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 61 Annie Bitbol-Hespériès Degeneration and Hybridism in the Early Modern Species 109 Debate: Towards the Philosophical Roots of the Creation-Evolution Controversy Justin E. H. Smith Leibniz on the Unicorn and Various other Curiosities 131 Roger Ariew The Creativity of God and the Order of Nature: 153 Anatomizing Monsters in the Early Eighteenth Century Anita Guerrini The Status of Anomalies in the Philosophy of Diderot 169 Annie Ibrahim The Materialist Denial of Monsters 187 Charles T. Wolfe Cerebral Assymetry, Monstrosities and Hegel. 205 On the Situation of the Life Sciences in 1800 Michael Hagner The Lady Knight of the Perilous Place 217 Elfriede Jelinek Monster: More than a Word. . . From Portent to Anomaly, 231 the Extraordinary Career of Monsters Beate Ochsner Index 281 . (shrink)

Corcoran’s 27 entries in the 1999 second edition of Robert Audi’s Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge UP]. -/- ancestral, axiomatic method, borderline case, categoricity, Church (Alonzo), conditional, convention T, converse (outer and inner), corresponding conditional, degenerate case, domain, De Morgan, ellipsis, laws of thought, limiting case, logical form, logical subject, material adequacy, mathematical analysis, omega, proof by recursion, recursive function theory, scheme, scope, Tarski (Alfred), tautology, universe of discourse. -/- The entire work is available online free at more (...) than one website. Paste the whole URL. http://archive.org/stream/RobertiAudi_The.Cambridge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy/Robert.Audi_The.Cambrid ge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy -/- The 2015 third edition will be available soon. Before you think of buying it read some reviews on Amazon and read reviews of its competition: For example, my review of the 2008 Oxford Companion to Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Logic,29:3,291-292. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01445340701300429 -/- Some of the entries have already been found to be flawed. For example, Tarski’s expression ‘materially adequate’ was misinterpreted in at least one article and it was misused in another where ‘materially correct’ should have been used. The discussion provides an opportunity to bring more flaws to light. -/- Acknowledgements: Each of these entries was presented at meetings of The Buffalo Logic Dictionary Project sponsored by The Buffalo Logic Colloquium. The members of the colloquium read drafts before the meetings and were generous with corrections, objections, and suggestions. Usually one 90-minute meeting was devoted to one entry although in some cases, for example, “axiomatic method”, took more than one meeting. Moreover, about half of the entries are rewrites of similarly named entries in the 1995 first edition. Besides the help received from people in Buffalo, help from elsewhere was received by email. We gratefully acknowledge the following: José Miguel Sagüillo, John Zeis, Stewart Shapiro, Davis Plache, Joseph Ernst, Richard Hull, Concha Martinez, Laura Arcila, James Gasser, Barry Smith, Randall Dipert, Stanley Ziewacz, Gerald Rising, Leonard Jacuzzo, George Boger, William Demopolous, David Hitchcock, John Dawson, Daniel Halpern, William Lawvere, John Kearns, Ky Herreid, Nicolas Goodman, William Parry, Charles Lambros, Harvey Friedman, George Weaver, Hughes Leblanc, James Munz, Herbert Bohnert, Robert Tragesser, David Levin, Sriram Nambiar, and others. -/- . (shrink)

To address the underrepresentation of women in philosophy effectively, we must understand the causes of the early loss of women. In this paper we challenge one of the few explanations that has focused on why women might leave philosophy at early stages. Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich offer some evidence that women have different intuitions than men about philosophical thought experiments. We present some concerns about their evidence and we discuss our own study, in which we attempted to replicate their (...) results for 23 different responses to 14 scenarios . We also conducted a literature search to see if other philosophers or psychologists have tested for gender differences in philosophical intuitions. Based on our findings, we argue that that it is unlikely that gender differences in intuitions play a significant role in driving women from philosophy. (shrink)

In his book, The Last Word, Thomas Nagel expresses the hope that there exists no God. Guy Kahane, in his paper ‘Should We Want God to Exist?’, attempts to defend Nagel from an argument that concludes such a hope may be impermissible. In this paper we present a new defense for the hope that God does not exist.

The paper identifies the phenomenal rise of increasingly invasive forms of elective cosmetic surgery targeted primarily at women and explores its significance in the context of contemporary biotechnology. A Foucauldian analysis of the significance of the normalization of technologized women's bodies is argued for. Three "Paradoxes of Choice" affecting women who "elect" cosmetic surgery are examined. Finally, two utopian feminist political responses are discussed: a Response of Refusal and a Response of Appropriation.

