, I explicate Kant’s claims about radical evil. It is a morally evil disposition that all human beings have necessarily, at least for the first part of their lives, and for which they are blameworthy. Second, since these properties about radical evil appear to contradict Kant’s even more famous claims about imputation, ‘ought implies can’, and free will, I unpack Henry Allison’s proof of radical evil and show how it is consistent with interpretations of Kant’s broader views about morality. Third, I define and illustrate the category of constitutive moral luck and argue that Kant embraces the existence of constitutive moral luck given Allison-style interpretations of radical evil. This provides a reason for philosophers to reject the received view, and it creates an occasion for Kantians and Kant scholars to check their reasons if they deny moral luck.
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334933.136244
This highly accessible series of Elements provides brief but comprehensive introductions to the most central topics in metaphysics. Many of the Elements also go into considerable depth, so the series will appeal to both students and academics. Some Elements bridge the gaps between metaphysics, philosophy of science, and epistemology.
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396862.136253
In many traditions, God is claimed to be everywhere. In this paper I introduce and defend a novel account of what this might mean. Recent literal accounts of omnipresence draw on discussions about the general nature of location in metaphysics, and my approach continues this theme. I first suggest there are independent reasons to develop a new primitive location relation – exact co-location – which is a generalisation of the relation of exact location. I then use this relation to articulate a version of divine omnipresence which avoids several of the challenges which arise for a literal interpretation of God being everywhere. The resulting view says that God is exactly co-located with every thing and every place, and therefore literally present everywhere, without bearing precisely the same relationship to things and space that we do.
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396883.136261
There are many and varied claims made about divine presence in different religious traditions. The idea that God is omnipresent, i.e. everywhere, is the subject of this Handbook and is a staple of western theism and several other systems of belief. This chapter focuses on a different claim that’s made about where God is located, namely the rather puzzling assertion that Jesus Christ becomes present in a particular way in the Eucharistic celebration.
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468273.136268
This chapter provides a theoretical lens on conceptual disruption. It offers a typology of conceptual disruption, discusses its relation to conceptual engineering, and sketches a programmatic view of the implications of conceptual disruption for the ethics of technology.
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468342.136275
Generative AI enables automated, effective manipulation at scale. Despite the growing general ethical discussion around generative AI, the specific manipulation risks remain inadequately investigated. This article outlines essential inquiries encompassing conceptual, empirical, and design dimensions of manipulation, pivotal for comprehending and curbing manipulation risks. By highlighting these questions, the article underscores the necessity of an appropriate conceptualisation of manipulation to ensure the responsible development of Generative AI technologies.
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468359.136282
Franke, in Philosophy & Technology, 37(1), 1–6, (2024), connects the recent debate about manipulative algorithmic transparency with the concerns about problematic pursuits of positive liberty. I argue that the indifference view of manipulative transparency is not aligned with positive liberty, contrary to Franke’s claim, and even if it is, it is not aligned with the risk that many have attributed to pursuits of positive liberty. Moreover, I suggest that Franke’s worry may generalise beyond the manipulative transparency debate to AI ethics in general.
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586122.136289
Mark Antony’s funeral oration is the turning point of Julius Caesar. Brutus had just finished his own speech, and seemed to persuade the people that the killing of Caesar was the justified killing of a tyrant. …
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644783.136296
Whether one realises it or not, chemistry is everywhere. What we eat; the drugs that cure our diseases; the detergents that we use to clean our clothes and houses, to climate change; the discovery of life in distant planets; understanding brain activity; and, photosynthesis- for everything, the study of chemistry is not just relevant but vital.
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693075.136304
It is conventional wisdom that appreciating the role of luck in our moral lives should make us more sparing with blame. But views of moral responsibility that allow luck to augment a person’s blameworthiness are in tension with this wisdom. I resolve this tension: our common moral luck partially generates a duty to forgo retributively blaming the blameworthy person at least sometimes. So, although luck can amplify the blame that a person deserves, luck also partially generates a duty not to give the blameworthy person the retributive blame that he deserves at least sometimes.
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713047.13631
I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it).
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760133.136317
Wilfrid Sellars’ distinctive mid-20th century version of scientific realism has lately been gaining ground. There has been growing appreciation of how, by means of his critique of the Myth of the Given, Sellars highlights profound problems in the representationalism (or descriptivism – we treat these terms as equivalent) that mainstream realisms have taken for granted. Representationalism may be broadly understood as the idea that statements count as true exactly insofar as corresponding discrete portions of reality (‘truth-makers’) exist. The problem Sellars saw with representationalist realisms is that although they posit the existence of many entities, they leave unexplained: i) how our language manages to ‘denote’ these entities, when it would appear that linguistic and worldly items are quite unlike one another, ii) how the worldly items (both particulars and general properties) are individuated. With synoptic ambition rare in his era, Sellars set out to extract the tangled hedge of representationalism by its root, and develop a new, properly naturalistic, account of concept-formation in its place.
