Results for 'Aron Wolfe Siegman'

195 found
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  1. Imprecise Bayesianism and Global Belief Inertia.Aron Vallinder - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (4):1205-1230.
    Traditional Bayesianism requires that an agent’s degrees of belief be represented by a real-valued, probabilistic credence function. However, in many cases it seems that our evidence is not rich enough to warrant such precision. In light of this, some have proposed that we instead represent an agent’s degrees of belief as a set of credence functions. This way, we can respect the evidence by requiring that the set, often called the agent’s credal state, includes all credence functions that are in (...)
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  2. Bayesian Variations: Essays on the Structure, Object, and Dynamics of Credence.Aron Vallinder - 2018 - Dissertation, London School of Economics
    According to the traditional Bayesian view of credence, its structure is that of precise probability, its objects are descriptive propositions about the empirical world, and its dynamics are given by conditionalization. Each of the three essays that make up this thesis deals with a different variation on this traditional picture. The first variation replaces precise probability with sets of probabilities. The resulting imprecise Bayesianism is sometimes motivated on the grounds that our beliefs should not be more precise than the evidence (...)
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  3. Longtermism and Cultural Evolution.Aron Vallinder - 2025 - In Jacob Barrett, Hilary Greaves & David Thorstad, Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future. Oxford University Press.
    In this chapter, I argue that the field of cultural evolution can usefully inform attempts to understand and influence the long-term future. First, I provide an overview of cultural evolution, covering what it means for culture to evolve, the mechanisms by which it happens, the crucial importance of cumulative cultural evolution for hunan history, and how cultural evolution (and in particular intergroup competition) has driven the rise of large-scale cooperation. Second, I draw out some possible lessons from cultural evolution for (...)
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  4. Towards a New Theory of Modal Fictionalism.Áron Dombrovszki - 2017 - Ostium 13 (4).
    In our everyday discourse, most of us use modal statements to express possibility, necessity, or contingency. Logicians, linguists, and philosophers of language tend to use the possible world discourse to analyse the semantics of this kind of sentences. There is a disadvantage of this method: in the usual Quinean meta-ontology it commits the users to the existence of possible worlds. Even though there are many theories on metaphysics of these possible worlds, I will focus on the fictionalist approach, which aims (...)
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  5. Edge Modes and Dressing Fields for the Newton–Cartan Quantum Hall Effect.William J. Wolf, James Read & Nicholas J. Teh - 2022 - Foundations of Physics 53 (1):1-24.
    It is now well-known that Newton–Cartan theory is the correct geometrical setting for modelling the quantum Hall effect. In addition, in recent years edge modes for the Newton–Cartan quantum Hall effect have been derived. However, the existence of these edge modes has, as of yet, been derived using only orthodox methodologies involving the breaking of gauge-invariance; it would be preferable to derive the existence of such edge modes in a gauge-invariant manner. In this article, we employ recent work by Donnelly (...)
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  6. "Do I Have to Be Tested?": Understanding Reluctance to Be Screened for COVID-19.Aron Egelko, Leen Arnaout, Joshua Garoon, Carl Streed & Zackary Berger - 2020 - American Journal of Public Health 110 (12).
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  7. “Was Canguilhem a biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the project of ‘biophilosophy’".Charles Wolfe - 2015 - In Darian Meacham, Medicine and Society, New Continental Perspectives (Dordrecht: Springer, Philosophy and Medicine Series, 2015). Springer. pp. 197-212.
    Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934; along with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem was the main (...)
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  8. On the role of Newtonian analogies in eighteenth-century life science:Vitalism and provisionally inexplicable explicative devices.Charles T. Wolfe - 2014 - In Zvi Biener Eric Schliesser, Newton and Empiricism. New York: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 223-261.
    Newton’s impact on Enlightenment natural philosophy has been studied at great length, in its experimental, methodological and ideological ramifications. One aspect that has received fairly little attention is the role Newtonian “analogies” played in the formulation of new conceptual schemes in physiology, medicine, and life science as a whole. So-called ‘medical Newtonians’ like Pitcairne and Keill have been studied; but they were engaged in a more literal project of directly transposing, or seeking to transpose, Newtonian laws into quantitative models of (...)
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  9. Good-for-nothings.Susan Wolf - 2010 - Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 85 (2):47-64.