There are a bewildering variety of claims connecting Darwin to nineteenth-century philosophy of science—including to Herschel, Whewell, Lyell, German Romanticism, Comte, and others. I argue here that Herschel’s influence on Darwin is undeniable. The form of this influence, however, is often misunderstood. Darwin was not merely taking the concept of “analogy” from Herschel, nor was he combining such an analogy with a consilience as argued for by Whewell. On the contrary, Darwin’s Origin is written in precisely the manner that one (...) would expect were Darwin attempting to model his work on the precepts found in Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on Natural Science. While Hodge has worked out a careful interpretation of both Darwin and Herschel, drawing similar conclusions, his interpretation misreads Herschel’s use of the vera causa principle and the verification of hypotheses. The new reading that I present here resolves this trouble, combining Hodge’s careful treatment of the structure of the Origin with a more cautious understanding of Herschel’s philosophy of science. This interpretation lets us understand why Darwin laid out the Origin in the way that he did and also why Herschel so strongly disagreed, including in Herschel’s heretofore unanalyzed marginalia in his copy of Darwin’s book. (shrink)

Some have claimed that there are laws of appearance, i.e. in principle constraints on which types of sensory experiences are possible. Within a representationalist framework, these laws amount to restrictions on what a given experience can represent. I offer an in-depth defence of one such law and explain why prevalent externalist varieties of representationalism have trouble accommodating it. In light of this, I propose a variety of representationalism on which the spatial content of experience is determined by intrinsic features of (...) conscious subjects. I conclude by considering an externalist-friendly reworking of my proposal, but suggest that the success of such a reworking is dubious. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists have attempted to elucidate the nature of mental representation by appealing to notions like isomorphism or abstract structural resemblance. The ‘structural representations’ that these theorists champion are said to count as representations by virtue of functioning as internal models of distal systems. In his 2007 book, Representation Reconsidered, William Ramsey endorses the structural conception of mental representation, but uses it to develop a novel argument against representationalism, the widespread view that cognition essentially involves the manipulation of (...) mental representations. Ramsey argues that although theories within the ‘classical’ tradition of cognitive science once posited structural representations, these theories are being superseded by newer theories, within the tradition of connectionism and cognitive neuroscience, which rarely if ever appeal to structural representations. Instead, these theories seem to be explaining cognition by invoking so-called ‘receptor representations’, which, Ramsey claims, aren’t genuine representations at all—despite being called representations, these mechanisms function more as triggers or causal relays than as genuine stand-ins for distal systems. I argue that when the notions of structural and receptor representation are properly explicated, there turns out to be no distinction between them. There only appears to be a distinction between receptor and structural representations because the latter are tacitly conflated with the ‘mental models’ ostensibly involved in offline cognitive processes such as episodic memory and mental imagery. While structural representations might count as genuine representations, they aren’t distinctively mental representations, for they can be found in all sorts of non-intentional systems such as plants. Thus to explain the kinds of offline cognitive capacities that have motivated talk of mental models, we must develop richer conceptions of mental representation than those provided by the notions of structural and receptor representation. (shrink)

Technological determinism, as a position on the nature and effects of technology/technologies can be divided into optimistic and critical forms. The optimistic variety, of which contemporary cyber-utopianism is an instance, holds that the development of technology shapes or at least facilitates ameliorative alterations in society. The critical variety, on the other hand, tends to problematise or condemn the positive narrative of technological impact on human existence. Whilst the optimistic form still retains some academic credibility, especially concerning digital technologies, the critical (...) variety tends to be viewed as reductionist, essentialist and pessimistic. Furthermore, the fact that many of its leading proponents base their critiques on the analysis of industrial technology, reinforces the impression that critical technological determinism is outdated. I argue that focussing on the specific forms of technology analysed by classic technological determinists is to miss the key point of their arguments. Critical determinism warns that with the increasing integration of technology into everyday life, we run the risk of idealising technological organisation and making sociotechnical relations a model for all social relations. Drawing upon Rendueles’s (2017) analysis of the sociophobic tendencies of the online public sphere, I argue for the continuing relevance of so-called ‘Classic’ technological determinism. The danger posed by the ubiquity of the internet on this account is not that it possesses some innate quality that imposes a particular social pattern on humanity, but that the way in which we interact in cyberspace becomes the norm for social relations outside the cybersphere. (shrink)

In transplant medicine, the use of normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) in donation after circulatory determination of death raises ethical difficulties. NRP is objectionable because it restores the donor's circulation, thus invalidating a death declaration based on the permanent cessation of circulation. NRP's defenders respond with arguments that are tortuous and factually inaccurate and depend on introducing extraneous concepts into the law. However, results comparable to NRP's—more and higher‐quality organs and more efficient allocation—can be achieved by removing organs from deceased donors (...) and using normothermic machine perfusion (NMP) to support the organs outside the body, without jeopardizing confidence in transplantation's legal and ethical foundations. Given the controversy that NRP generates and the convoluted justifications made for it, we recommend a prudential approach we call “ethical parsimony,” which holds that, in the choice between competing means of achieving a result, the ethically simpler one is to be preferred. This approach makes clear that policy‐makers should favor NMP over NRP. (shrink)

