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31097.629975
Preliminary Note: As usual, the end of the year is hectic, and I’m spending quite some time preparing special content for this newsletter that should be ready for Christmas Eve. Posting should be light until then, and today’s post is more a digression from my usual topics than anything else. …
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184229.630088
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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420547.630125
For a few years now there have been strange rumblings emanating from Exeter. Many of them have been coming from the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, Egenis, and the process philosophy research-group set up by John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson, with Stephan Guttinger and Anne Sophie Meincke. Nicholson and Dupré are the editors of this collection, and its publication marks the conclusion of their ve-year ‘PROBIO’ project, collecting together the contributions from their rst major workshop, ‘Process Philosophy of Biology’, alongside others. And while they may object to the suggested metaphysical implication, I’m happy to say this is a substantial contribution to discussions of process in analytic philosophy of biology.
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420633.630143
The historical sciences appear to present a challenge for mainstream views about the epistemology of science, which have largely been developed with the physical sciences in mind. While debates over realism about microphysical entities still continue, what are we to make of the epistemic situation of historical scientists? The objects of their investigation, namely, historical entities and processes, are, like microphysical entities, not directly observable, but unlike microphysical entities, they are unmanipulable. As Derek Turner ([2007]) has argued, this appears to put historical scientists in a worse situation, epistemically, than microphysicists. But most philosophers (I presume) would not want to be anti-realists about the entities and processes of the past. What, then, is the proper attitude we should have towards the historical sciences? And might thinking about this question provide us with insights that we could direct back towards more traditional debates about the epistemology of science?
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448279.630159
In 1979 Bob Dylan became a born again Christian, and worse, released three albums of songs about God. About this perceived betrayal, I was too young to have an opinion; it was part of a lore I learned much later. …
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478477.630171
Is stand-up comedy akin to psychotherapy? Yes, argues psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir in Animal Joy:
As part of my research … I had frequented comedy clubs and noticed how each performance, had it been delivered in a different tone of voice and context, could have been the text of a therapy session. …
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505353.630182
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published a book arguing that the Earth revolves around the Sun: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. This is sometimes painted as a sudden triumph of rationality over the foolish yet long-standing belief that the Sun and all the planets revolve around the Earth. …
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536071.630195
In recent years, some productive connections have grown up between Pittsburgh School philosophy, which derives from the rich philosophical investigations of Wilfrid Sellars and his students, and certain realist-inclined corners of the pragmatist philosophical tradition, particularly those focussed on Charles Peirce. These two research communities arguably are in many ways fellow travellers who increasingly find themselves sharing common themes. These themes include critiques of metaphysical realism and representationalist semantics in favour of an appreciation of the sociality of meaning and truth, a determined antireductionism about normativity in the face of ongoing positivist currents in mainstream philosophy, and thoughtful and original discussions of how the natural sciences might be used to ground naturalistic philosophy methodologically rather than ontologically. It is also interesting to observe how both philosophical perspectives were founded on strong critiques of modern philosophy’s Cartesian legacy, including its methodological individualism and its supposed ‘foundation’ of radical doubt.
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560678.63021
Plutarch of Chaeronea in Boeotia (ca. 45–120 CE) was a
Platonist philosopher, best known to the general public as author of
his “Parallel Lives” of paired Greek and Roman statesmen
and military leaders. He was a voluminous writer, author also of a
collection of “Moralia” or “Ethical Essays,”
mostly in dialogue format, many of them devoted to philosophical
topics, but not at all limited to ethics. Plutarch’s significance as a philosopher, on which this article
concentrates, lies in his attempt to do justice to Plato’s work
as a whole, and to reconstruct a coherent and credible philosophical
system out of it, as Antiochus (1st c. BCE) tried to do and as
Plotinus will also do later (204–270 CE).