    Many academic works as well as many works of art are such that if they had never been produced, no one would be worse off. Yet it is hard to resist the judgment that some such works are good nonetheless. We are rightly grateful that these works were created; we rightly admire them, appreciate them, and take pains to preserve them. And the authors and artists who produced them have reason to be proud. This should lead us to question the (...)
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  10. Karl Homann aus Perspektive kohärentistischer Wirtschaftsethik.Wolf Rogowski & Tanja Rechnitzer - 2023 - Zfwu Zeitschrift Für Wirtschafts- Und Unternehmensethik 24 (1):21-52.
    Abstract (German version follows): -/- This paper develops a new proposal for a coherentist business ethic in which ethically justified and empirically supported proposed solutions to economic problems are developed through a coherentist process of adjustments between the three levels of (1) conception of problem and its solution, (2) positive economic theory, and (3) ethical theories. Using an example, it illustrates how in this framework, Homann's business ethics gains in validity and relevance but loses its claim to universality. // -/- (...)
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  11. Epigenesis as Spinozism in Diderot’s biological project (draft).Charles T. Wolfe - 2014 - In Ohad Nachtomy & Justin E. H. Smith, The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy. New York, NY: Oup Usa. pp. 181-201.
    Denis Diderot’s natural philosophy is deeply and centrally ‘biologistic’: as it emerges between the 1740s and 1780s, thus right before the appearance of the term ‘biology’ as a way of designating a unified science of life (McLaughlin), his project is motivated by the desire both to understand the laws governing organic beings and to emphasize, more ‘philosophically’, the uniqueness of organic beings within the physical world as a whole. This is apparent both in the metaphysics of vital matter he puts (...)
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  12. The organism as ontological go-between. Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual history.Charles T. Wolfe - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 1:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shps.
    The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles – sometimes overt, sometimes masked – throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the ‘theorization’ of Life, (...)
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  13. (1 other version)From Locke to Materialism: Empiricism, the Brain and the Stirrings of Ontology.Charles Wolfe - 2018 - In A. L. Rey S. Bodenmann, 18th-Century Empiricism and the Sciences.
    My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which interestingly is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but is also a medical phrase, used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall (...)
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  14. Do organisms have an ontological status?Charles T. Wolfe - 2010 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2-3):195-232.
    The category of ‘organism’ has an ambiguous status: is it scientific or is it philosophical? Or, if one looks at it from within the relatively recent field or sub-field of philosophy of biology, is it a central, or at least legitimate category therein, or should it be dispensed with? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific “bolstering” for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the “mechanistic” or “reductionist” trend, which has been perceived (...)
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  15. A happiness fit for organic bodies: La Mettrie's medical Epicureanism.Charles T. Wolfe - 2009 - In Neven Leddy & Avi Lifschitz, Epicurus in the Enlightenment. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. pp. 69--83.
    A chapter on the specifically 'medical' Epicureanism of La Mettrie, connecting his materialist approach to mind-body issues and his hedonistic ethics.
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  16. Esoteric philosophy: Leo Strauss and sociolinguistics.Aron B. Bekesi - 2019 - Science and Philosophy 7 (2):27-48.
    Leo Strauss’ controversial theory of esoteric philosophy, as presented in Persecution and the Art of Writing, sparked a fierce debate. Opponents and proponents of the theory utilised a wide range of perspectives to support their arguments. By investigating esoteric philosophy from a sociolinguistic perspective, this paper introduces a novel perspective to the Strauss dispute. In PAW Strauss is mistaken regarding esotericism and its role in philosophy. On one hand it is reasonable to endorse Strauss’ persuasive account on the origins of (...)
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  17. “The Materialist Denial of Monsters”.Charles T. Wolfe - 2005 - In Monsters and Philosophy. College Publications. pp. 187--204.
    Locke and Leibniz deny that there are any such beings as ‘monsters’ (anomalies, natural curiosities, wonders, and marvels), for two very different reasons. For Locke, monsters are not ‘natural kinds’: the word ‘monster’ does not individuate any specific class of beings ‘out there’ in the natural world. Monsters depend on our subjective viewpoint. For Leibniz, there are no monsters because we are all parts of the Great Chain of Being. Everything that happens, happens for a reason, including a monstrous birth. (...)