Suppose that, while you are dreamlessly asleep, the sizes of and distances between all objects in the world are uniformly multiplied. Would you be able to detect this global inflation? Intuitively, no. But would your experience of size remain accurate? Intuitively, yes. On these grounds, some have concluded that our experiences do not represent size and instead represent modes of presentation of size. We are, in this sense, ‘cut off’ from the sizes of things in the external world. Here, I (...) argue for a more modest conclusion: undetectable inflation reveals that our experiences represent only relative size. Call this view austere phenomenal relativism––or austere relativism, for short. I develop a framework to contrast austere relativism with its competitors, give an extended argument for the view, and then defuse a potential dilemma concerning the units in which our experiences represent size. (shrink)

Philosophers of science often make reference — whether tacitly or explicitly — to the notion of a scientific community. Sometimes, such references are useful to make our object of analysis tractable in the philosophy of science. For others, tracking or understanding particular features of the development of science proves to be tied to notions of a scientific community either as a target of theoretical or social intervention. We argue that the structure of contemporary scientific research poses two unappreciated, or at (...) least underappreciated, challenges to this concept of the “scientific community” in the philosophy of science. In particular, we will present two case studies from robotics research, broadly construed, which show that (1) the boundedness of the scientific community is threatened when private citizens can develop scientific and technological advances at minimal expense (democratization), and (2) the discreteness of scientific research programs is threatened by the complexly interrelated environment of contemporary scientific work (interconnectivity). Taken together, the extent of democratization and interconnectivity present a significant challenge for any practically oriented philosophy of science, one which we hope will be taken on directly by philosophers in the future. (shrink)

Deidealization as a topic in its own right has attracted remarkably little philosophical interest despite the extensive literature on idealization. One reason for this is the often implicit assumption that idealization and deidealization are, potentially at least, reversible processes. We question this assumption by analyzing the challenges of deidealization within a menu of four broad categories: deidealizing as recomposing, deidealizing as reformulating, deidealizing as concretizing, and deidealizing as situating. On closer inspection, models turn out much more inflexible than the reversal (...) thesis would have us believe, and deidealization emerges as a creative part of modeling. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s politics is aesthetic rather than practical, motivated by enjoyment rather than well-being, and so it should be rejected. I begin with an account of aestheticism as the doctrine according to which seemingly non-aesthetic things are actually aesthetic, parts of a whole dimension of reality that we might simply call “the aesthetic.” We access it by taking a disinterested attitude, one that affirms things for their own sakes, and there are four ways of doing this: disinterested appreciating (e.g., of (...) beautiful art), fun playing, fantasizing, and putting on shows or spectacles. While Arendt’s politics takes a classical republican form that is like a competitive game, an analysis of her conceptions of acting and judging reveals that the modes of disinterested showing and appreciating are also present. Her philosophy has another motivation, however, alongside enjoying the aesthetic: the need to escape the reality of evil. (shrink)

This paper uses a paradox inherent in any solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness to argue for God’s existence. The paper assumes we are “thought machines”, reading the state of a relevant physical medium and then outputting corresponding thoughts. However, the existence of such a thought machine is impossible, since it needs an infinite number of point-representing sensors to map the physical world to conscious thought. This paper shows that these sensors cannot exist, and thus thought cannot come solely (...) from our physical world. The only possible explanation is something outside, argued to be God. (shrink)

The concept of “progress” in evolutionary theory and its relationship to a putative notion of “Progress” in a global, normatively loaded sense of “change for the better” have been the subject of debate since Darwin admonished himself in a marginal note to avoid using the terms ‘higher’ and ‘lower.’ While an increase in some kind of complexity in the natural world might seem self-evident, efforts to explicate this trend meet notorious philosophical difficulties. Numerous historians pin the Modern Synthesis as a (...) pivotal moment in this history; Michael Ruse even provocatively hypothesizes that Ernst Mayr and other “architects” of the Synthesis worked actively to eliminate Progress from evolutionary biology’s scientific purview. I evaluate these claims here with a textual analysis of the journals Evolution and Proceedings of the Royal Society B (a corpus of 27,762 documents), using a dynamic topic modeling approach to track the fate of the term ‘progress’ across the Modern Synthesis. The claim that this term declines in importance for evolutionary theorizing over this period can, indeed, be supported; more tentative evidence is also provided that the discussion of ‘progress’ is largely absent from the British context, emphasizing the role of American paleontology in the rise and fall of ‘progress’ in 20th-century evolutionary biology. (shrink)

