This study aimed to understand the preserved elements of self-identity in persons with moderate to severe dementia attributable to Alzheimer’s disease. A semi-structured interview was developed to explore the narrative self among residents with dementia in a residential care facility and residents without dementia in an independent living setting. The interviews were transcribed verbatim from audio recordings and analyzed for common themes, while being sensitive to possible differences between the groups. The participants with dementia showed evidence of self-reference even though (...) losses in explicit memory were evident. The most noticeable difference between the two groups was time frame reference. Nonetheless, all participants showed understanding of their role in relationships and exhibited concrete preferences. Our findings suggest that memory loss and other cognitive deficits associated with moderate to severe dementia do not necessarily lead to a loss of “self.”. (shrink)

In a recent letter, Dillion et. al (2023) make various suggestions regarding the idea of artificially intelligent systems, such as large language models, replacing human subjects in empirical moral psychology. We argue that human subjects are in various ways indispensable.

How does microbiota research impact our understanding of biological individuality? We summarize the interdisciplinary summer school on "Microbiota, Symbiosis and Individuality: Conceptual and Philosophical Issues" (July 2019), which was supported by a European Research Council starting grant project "Immunity, DEvelopment, and the Microbiota" (IDEM). The summer school centered around interdisciplinary group work on four facets of microbiota research: holobionts, individuality, causation, and human health. The conceptual discussion of cutting-edge empirical research provided new insights into microbiota and highlights the value of (...) incorporating into meetings experts from other disciplines, such as philosophy and history of science. (shrink)

In her Remarks Upon Some Writers (1743), Catharine Trotter Cockburn takes a seemingly radical stance by asserting that it is possible for atheists to be virtuous. In this paper, I examine whether or not Cockburn’s views concerning atheism commit her to a naturalistic ethics and a so-called radical enlightenment position on the independence of morality and religion. First, I examine her response to William Warburton’s critique of Pierre Bayle’s arguments concerning the possibility of a society of virtuous atheists. I argue (...) that this response shows Cockburn vacillating between a moral naturalism, on the one hand, and a theistic morality, on the other. Second, I draw on Cockburn’s letters to her niece Ann Arbuthnot, and her opinions concerning mystical ideas about “the will of God” in north-east Scotland in the mid-eighteenth century. I maintain that these letters give us a fuller appreciation of Cockburn’s naturalistic position. My conclusion is that Cockburn’s ideas concerning atheism prompt us to consider the close interplay between secular and religious principles in so-called radical ideas of the period. (shrink)

We argue that, in order to explain the relative strengths of our reasons to contribute to different collective endeavours, approaches to the ethics of collective action must understand the strengths of our reasons to make a given contribution as proportional to its expected benefits, or its chances of bringing about benefits in proportion to their magnitudes. The view that most clearly meets this proportionality requirement is the expected consequences approach, which identifies our reasons to perform an act with its expected (...) benefits. We contend that views other than the expected consequences approach must similarly proportion the expected degrees of what they take to be reason-giving features of a contribution – such as its virtuousness, appropriate expression, support by considerations of fairness, or helping without making a difference – to the contribution’s expected benefits. The proportionality requirement explains why we should spend more time participating in strategic social, political, and labour movement activities, while avoiding unproductive conflicts and merely performative activities. We conclude that the proportionality requirement, and the ability of views other than the expected consequences approach to meet it, are important for thinking and communicating about the ethics of collective action in ways that are simultaneously most compelling and most strategic. (shrink)

Descriptive accounts of the nature of explanation in neuroscience and the global goals of such explanation have recently proliferated in the philosophy of neuroscience and with them new understandings of the experimental practices of neuroscientists have emerged. In this paper, I consider two models of such practices; one that takes them to be reductive; another that takes them to be integrative. I investigate those areas of the neuroscience of learning and memory from which the examples used to substantiate these models (...) are culled, and argue that the multiplicity of experimental protocols used in these research areas presents specific challenges for both models. In my view, these challenges have been overlooked largely because philosophers have hitherto failed to pay sufficient attention to fundamental features of experimental practice. I demonstrate that when we do pay attention to such features, evidence for reduction and integrative unity in neuroscience is simply not borne out. I end by suggesting some new directions for the philosophy of neuroscience that pertain to taking a closer look at the nature of neuroscientific experiments. (shrink)