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  18. The Evidentialist's Wager.William MacAskill, Aron Vallinder, Caspar Oesterheld, Carl Shulman & Johannes Treutlein - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy 118 (6):320-342.
    Suppose that an altruistic agent who is uncertain between evidential and causal decision theory finds herself in a situation where these theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act in accordance with EDT. First, we claim that the appropriate response to normative uncertainty is to hedge one's bets. That is, if the stakes are much higher on one theory than another, and the credences you assign to each of (...)
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  19. Kant's Formula of Universal Law as a Test of Causality.W. Clark Wolf - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (3):459-90.
    Kant’s formula of universal law (FUL) is standardly understood as a test of the moral permissibility of an agent’s maxim: maxims which pass the test are morally neutral, and so permissible, while those which do not are morally impermissible. In contrast, I argue that the FUL tests whether a maxim is the cause or determining ground of an action at all. According to Kant’s general account of causality, nothing can be a cause of some effect unless there is a law-like (...)
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  20. The Renewal of Perception in Religious Faith and Biblical Narrative.Wolfe Judith - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13 (4):111-128.
    Religious faith may manifest itself, among other things, as a mode of seeing the ordinary world, which invests that world imaginatively (or inspiredly) with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance. While such seeing may well be truthful, it is also unavoidably constructive, involving the imagination in its philosophical sense of the capacity to organize underdetermined or ambiguous sense date into a whole or gestalt. One of the characteristic ways in which biblical narratives inspire and teach is by (...)
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  21. Sensibility as vital force or as property of matter in mid-eighteenth-century debates.Charles T. Wolfe - 2013 - In Henry Martyn Lloyd, The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment. Springer Cham. pp. 147-170.
    Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount case of a higher-level, intentional property, not a basic property. Diderot famously made the bold and attributive move of postulating that matter itself senses, or that sensibility (perhaps better translated ‘sensitivity’ here) is a general or universal property of matter, even if he at times took a step back from this claim and called it a “supposition.” Crucially, sensibility is (...)
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  22. Pornography and Speech Act Theory – An In-Depth Survey.Áron Dombrovszki - 2021 - Elpis 14 (1):9-26.
    Considering the short history of the feminist philosophy of language, Rae Langton’s article “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts” was highly influential as one of the first positive research programs in the movement. In that paper, Langton – using John L. Austin’s speech act theory – tries to interpret Catharine MacKinnon’s thesis: pornography is a speech that subordinates and silences women. Despite the importance of the subject, those unfamiliar with certain historical and contextual features of the topic would hardly understand it. (...)
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  23. Forms of materialist embodiment.Charles T. Wolfe - 2012 - In Matthew Landers & Brian Muñoz, Anatomy and the Organization of Knowledge, 1500-1850. Pickering & Chatto.
    The materialist approach to the body is often, if not always understood in ‘mechanistic’ terms, as the view in which the properties unique to organic, living embodied agents are reduced to or described in terms of properties that characterize matter as a whole, which allow of mechanistic explanation. Indeed, from Hobbes and Descartes in the 17th century to the popularity of automata such as Vaucanson’s in the 18th century, this vision of things would seem to be correct. In this paper (...)
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  24. Why was there no controversy over Life in the Scientific Revolution?Charles T. Wolfe - 2011 - In Victor Boantza Marcelo Dascal, Controversies in the Scientific Revolution. John Benjamins.
    Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus, and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz in the early 1700s, the question of ‘Life’, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanism to medical Newtonianism, from Stahlian animism to the discourse on the ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medicine, models (...)
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  25. Hagia Sophia.Wolf Leslau, C. F. Beckingham & G. W. B. Huntingford - manuscript
    Three separate churches erected in Constantinople were all dedicated to the wisdom of Christ and erected on the same site one after the other. These churches were built between 360 and 537 AD by three different emperors: Constantius II, Theodosius the Younger, and Justinian I. The first two churches were consumed in flames after relatively short lives, but the final and greatest church still stands today, despite a history of extensive damage. This final edifice is the main focus of this (...)
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  26. The Unfounded Bias Against Autonomous Weapons Systems.Áron Dombrovszki - 2021 - Információs Társadalom 21 (2):13–28.