The brain in its plasticity and inherent 'sociality' can be proclaimed and projected as a revolutionary organ. Far from the old reactions which opposed the authenticity of political theory and praxis to the dangerous naturalism of 'cognitive science' (with images of men in white coats, the RAND Corporation or military LSD experiments), recent decades have shown us some of the potentiality of the social brain (Vygotsky, and more recently Negri 1995 and Negri 2000, Virno 2001). Is the brain somehow inherently (...) a utopian topos? If in some earlier papers I sought to defend naturalism against these reactions, here I consider a new challenge: the recently emerged disciplines of neuronormativity, which seek in their own way to overcome the nature-normativity divide. This is the task of a materialist brain theory today. 1. The setup: horns of a dilemma There is a lingering zone of what one might think of as sore cognitive muscle tissue in the area of materialism. It is an area of both contested territory and in some cases, a kind of pathos of distance of the 'Ugh! Keep that thing away from me!' sort. I have in mind the combination of materialism as an emancipatory socio-political project (which need not be construed in strictly Marx-Engels terms, if we think of Lucretius et al.) and as a cold-hearted 'spontaneous philosophy of the men in white coats', e.g. nefarious neurophilosophers. Faced with this rather massive alternative, this choice between two projects, I have stubbornly been saying since some discussions with Negri in the late 90s. (shrink)

In this article, network science is discussed from a methodological perspective, and two central theses are defended. The first is that network science exploits the very properties that make a system complex. Rather than using idealization techniques to strip those properties away, as is standard practice in other areas of science, network science brings them to the fore, and uses them to furnish new forms of explanation. The second thesis is that network representations are particularly helpful in explaining the properties (...) of non-decomposable systems. Where part-whole decomposition is not possible, network science provides a much-needed alternative method of compressing information about the behavior of complex systems, and does so without succumbing to problems associated with combinatorial explosion. The article concludes with a comparison between the uses of network representation analyzed in the main discussion, and an entirely distinct use of network representation that has recently been discussed in connection with mechanistic modeling. (shrink)

A longstanding issue in attempts to understand the Everett (Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics is the origin of the Born rule: why is the probability given by the square of the amplitude? Following Vaidman, we note that observers are in a position of self-locating uncertainty during the period between the branches of the wave function splitting via decoherence and the observer registering the outcome of the measurement. In this period it is tempting to regard each branch as equiprobable, but we (...) argue that the temptation should be resisted. Applying lessons from this analysis, we demonstrate (using methods similar to those of Zurek's envariance-based derivation) that the Born rule is the uniquely rational way of apportioning credence in Everettian quantum mechanics. In doing so, we rely on a single key principle: changes purely to the environment do not affect the probabilities one ought to assign to measurement outcomes in a local subsystem. We arrive at a method for assigning probabilities in cases that involve both classical and quantum self-locating uncertainty. This method provides unique answers to quantum Sleeping Beauty problems, as well as a well-defined procedure for calculating probabilities in quantum cosmological multiverses with multiple similar observers. (shrink)

In this paper I shall explain how I came to realize that for as long as I believed that there exists an epistemic gap, or veil of perception, separating the world into that which is subjective and internal to the mind from that which is objective and external to the mind, I was unable to provide a compelling argument for the existence of this same Epistemic Gap ontology.

‘Biodiversity’ is widely recognized as an extremely ambiguous concept in conservation science and ecology. It is defined in a number of different and incompatible ways in the scientific literature, and is also “exported” beyond the scientific community, where it may take on a host of other meanings for governments, policy-makers, non-governmental organizations, and the general public at large. One might respond to this ambiguity by either pushing for its clarification, and by extension the adoption of a single, univocal biodiversity concept, (...) or by rejecting the term entirely, replacing it with a relevant, more precise concept in each context. In this paper, I argue for a third approach. Drawing on literature describing change in large organizations, I explore ways in which ambiguity might be seen as productive – as a manner, at the very least, in which we can enable action by a mixed coalition of actors with different and, at times, contradictory interests and value commitments. I explore how this literature – in particular, a taxonomy of rhetorical uses of ambiguous concepts – could enable us to put the ambiguity of biodiversity to work for us, offering us a way to intervene in conflicts about the concept by helping to develop both clearer descriptive analyses and normative “rules for engagement” in debates surrounding biodiversity. (shrink)