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868571.136325
The commentators in this Special Issue on ‘Epistemology, ontology, and scientific realism’ raise substantial questions about, and objections to, central aspects of my own thinking about semirealism (a proposal for how best to formulate scientific realism), as well as the larger philosophical context in which debates about scientific realism unfold. This larger context concerns the nature of realism more generally and the epistemic stances that underlie our considered opinions of what the sciences are telling us about the ontology of the world. In this paper, I consider my critics’ remarks, and endeavor to lay their criticisms to rest.
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927612.136331
The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato ’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. Beginning then and there opens a new vista on the history of political thought by restoring questions of public administration to the foreground of the field. For while the ancient Athenians enslaved their bureaucrats and wrote almost nothing about them, the analogous actors were free and highly valued in ancient Mesopotamian political culture. It was these scribal administrators who invented the world ’s first literature and written political thought. In their writings, they valorized their own administrative labor and the public goods that it alone could produce as objects of wonder and enchantment. From this vantage point, the article calls for a new research agenda that will expand political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by recovering public administration as a major thematic throughline in the five-thousand-year global history of human political ideas. Understanding public administration as an integral part of large-scale human societies from the very beginning may help to counter oligarchic claims in contemporary democracies that bureaucracy is a recent alien imposition.
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1163794.136342
Should metaphysics be informed by the results of contemporary science? Should it be naturalized? The debate surrounding these and similar questions is one of the most vigorous in contemporary theoretical philosophy. However, until now many positions have only been roughly sketched out, and there has been very limited dialogue between the proponents of naturalization and the defenders of traditional metaphysics. This is unfortunate, considering the fact that the status and legitimacy of an entire philosophical sub-discipline is at stake.
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1163821.136351
Ryckman’s work derives its generic title from its being part of the series Routledge Philosophers, which features monographs on philosophers from Plato to Heidegger. His opening statement that ‘Einstein was a theoretical physicist, not a philosopher in any customary sense’ (p. 1) seems an unnecessarily apologetic start since, among the Routledge philosophers, we also nd Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin, neither of whom would count as ‘philosophers in any customary sense’. But their work, like Einstein’s, has profoundly transformed our understanding of the world and, like Einstein, they have articulated explicit re ections that might well be classi ed as philosophical.
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1163848.136359
Debates on the ontology of space used to gesture at some root in history—of philosophical groundings of dynamics and gravitation theory—a history as old as the physics it engaged with. In our century, however, this tribute to the philosophical past has become an absent-minded nod, a ritual invocation of credos whose real origins are now occulted by mythopoiesis. A regrettable outcome, in many ways, but not entirely unexpected. History of philosophy of science has matured greatly, and the threshold of admission to its peerage has gone up dramatically—it is now too high for most full-time workers in ‘general’ philosophy of science to pass. Conversely, the latter eld has taken a broadly naturalistic bent, and turned away from (philosophical) history as a source of insight. Instead, it often nds analytic metaphysics a more congenial interlocutor. Hard-headed spectators might nd it a bit self-serving; historians are a demanding bunch, whereas latter-day metaphysicians are kind to anyone who does not mind relying on personal intuitions.
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1163875.136368
This collection of nine free-standing essays o ers a fresh perspective on science and language and a fascinating critique of much of contemporary philosophy. The essays can be grouped as follows: Chapter 1 serves as an introduction and a brief for pragmatism; Chapters 2 and 5 concern science; Chapters 3 and 4 deal with historical gures (Leibniz and Duhem); Chapters 6 and 7 critique contemporary analytic metaphysics; and Chapters 8 and 9 discuss language and mathematics. The style is opinionated, contrarian, humorous, and expansive. The essays focus on case studies that develop in detail some of the themes of Wilson’s earlier Wandering Signi cance ([2006]). Though they avoid general dogma, they re ect a uni ed critical perspective organized around puzzles that emerge when one considers the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the practical successes that attend conceptual development in applied mathematics. Those already familiar with Wilson’s work will appreciate the novel developments in this long-awaited publication; those new to his work, despite its sometimes technical challenges and hard-to-tame aspects, will nd ample reward in the surprising new light it sheds on contemporary philosophical issues in language and science.