    Autonomous Weapons Systems (AWS) have not gained a good reputation in the past. This attitude is odd if we look at the discussion of other-usually highly anticipated-AI-technologies, like autonomous vehicles (AVs); whereby even though these machines evoke very similar ethical issues, philosophers' attitudes towards them are constructive. In this article, I try to prove that there is an unjust bias against AWS because almost every argument against them is effective against AVs too. I start with the definition of "AWS." Then, (...)
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  27. Cultured brains and the production of subjectivity: The politics of affect(s) as an unfinished project.Charles T. Wolfe - 2014 - In W. Neidich, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism II. ArchiveBooks. pp. 245-267.
    A reflection on overcoming Natur vs Geisteswissenschaften oppositions in thinking about the 'cultured brain' and plasticity.
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  28. Monsters and Philosophy.Charles T. Wolfe (ed.) - 2005 - College Publications.
    Table of contents for MONSTERS AND PHILOSOPHY, edited by Charles T. Wolfe (London 2005) -/- List of Contributors iii Acknowledgments vii List of Abbreviations ix -/- Introduction xi Charles T. Wolfe The Riddle of the Sphinx: Aristotle, Penelope, and 1 Empedocles Johannes Fritsche Science as a Cure for Fear: The Status of Monsters in 21 Lucretius Morgan Meis Nature and its Monsters During the Renaissance: 37 Montaigne and Vanini Tristan Dagron Conjoined Twins and the Limits of our Reason (...)
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  29. Automata, man-machines and embodiment: deflating or inflating Life?Charles T. Wolfe - forthcoming - In A. Radman & H. Sohn, Critical and Clinical Cartographies: Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press.
    Early modern automata, understood as efforts to ‘model’ life, to grasp its singular properties and/or to unveil and demystify its seeming inaccessibility and mystery, are not just fascinating liminal, boundary, hybrid, crossover or go-between objects, while they are all of those of course. They also pose a direct challenge to some of our common conceptions about mechanism and embodiment. They challenge the simplicity of the distinction between a purported ‘mechanistic’ worldpicture, its ontology and its goals, and on the other hand (...)
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  30. “Determinism/Spinozism in the Radical Enlightenment: the cases of Anthony Collins and Denis Diderot”.Charles T. Wolfe - 2007 - International Review of Eighteenth-Century Studies 1 (1):37-51.
    In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, (...)
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  31. The self-fashioning of French Newtonianism: J. B. Shank: The Newton Wars and the beginning of the French Enlightenment. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008, xv+571pp, $55.00 HB.Charles T. Wolfe & David Gilad - 2011 - Metascience 20 (3):573-576.
    The self-fashioning of French Newtonianism Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9511-3 Authors Charles T. Wolfe, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia David Gilad, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.
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  32. (1 other version)Introduction: Vitalism without Metaphysics? Medical Vitalism in the Enlightenment.Charles T. Wolfe - 2008 - Science in Context 21 (4):461-463.
    my introduction to special issue of Science in Context on 18c vitalism.
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  33. Explanatory Depth in Primordial Cosmology: A Comparative Study of Inflationary and Bouncing Paradigms.William J. Wolf & Karim Pierre Yves Thébault - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    We develop and apply a multi-dimensional account of explanatory depth towards a comparative analysis of inflationary and bouncing paradigms in primordial cosmology. Our analysis builds on earlier work due to Azhar and Loeb (2021) that establishes initial conditions fine-tuning as a dimension of explanatory depth relevant to debates in contemporary cosmology. We propose dynamical fine-tuning and autonomy as two further dimensions of depth in the context of problems with instability and trans-Planckian modes that afflict bouncing and inflationary approaches respectively. In (...)
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  34. The Return of Vitalism: Canguilhem and French Biophilosophy in the 1960s.Charles T. Wolfe - manuscript
    The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared “On n’interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires”: laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of ‘Life’. Nowadays, as David Hull puts it, “both scientists and philosophers take ontological reduction for granted… Organisms are ‘nothing but’ atoms, and that is that.” In the mid-twentieth century, from the immediate post-war period to the late 1960s, French philosophers of science such as Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon (...)
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  35. La biophilosophie de Georges Canguilhem.Charles T. Wolfe - 2017 - Scienza and Filosofia 17:33–54.