In much of the literature graffiti is connected to notions of defacing, devaluing, vandalising, participating in an illegal activity or exhibiting ‘anti-social behaviour.’ The aim of this paper is to show the change of perceptions toward graffiti as less of an act of vandalism or a criminal activity and more of a solution to many social and political concerns. The paper offers a way to reframe graffiti as the solution rather then the problem based on a study of graffiti crews (...) in Sofia, Bulgaria. The paper presents three cases of these crews, each attempting to address different social and political issues within the capital of Bulgaria. This paper is hoping to highlight how graffiti can be used as a tool to help reduce crime, showcase a critical subcultural communication that is inclusive of the community at large, and depict the aesthetic value that can be added to a place in order to re-design the space and people’s attitude and behaviour. More importantly, the paper serves to show how graffiti can enable introspection and bring out not only the ‘soul’ from the wall, but also our own. (shrink)

The mind-body problem is intuitively familiar, as mental and physical entities mysteriously interact. However, difficulties arise when intertwining concepts of the self with mental and physical traits. To avoid confusion, I propose instead focusing on three categories, with the mental matching the mind and physical the body with respect to raw inputs and outputs. The third category, the self, will experience and measure the others. With this new classification, we can see difficulties clearly, specifically five questions covering interaction and correlation. (...) We break down the problem using both existing theories and a hypercube topology representing the solution. We show any satisfactory theory must explain both spatial interaction and content correlation, and that we cannot escape our topology, whatever our preferred fundamental substance and mind-body movement permutation. We conclude by looking outside the hypercube, noting how solutions such as existential monism, priority monism, and will-based cosmic-idealism avoid the dangers involved. (shrink)

Most see having their individuality stifled as equivalent to the terrible forced conformity found within speculative fiction like George Orwell's 1984. However, the oppression of others by those in power has often been justified through ideologies of individualism. If we look to animistic traditions, could we bridge the gap between these extremes? What effect would such a reevaluation of identity have on the modern understanding of selfhood? The term ' in-dividual' suggests an irreducible unit of identity carried underneath all of (...) our titles and experiences—the real self. By linking Marilyn Strathern's elaboration of dividualism and Nurit Bird-David's relational epistemology , a clear contrast forms between the animistic sense of self and that of the West. This system of selfhood more readily encourages a life lived in Henri Bergson's sense of duration and sets up a state of dialogical discourse , as seen in Mikhail Bakhtin's work. These concepts challenge the traditional praise for individuality and exposes how individualism can be used as a tool of marginalization as seen in Michel Foucault's critique of authorship. I argue that pursuing a sense of self rooted in these concepts instead of individualism mitigates this marginalization via a more socially aware cultural environment that the traditional Western sense of self fails to create. (shrink)

The Racial Contract pone la teoría clásica del contrato social occidental, sin ambages, al servicio de un uso radical extraordinario. Con una mirada arrolladora sobre el expansionismo y el racismo europeos de los últimos quinientos años, Charles W. Mills demuestra cómo este peculiar y no reconocido "contrato" ha dado forma a un sistema de dominación europea global: cómo da lugar a la existencia de "blancos" y "no blancos", personas de pleno derecho y subpersonas, cómo influye en la teoría moral (...) y la psicología moral de los blancos; y cómo este sistema se impone a los no blancos mediante el condicionamiento ideológico y la violencia. The Racial Contract sostiene que la sociedad en la que vivimos es un estado continuado de supremacía blanca. Levantando un espejo ante la filosofía dominante, este provocativo libro explica el esquema evolutivo del contrato racial desde la época de la conquista del Nuevo Mundo y el posterior colonialismo, pasando por el contrato escrito de la esclavitud, hasta el sistema de segregación "separados pero iguales" en los Estados Unidos del siglo XX. Según Mills, el contrato ha proporcionado la arquitectura teórica que justifica toda una historia de atrocidades europeas contra los no blancos, desde las afirmaciones de David Hume e Immanuel Kant de que los negros tenían un poder cognitivo inferior, pasando por el Holocausto, hasta el tipo de imperialismo en Asia que se demostró con la guerra de Vietnam. Mills sugiere que la guetización del trabajo filosófico sobre la raza no es accidental. Este trabajo desafía la suposición de que la teoría dominante carece en sí misma de raza. Al igual que la teoría feminista ha revelado el sesgo invisible de la filosofía política hacia los hombres blancos, la explicación de Mills del contrato racial expone sus fundamentos raciales. (shrink)