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618357.630222
Nonhuman animals have long been seen as a crucial source of evidence
regarding the nature and origins of human social capacities, such as
communication, deception, culture, technology, politics, and morality. Humans distinctively excel at these forms of sociality, which led
theorists in many disciplines to hypothesize that humans possess
unique adaptations facilitating advanced social cognition. Many of
these social activities presume an ability to attribute mental states
such as perceptions, beliefs, and desires to other social agents,
which might suggest that humans uniquely evolved a “theory of
mind” that enables these attributions.
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633945.630233
Many moral theories hold individuals responsible for their marginal impact on massive patterns (for instance overall value or equality of opportunity) or for following whichever rules would realise that pattern on the whole. But each of these injunctions is problematic. Intuitively, the first gives individuals responsibility for too much, and the second gives them responsibility for too little. I offer the outlines of a new approach to ethics in collective action contexts. I defend a new collaborative principle that assigns recognisably worthwhile responsibilities to agencies wherever possible. This principle supports a fractal model of moral responsibility, one that favours restructuring divisions of labour in ways that enhance the prospects of recognition at every resolution of social organisation. This essay is programmatic: starting from a conjecture about the moral significance of recognition, it sketches a new way of approaching a range of collective action problems that combines the importance of the perspectives of both moral and political philosophy.
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682780.630251
Living systems are complex systems made of components that tend to degrade, but nonetheless they maintain themselves far from equilibrium. This requires living systems to extract energy and materials from the environment and use them to build and repair their parts by regulating their activities based on their internal and external conditions in ways that allow them to keep living. The philosophical and theoretical approach discussed in this Element aims to explain these features of biological systems by appealing to their organization. It addresses classical and more recent issues in philosophy of biology, from origins and definitions of life to biological teleology and functions, from an original perspective mainly focused on the living system, its physiology and behavior, rather than evolution. It discusses and revises the conceptual foundations of this approach and presents an updated version of it. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
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709318.630267
How do social factors affect group learning in diverse populations? Evidence from cognitive science gives us some insight into this question, but is generally limited to showing how social factors play out in small groups over short time periods. To study larger groups and longer time periods, we argue that we can combine evidence about social factors from cognitive science with agent-based models of group learning. In this vein, we demonstrate the usefulness of idealized models of inquiry, in which the assumption of Bayesian agents is used to isolate and explore the impact of social factors. We show that whether a certain social factor is beneficial to the community’s epistemic aims depends on its particular manifestation by focusing on the impacts of homophily – the tendency of individuals to associate with similar others – on group inquiry.
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709344.630282
Concerns over medical paternalism are especially salient when there exists a conflict of values between patient and clinician. This is particularly relevant for psychiatry, the field of medicine for which the phenomenon of conflicting values is most present and for which the specter of medical paternalism looms large. Few cases are as glaring as that of anorexia nervosa (AN), a disorder that is considered to be egosyntonic (meaning its symptoms are reflectively endorsed by the patient) and maintained by the presence of pathological values. One might think, given this, that an approach to medicine that foregrounds the role of values in clinical encounters would be particularly well suited to address the problem of medical paternalism in treating AN. As it happens, this is precisely the goal of values-based medicine, an approach to medicine that prioritizes the integration of patients’ unique values into the aims of treatment and that has been touted as being particularly applicable to psychiatric conditions such as AN.
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734767.630298
My colleague and co-author Alexandre Chirat published with Basile Clerc an op-ed in Le Monde a few days ago defending the use of non-linear pricing as an efficient and fair way to reallocate resources in the fight against climate change (in French). …
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767053.630311
Imagine huge bats roaring in the clear sky, all swooping and screeching and diving around you. As you’re imagining this scene, you have now an experience of something, you are in an intentional state. Your intentional state is one of imagining, rather than one of perceiving or remembering. If you want to gure out what kind of intentional state you’re having, you don’t have to make any inference or to focus on the content of your experience. Your experience of huge bats roaring around you seems to incorporate a pre-re ective sense of the kind of intentional state you’re having.