    ABSTRACT: GEORGES CANGUILHEM’S BIOPHILOSOPHY The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared «On n’interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires»: laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of “Life”. Certain influential French philosophers of science of the mid‐century such as Georges Canguilhem would disagree, or at least seek to resist some of Jacob’s diagnosis. Not by imposing a different kind of research program in laboratories, but by an unusual combination of historical and philosophical inquiry (...)
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  36. Respecting boundaries: theoretical equivalence and structure beyond dynamics.William J. Wolf & James Read - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (4):1-28.
    A standard line in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that physical theories are equivalent only when they agree on their empirical content, where this empirical content is often understood as being encoded in the equations of motion of those theories. In this article, we question whether it is indeed the case that the empirical content of a theory is exhausted by its equations of motion, showing that (for example) considerations of boundary conditions play a key role in the empirical (...)
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  37. Hegel's Metametaphysical Antirealism.W. Clark Wolf - forthcoming - International Journal of Philosophical Studies:1-22.
    This essay defends a reading of Hegel as a metametaphysical antirealist. Metametaphysical antirealism is a denial that metaphysics has as its subject matter answers to theoretical questions about the mind-independent world. Hence, on this view, metaphysical questions are not, in principle, knowledge transcendent. I hold that Hegel presents a version of metametaphysical antirealism in the Science of Logic because he pursues his project by suspending reference to all supposed objects of metaphysical theory as practiced before him. Hegel introduces reference in (...)
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  38. “The ‘physiology of the understanding’ and the ‘mechanics of the soul’: reflections on some phantom philosophical projects”.Charles T. Wolfe - 2016 - Quaestio 16:3-25.
    In reflecting on the relation between early empiricist conceptions of the mind and more experimentally motivated materialist philosophies of mind in the mid-eighteenth century, I suggest that we take seriously the existence of what I shall call ‘phantom philosophical projects’. A canonical empiricist like Locke goes out of his way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (...)
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  39. (1 other version)Vital anti-mathematicism and the ontology of the emerging life sciences: from Mandeville to Diderot.Charles T. Wolfe - 2017 - Synthese:1-22.
    Intellectual history still quite commonly distinguishes between the episode we know as the Scientific Revolution, and its successor era, the Enlightenment, in terms of the calculatory and quantifying zeal of the former—the age of mechanics—and the rather scientifically lackadaisical mood of the latter, more concerned with freedom, public space and aesthetics. It is possible to challenge this distinction in a variety of ways, but the approach I examine here, in which the focus on an emerging scientific field or cluster of (...)
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  40. From Spinoza to the socialist cortex: The social brain.Charles T. Wolfe - 2010 - In Deborah Hauptmann & Warren Neidich, Cognitive Architecture: From Bio-politics to Noo-politics ; Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information. 010 Publishers.
    The concept of 'social brain‘ is a hybrid, located somewhere in between politically motivated philosophical speculation about the mind and its place in the social world, and recently emerged inquiries into cognition, selfhood, development, etc., returning to some of the founding insights of social psychology but embedding them in a neuroscientific framework. In this paper I try to reconstruct a philosophical tradition for the social brain, a ‗Spinozist‘ tradition which locates the brain within the broader network of relations, including social (...)
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  41. Chance between holism and reductionism: tensions in the conceptualisation of Life.Charles T. Wolfe - 2012 - Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.
    In debates between holism and reductionism in biology, from the early 20th century to more recent re-enactments involving genetic reductionism, developmental systems theory, or systems biology, the role of chance – the presence of theories invoking chance as a strong explanatory principle – is hardly ever acknowledged. Conversely, Darwinian models of chance and selection (Dennett 1995, Kupiec 1996, Kupiec 2009) sit awkwardly with reductionist and holistic concepts, which they alternately challenge or approve of. I suggest that the juxtaposition of chance (...)
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  42. (1 other version)Vital materialism and the problem of ethics in the Radical Enlightenment.Charles T. Wolfe - 2013 - Philosophica 88 (1):31-70.
    From Hegel to Engels, Sartre and Ruyer (Ruyer, 1933), to name only a few, materialism is viewed as a necropolis, or the metaphysics befitting such an abode; many speak of matter’s crudeness, bruteness, coldness or stupidity. Science or scientism, on this view, reduces the living world to ‘dead matter’, ‘brutish’, ‘mechanical, lifeless matter’, thereby also stripping it of its freedom (Crocker, 1959). Materialism is often wrongly presented as ‘mechanistic materialism’ – with ‘Death of Nature’ echoes of de-humanization and hostility to (...)