This paper attempts to develop an ethico-aesthetic framework for enriching one's life and ethical outlook. Drawing primarily from Nietzsche, Foucault, and Heidegger, an argument is made that Heidegger's understanding of this issue was mistaken. The ontological crisis of modernity is not the overt influence of mathematics as a worldview over poetics and more traditionally aesthetic approaches. It is the rampant mis-and over-application of abstraction within one's view of the world while denying the material realities of life as we live it. (...) This runaway abstractive worldview leads to the misapplication of mathematics and other sciences which in turn facilitate the dehumanization of life and those within it. When we try to solve the real problems of our material human lives through overly abstractive means, then we arrive at inauthentic arguments that fuel popular disdain for philosophy as irrelevant and nothing more than the purview of the elite. The goal is a recalibration of the argument toward addressing the denial of materiality within Modernism. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories should be neither believed nor investigated - that is the conventional wisdom. I argue that it is sometimes permissible both to investigate and to believe. Hence this is a dispute in the ethics of belief. I defend epistemic ‘oughts’ that apply in the first instance to belief-forming strategies that are partly under our control. I argue that the policy of systematically doubting or disbelieving conspiracy theories would be both a political disaster and the epistemic equivalent of self-mutilation, since (...) it leads to the conclusion that history is bunk and the nightly news unbelievable. In fact (of course) the policy is not employed systematically but is only wheeled on to do down theories that the speaker happens to dislike. I develop a deductive argument from hard-to-deny premises that if you are not a ‘conspiracy theorist’ in my anodyne sense of the word then you are an ‘idiot’ in the Greek sense of the word, that is, someone so politically purblind as to have no opinions about either history or public affairs. The conventional wisdom can only be saved (if at all) if ‘conspiracy theory’ is given a slanted definition. I discuss some slanted definitions apparently presupposed by proponents of the conventional wisdom (including, amongst others, Tony Blair) and conclude that even with these definitions the conventional wisdom comes out as deeply unwise. I finish up with a little harmless fun at the expense of David Aaronvitch whose abilities as a rhetorician and a popular historian are not perhaps matched by a corresponding capacity for logical thought. (shrink)

In The Decline of the West Spengler puts forward a type of philosophical anthropology, an account of the structures of human experiential consciousness and a method of “physiognomic” analysis, which I argue has dimensions that can be understood as akin to existential phenomenology. Humanity, for Spengler, is witness to the creative flux of “Becoming” and constructs a world of phenomena bounded by death, underpinned by the two prime feelings of dread and longing and structured by the two forms of Destiny (...) (Time) and Direction (Space). Human existence, Spengler argues, is future-directed and open in the sense that there is a certain degree of freedom in the ways in which humanity can actualize its existential possibilities. In the course of elaborating the existential implications of this future-orientation, Spengler introduces the concept of care (Sorge), the fundamental experiential structure. (shrink)

In this paper I raise concerns that I have with what I perceive to be as a complete lack of warrant for Hume’s assertion that there are only two types of reasoning – demonstrative and probable. (Hume’s fork) What I leave for others to decide is whether this lack of warrant therefore successfully undercuts Hume’s argument for the Problem of Induction.

The ninth and tenth chapters of the Origin mark a profound, if perhaps difficult to detect, shift in the book’s argumentative structure. In the previous few chapters and in the ninth, Darwin has been exploring a variety of objections to natural selection, some more obvious (where are all the fossils of transitional forms?) and some showing careful attention to challenging consequences of evolution (could selection really produce instincts?). Starting in the tenth, however, Darwin turns to showing us what kinds of (...) new and unexpected results evolutionary theory might be able to offer us, again in domains both predictable (extinction) and unexpected (biogeography, embryology). It is notable that it is the fossil record that serves as this pivot point, being both a source of potentially powerful objections to evolutionary theory and home to some of its most compelling new explanations. In this chapter, I present both sets of arguments and consider what role Darwin gave to fossil evidence, in the process attempting to discover why it might have played this unique role in two different parts of Darwin’s “long argument” for evolution by natural selection. Geology’s special place, I argue, derives at least in part from its particular importance in Darwin’s social and intellectual context. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that a reimagining of the notion of silence as more than a sonic phenomenon is needed to address the dominant structural apparati of Western discourse. Silence as an existential medium is where the Foucauldian apparatuses that power the status-quo of the world operate. They forge connections between things like ideology and social organization where one falls into the wake of the other and is shaped in a way that is nearly invisible to the passing glance. (...) It is the indeterminacy within silence as explored by John Cage that that allows this to happen, but it also offers the potential to have an active role in the shaping of these apparatuses toward a more beneficial and culturally aware form of society. This new approach is crucial in helping one learn to embrace the indeterminacy of life and the hazy relational structures that drive our existence. (shrink)