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767161.630325
Reading the opening pages of this book, an enormous sympathy welled up in me towards its author. The introduction depicts Wagner frustrated by the limited repertoire of questions covered today within the philosophy of mathematics, where by his calculation forty percent of the literature is dedicated to the sole issue of the existence of mathematical objects, and so seeking to explore ‘What else philosophy of mathematics can be’. He recounts giving a job talk and being told, ‘this is not philosophy of mathematics’. I was immediately reminded of a time around fteen years ago, as I was nishing o my own book (Cor eld [2003]), which itself arose from similar frustrations about the state of the eld. I gave a talk on the subject of the role of analogy in mathematics, later to become Chapter 4 of my book, to what must have been a politer audience. Rather than bluntly being told it was not philosophy, instead it was gently enquired why such an investigation as mine should count as philosophy.
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767214.63034
Scienti c collaboration is taking place with increasing frequency, at least since the Manhattan project. Globalization and rapid advancement in communication technologies have made easier national and international inquiry across di erent scienti c disciplines. Boyer-Kassem, Mayo-Wilson, and Weisberg have collected eleven chapters that address conceptual and normative issues about collaborative research and ensuing collective knowledge in the sciences. These issues are clustered around four core topics, each forming one part of the book: (i) information sharing among scientists, (ii) the reasons and strategies for (fruitful) collaboration, (iii) challenges, in terms of accountability, to the ordinary notions of authorship and refereeing, and (iv) the relationship between individual and group opinions in social decision-making problems. Most of the authors employ formal tools (mathematical models, computer simulations) to discuss and analyse di erent aspects of the dynamics of scienti c communities and collaborative research. Here, I focus on the notable contributions of each chapter.
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767357.630356
In the 20th century, the distinction between instinct and learning motivated international debates that reshaped the disciplinary landscape of animal behavior studies. When the dust settled, a new consensus emerged: the development of behavioral traits involves complex interactions between organism, genetic inheritance, and experience with the environment. This insight has spurred some philosophers and scientists to eschew instinct versus learning dichotomies—and instinct concepts in particular—on epistemic grounds. In this paper, I reassess influential 20th century arguments against instinct concepts and instinct vs. learning dichotomies to show that these arguments have limited scope. Then, I use historical case studies to demonstrate the combinatorial flexibility of instinct and learning concepts. Although instinct and learning are often framed as mutually exclusive opposites, scientists continue to combine them in causal physiological accounts of behavior. I conclude by suggesting that instinct concepts help scientists achieve their epistemic aims because of the way they facilitate abductive inferences.
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802749.63037
PEA Soup Blog is pleased to be hosting this Ethics discussion with Lowry Pressly (University of Stanford) and Wendy Salkin (University of Stanford). This discussion focuses on Pressly’s paper “The Right to Be Forgotten and the Value of an Open Future”, with a critical précis from Wendy Salkin. …
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1011970.630384
Someone who worked here once said...that I was not interested in a story unless it contained a first-semester philosophy question. There is definitely some truth to that. (Errol Morris, in an interview.) …
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1035083.630396
The puzzle of 101 starship captains
101 starship captains, bored with life in the Federation, decide to arrange their starships in a line, equally spaced, and let them fall straight into an enormous spherically symmetrical black hole—one right after the other. …
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1055734.630408
This article outlines an epistemological perspective to understand the organism as a temporally changing whole. To analyze the mental faculties involved, the organism’s development and persisting existence is differentiated into four interdependent aspects: descent, future existence, persistent species, and environmentally adapted physical appearance. It is outlined that these aspects are recognized by comparative memory, concept-guided anticipation, conceptual thinking, and sensory perception, respectively. Furthermore, it is pointed out that these aspects correspond to the famous four Aristotelian “causes” or principles of explanation. The descent of an organism corresponds to Aristotle’s efficient principle (“where does it come from?”), its future existence to the final principle (“what is if for?”), its physical structure to the material principle (“out of what is it?”) and its persistent species to the formal principle (“what is it?”).