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  43. Teleomechanism redux? The conceptual hybridity of living machines in early modern natural philosophy.Charles T. Wolfe - manuscript
    We have been accustomed at least since Kant and mainstream history of philosophy to distinguish between the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘teleological’; between a fully mechanistic, quantitative science of Nature exemplified by Newton and a teleological, qualitative approach to living beings ultimately expressed in the concept of ‘organism’ – a purposive entity, or at least an entity possessed of functions. The beauty of this distinction is that it seems to make intuitive sense and to map onto historical and conceptual constellations in (...)
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  44. Embodied Empiricism.Charles T. Wolfe - 2010 - In Charles T. Wolfe & Ofer Gal, The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science. Springer. pp. 1--6.
    This is the introduction to a collection of essays on 'embodied empiricism' in early modern philosophy and the life sciences - papers on Harvey, Glisson, Locke, Hume, Bonnet, Lamarck, on anatomy and physiology, on medicine and natural history, etc.
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  45. Rethinking empiricism and materialism: the revisionist view.Charles T. Wolfe - 2010 - Annales Philosophici 1:101-113.
    There is an enduring story about empiricism, which runs as follows: from Locke onwards to Carnap, empiricism is the doctrine in which raw sense-data are received through the passive mechanism of perception; experience is the effect produced by external reality on the mind or ‘receptors’. Empiricism on this view is the ‘handmaiden’ of experimental natural science, seeking to redefine philosophy and its methods in conformity with the results of modern science. Secondly, there is a story about materialism, popularized initially by (...)
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  46. Holism, organicism and the risk of biochauvinism.Charles T. Wolfe - 2014 - Verifiche: Rivista Trimestrale di Scienze Umane 43 (1-3):39-57.
    In this essay I seek to critically evaluate some forms of holism and organicism in biological thought, as a more deflationary echo to Gilbert and Sarkar's reflection on the need for an 'umbrella' concept to convey the new vitality of holistic concepts in biology (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000). Given that some recent discussions in theoretical biology call for an organism concept (from Moreno and Mossio’s work on organization to Kirschner et al.’s research paper in Cell, 2000, building on chemistry to (...)
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  47. Locke’s compatibilism: Suspension of desire or suspension of determinism?Charles T. Wolfe - 2010 - In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Harry Silverstein, Action, Ethics, and Responsibility. Bradford.
    In Book II, chapter xxi of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, on ‘Power’, Locke presents a radical critique of free will. This is the longest chapter in the Essay, and it is a difficult one, not least since Locke revised it four times without always taking care to ensure that every part cohered with the rest. My interest is to work out a coherent statement of what would today be termed ‘compatibilism’ from this text – namely, a doctrine which seeks (...)
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  48. The Normative and the Natural.Michael Padraic Wolf & Jeremy Randel Koons - 2016 - New York: Palgrave.
    Drawing on a rich pragmatist tradition, this book offers an account of the different kinds of ‘oughts’, or varieties of normativity, that we are subject to contends that there is no conflict between normativity and the world as science describes it. The authors argue that normative claims aim to evaluate, to urge us to do or not do something, and to tell us how a state of affairs ought to be. These claims articulate forms of action-guidance that are different in (...)
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  49. Was Canguilhem a Biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the Project of Biophilosophy.Charles Wolfe - 2015 - In Darian Meacham, Medicine and Society, New Continental Perspectives (Dordrecht: Springer, Philosophy and Medicine Series, 2015). Springer.
    Georges Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934; along with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem was the (...)
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  50. Rethinking Hegel's Conceptual Realism.W. Clark Wolf - 2018 - Review of Metaphysics 72 (2):331-70.
    In this paper, I contest increasingly common "realist" interpretations of Hegel's theory of "the concept" (der Begriff), offering instead a "isomorphic" conception of the relation of concepts and the world. The isomorphism recommended, however, is metaphysically deflationary, for I show how Hegel's conception of conceptual form creates a conceptually internal standard for the adequacy of concepts. No "sideways-on" theory of the concept-world relationship is envisioned. This standard of conceptual adequacy is also "graduated" in that it allows for a lack of (...)
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