In the study of education, as in many more travelled regions of Classical scholarship, democratic Athens is something of a special case. The cautions formulation is appropriate: in the case of education, surprisingly few studies have sought to establish quite how special Athens was, and those which have, have often raised more questions than they answered. The subject itself is partly to blame. The history of education invites comparison with the present day, while those planning the future of education rarely (...) fail to invoke the past. The place of Classical Athens in European culture has ensured a place for Athenian education in almost every debate from the relation between education and democracy to the value of educationversustraining, and as the original champion of causes as varied as mass education, co-education, and the national curriculum. Desirable as it is to be in demand, such treatment is not calculated to produce the most circumspect account of the subject. The study of education is further hampered by the fact that our knowledge of Athenian culture is so vibrant and diverse in some ways and so partial in others. Plato and Aristophanes present a vivid fictional picture of education in the late fifth century. If we add a few passages from Xenophon and Aristotle, a large number of vases depicting men, women, and children reading, playing the lyre, and doing athletics, and one or two archaeological finds of an educational appearance, it is tempting to take the result as a clear portrait of a society at school. (shrink)

The debate between instrumentalist and technological determinist positions on the nature of technology characterised the early history of the philosophy of technology. In recent years however technological determinism has ceased to be viewed as a credible philosophical position within the field. This paper uses Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to reconsider the technological determinist outlook in phenomenological terms as an experiential response to the encounter with the phenomenon of modern technology. Recasting the instrumentalist-determinist debate in a phenomenological manner enables one to reconcile the (...) apparent dualism of the instrumentalist and determinist positions through Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh. This ontology has recently been used to ground accounts of virtual embodiment. We argue that in addition to explaining away the classical form of technological determinism, it can also phenomenologically ground a novel understanding of technological determinism. Namely, a technological determinism of virtual embodiment. (shrink)

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” (...) (Essay, I.i.2). An equally prominent thinker, Immanuel Kant, seems to make an elementary mistake, given such a clear statement, when he claims that Locke’s project was a “physiology of the understanding,” in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). A first question, then, would be: what is this physiology of the understanding, if it was not Locke’s project? Did anyone undertake such a project? If not, what would it have resembled? My second and related case comes out of a remark the Hieronymus Gaub makes in a letter to Charles Bonnet of 1761: criticizing materialist accounts of mind and mind-body relations such as La Mettrie’s, Gaub suggests that what is needed is a thorough study of the “mechanics of the soul,” and that Bonnet could write such a study. What is the mechanics of the soul, especially given that it is presented as a non-materialist project? To what extent does it resemble the purported “physiology of the understanding”? And more generally, what do both of these phantom projects have to do with a process we might describe as a ‘naturalization of the soul’? (shrink)

This paper seeks to resolve a fairly simple question in ethics: Why do seemingly reasonable people disagree about ethical problems? My paper seeks both to analyze this question and attempts to find a solution. My premise is that disagreement happens because of differences in hierarchical value ranking, or quite simply because some problems are more important to some people than others. Theories of choice, however, influenced by concepts such as "freedom of choice," conceal the hierarchical nature of our choices, leading (...) to confusion over the nature and degree of our ethical disagreements. I propose then that ethical disagreements can be reduced when we understand hierarchy as an essential element in moral choice theory. (shrink)

Philosophy of science is expanding via the introduction of new digital data and tools for their analysis. The data comprise digitized published books and journal articles, as well as heretofore unpublished material such as images, archival text, notebooks, meeting notes, and programs. The growth in available data is matched by the extensive development of automated analysis tools. The variety of data sources and tools can be overwhelming. In this article, we survey the state of digital work in the philosophy of (...) science, showing what kinds of questions can be answered and how one can go about answering them. (shrink)

The propensity interpretation of fitness (PIF) is commonly taken to be subject to a set of simple counterexamples. We argue that three of the most important of these are not counterexamples to the PIF itself, but only to the traditional mathematical model of this propensity: fitness as expected number of offspring. They fail to demonstrate that a new mathematical model of the PIF could not succeed where this older model fails. We then propose a new formalization of the PIF that (...) avoids these (and other) counterexamples. By producing a counterexample-free model of the PIF, we call into question one of the primary motivations for adopting the statisticalist interpretation of fitness. In addition, this new model has the benefit of being more closely allied with contemporary mathematical biology than the traditional model of the PIF. (shrink)

This paper argues that Oswald Spengler has an innovative philosophical position on the nature and interrelation of mathematics and science. It further argues that his position in many ways parallels that of Martin Heidegger. Both held that an appreciation of the mathematical nature of contemporary science was critical to a proper appreciation of science, technology and modernity. Both also held that the fundamental feature of modern science is its mathematical nature, and that the mathematical operates as a projection that establishes (...) in advance the manner in which an object will present itself. They also assert that modern science, mathematics and metaphysics all have their roots in the ‘mathematical’, whose essence is itself nothing numerical. (shrink)