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1055824.630421
Other Minds emphasizes Godfrey-Smith’s rst-hand experience observing and interacting with cephalopods, especially octopuses and cuttle sh. For the general reader this rst-hand experience establishes his expertise, and also allows him a certain kind of intimacy with his subject that invites the reader on his journey. That journey also provides the book with a narrative thread, from his initial encounter with octopuses, into his growing fascination with them, and then on to his study and theorizing about the inner lives of cephalopods. For philosophers and cognitive scientists, this same narrative intimacy will immediately raise red ags. Has Godfrey-Smith turned into one of those animal minds kooks (or pet owners) whose evident a ection for their subjects robs them of critical distance? ‘The plural of anecdote is not data’, some will say.
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1055877.630436
Philosophers once thought that natural kinds were a manageable bunch, and that they could be grouped into a few taxonomic systems associated with the traditional natural sciences: physics, chemistry, and biology. When pressed for examples of natural kinds, they would wheel out the reliable ones: chemical elements, chemical compounds, and biological species. An outside observer would have been forgiven for accusing us of having an inordinate fondness for gold, water, and tigers. But as we have emerged from our studies and armchairs, we have come to discover a much wider array of candidates for kinds, pertaining to an ever-increasing number of scienti c disciplines and sub-disciplines, including those that study the social or human realms. Nowadays, the sciences seem to issue in a continuous supply of taxonomic categories and the learned journals introduce new ones on a quarterly basis. What is an empirically minded philosopher to do?
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1055903.630452
In this book, Marcel Boumans takes up an under-researched topic in philosophy of science, namely, the reliability of measurement in eld science and the rules that need to be met to ensure such reliability outside the laboratory. Generally, Boumans understands measurement as the attempt to acquire quantitative knowledge about a phenomenon of interest—an object or event called the ‘measurand’—by assigning numbers to its properties. To ensure that such numbers give us reliable information, speci c rules are needed; for instance, to map a phenomenon by way of a model or formula requires procedures that ensure the reliability of this mapping. It is important to note that measurement encompasses both assigning numbers to a property of a phenomenon and the rules according to which we do this (p. 2). Boumans’s goal is to develop ‘an account of measurement for eld science’ (p. 24), which he understands very broadly as ‘the varied range of research practices outside the laboratory’ (p. 2). Thereby, he takes seriously the idea that measurement in eld sciences such as economics and meteorology is di erent from measurement in laboratory sciences such as physics and that the former must proceed according to rules and standards distinct from those of the latter.
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1055953.630467
Scienti c pluralism is a timely and important topic in contemporary philosophy of science. Pluralism is generally understood as a reaction against scienti c monism, namely, against the view that science aims to establish a single, complete, and comprehensive account of the natural world.
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1055979.630482
Experimental biology has witnessed an industrial revolution. Increases in computational power and investment from private industry, as well as the development of sequencing techniques, has enabled the emergence of high-throughput biology on a factory scale. ‘Big data’ has arrived. And undoubtedly it has changed the face of biology. But what’s interesting about big data philosophically, and how is a philosophical perspective illuminative of it? Here’s a tempting thought: big data matters because it pursues data for its own sake. Investigation doesn’t aim to formulate and test hypotheses. Instead, studies are data-driven—Baconian—we generate masses of data, then hunt for meaningful patterns. Big-data science is data-driven science: theory takes a back seat, and the experimental generation of data takes on a ‘life of its own’.
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1056005.630496
This volume emerges from years of collaboration between the world-leading philosopher of archaeology, Alison Wylie, and eminent archaeologist Robert Chapman. It analyses the sophisticated ways in which evidence is produced, disseminated, discussed, and interpreted as a de ning aspect of archaeological reasoning and practice, and in this sense constitutes a foundational volume for anyone interested in the philosophy of the historical and social sciences. However, the main argument of the book and its signi cance extend far beyond archaeology and into the very foundations of the philosophy of science.
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1090046.630512
Intro Ethics
This fall, I’ve been teaching Intro Ethics for the first time in years. It’s a strange assignment, as though the students were previously feral and my task was to begin their moral education, age 18 to 22. …