Spengler’s work is typically represented as speculative philosophy of history. However, I argue that there is good reason to consider much of his thought as preoccupied with existential and phenomenological questions about the nature and ends of human existence, rather than with history per se. In this paper I consider Spengler’s work in comparison with Heidegger’s history of Being and analysis of technological modernity. I argue that Spengler’s considerable proximity to much of Heidegger’s thought compels us to reconsider the nature (...) and scope of Spengler’s philosophical project. (shrink)

Conpiracy theories are widely deemed to be superstitious. Yet history appears to be littered with conspiracies successful and otherwise. (For this reason, "cock-up" theories cannot in general replace conspiracy theories, since in many cases the cock-ups are simply failed conspiracies.) Why then is it silly to suppose that historical events are sometimes due to conspiracy? The only argument available to this author is drawn from the work of the late Sir Karl Popper, who criticizes what he calls "the conspiracy theory (...) of society" in The Open Society and elsewhere. His critique of the conspiracy theory is indeed sound, but it is a theory no sane person maintains. Moreover, its falsehood is compatible with the prevalence of conspiracies. Nor do his arguments create any presumption against conspiracy theories of this or that. Thus the belief that it is superstitious to posit conspiracies is itself a superstition. The article concludes with some speculations as to why this superstition is so widely believed. (shrink)

My aim here is to make sense of Plato's account of desire in the middle dialogues. To do that I need to unify or reconcile what are at first sight two quite different accounts: the doctrine of eros in the Symposium and the tripartite theory of motivation in the Republic. It may be that the two theories are after all irreconcilable, that Plato simply changed his mind on the nature of human desire after writing the Symposium and before composing the (...) Republic. But that conclusion can be justified only if attempts to reconcile the two theories end in failure. The attempt must be made first. (shrink)

Nihilism, Nietzsche and the Doppelganger Problem Was Nietzsche a nihilist? Yes, because, like J. L. Mackie, he was an error-theorist about morality, including the elitist morality to which he himself subscribed. But he was variously a diagnostician, an opponent and a survivor of certain other kinds of nihilism. Schacht argues that Nietzsche cannot have been an error theorist, since meta-ethical nihilism is inconsistent with the moral commitment that Nietzsche displayed. Schacht’s exegetical argument parallels the substantive argument (advocated in recent years (...) by Wright and Blackburn) that Mackie’s error theory can’t be true because if it were, we would have to give up morality or give up moralizing. I answer this argument with a little bit of help from Nietzsche. I then pose a problem, the Doppelganger Problem, for the meta-ethical nihilism that I attribute to Mackie and Nietzsche. (If A is a moral proposition then not-A is a moral proposition: hence not all moral propositions can be false.) I solve the problem by reformulating the error theory and also deal with a variant of the problem, the Reinforced Doppelganger, glancing at a famous paper of Ronald Dworkin’s. Thus, whatever its demerits, the error theory, is not self-refuting, nor does it require us to give up morality. (shrink)

The idea of ‘reversion’ or ‘atavism’ has a peculiar history. For many authors in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries – including Darwin, Galton, Pearson, Weismann, and Spencer, among others – reversion was one of the central phenomena which a theory of heredity ought to explain. By only a few decades later, however, Fisher and others could look back upon reversion as a historical curiosity, a non-problem, or even an impediment to clear theorizing. I explore various reasons that reversion might have (...) appeared to be a central problem for this first group of figures, focusing on their commitment to a variety of conceptual features of evolutionary theory; discuss why reversion might have then ceased to be an interesting phenomenon; and, finally, close with some more general thoughts about the death of scientific problems. (shrink)

Abstract Conspiracy theories should be neither believed nor investigated - that is the conventional wisdom. I argue that it is sometimes permissible both to investigate and to believe. Hence this is a dispute in the ethics of belief. I defend epistemic “oughts” that apply in the first instance to belief-forming strategies that are partly under our control. But the beliefforming strategy of not believing conspiracy theories would be a political disaster and the epistemic equivalent of selfmutilation. I discuss several variations (...) of this strategy, interpreting “conspiracy theory” in different ways but conclude that on all these readings, the conventional wisdom is deeply unwise. (shrink)

This paper describes one style of functional analysis commonly used in the neurosciences called task-bound functional analysis. The concept of function invoked by this style of analysis is distinctive in virtue of the dependence relations it bears to transient environmental properties. It is argued that task-bound functional analysis cannot explain the presence of structural properties in nervous systems. An alternative concept of neural function is introduced that draws on the theoretical neuroscience literature, and an argument is given to show that (...) this alternative concept of may help to overcome the explanatory limitations of task-bound functional analysis. (shrink)