Discussions concerning whether there is a natural right to health care may occur in various forms, resulting in policy recommendations for how to implement any such right in a given society. But health care policies may be judged by international standards including the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The rights enumerated in the UDHR are grounded in traditions of moral theory, a philosophical analysis of which is necessary in order to adjudicate the value of specific policies designed to enshrine (...) rights such as a right to health care. We begin with an overview of the drafting of the UDHR and highlight the primary influence of natural law theory in validating the rights contained therein. We then provide an explication of natural law theory by reference to the writings of Thomas Aquinas, as well as elucidate the complementary “capabilities approach” of Martha Nussbaum. We conclude that a right to health care ought to be guaranteed by the state. (shrink)

Against those who dismiss Kant's project in the "Religion" because it provides a Pelagian understanding of salvation, this paper offers an analysis of the deep structure of Kant's views on divine justice and grace showing them not to conflict with an authentically Christian understanding of these concepts. The first part of the paper argues that Kant's analysis of these concepts helps us to understand the necessary conditions of the Christian understanding of grace: unfolding them uncovers intrinsic relations holding between God's (...) justice and grace. Parts two and three provide an analysis of two concepts of grace used by Kant. Getting clear on their differences is the key to understanding why Kant's account is not Pelagian. (shrink)

Do neurobiologists aim to discover natural kinds? I address this question in this chapter via a critical analysis of classification practices operative across the 43-year history of research on long-term potentiation (LTP). I argue that this 43-year history supports the idea that the structure of scientific practice surrounding LTP research has remained an obstacle to the discovery of natural kinds.

What role does the concept of representation play in the contexts of experimentation and explanation in cognitive neurobiology? In this article, a distinction is drawn between minimal and substantive roles for representation. It is argued by appeal to a case study that representation currently plays a role in cognitive neurobiology somewhere in between minimal and substantive and that this is problematic given the ultimate explanatory goals of cognitive neurobiological research. It is suggested that what is needed is for representation to (...) instead play a more substantive role. (shrink)

The past decade has witnessed a growing awareness of conceptual and methodological hurdles within psychology and neuroscience that must be addressed for taxonomic and explanatory progress in understanding psychological functions to be possible. In this paper, I evaluate several recent knowledge-building initiatives aimed at overcoming these obstacles. I argue that while each initiative offers important insights about how to facilitate taxonomic and explanatory progress in psychology and neuroscience, only a “coordinated pluralism” that incorporates positive aspects of each initiative will have (...) the potential for success. (shrink)

Despite its centrality in the philosophy of cognitive science, there has been little prior philosophical work engaging with the notion of representation in contemporary NLP practice. This paper attempts to fill that lacuna: drawing on ideas from cognitive science, I introduce a framework for evaluating the representational claims made about components of neural NLP models, proposing three criteria with which to evaluate whether a component of a model represents a property and operationalising these criteria using probing classifiers, a popular analysis (...) technique in NLP (and deep learning more broadly). The project of operationalising a philosophically-informed notion of representation should be of interest to both philosophers of science and NLP practitioners. It affords philosophers a novel testing-ground for claims about the nature of representation, and helps NLPers organise the large literature on probing experiments, suggesting novel avenues for empirical research. (shrink)

What can contemporary machine learning (ML) models do? Given the proliferation of ML models in society, answering this question matters to a variety of stakeholders, both public and private. The evaluation of models' capabilities is rapidly emerging as a key subfield of modern ML, buoyed by regulatory attention and government grants. Despite this, the notion of an ML model possessing a capability has not been interrogated: what are we saying when we say that a model is able to do something? (...) And what sorts of evidence bear upon this question? -/- In this paper, we aim to answer these questions, using the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) as a running example. Drawing on the large philosophical literature on abilities, we develop an account of ML models' capabilities which can be usefully applied to the nascent science of model evaluation. Our core proposal is a conditional analysis of model abilities (CAMA): crudely, a machine learning model has a capability to X just when it would reliably succeed at doing X if it 'tried'. The main contribution of the paper is making this proposal precise in the context of ML, resulting in an operationalisation of CAMA applicable to LLMs. We then put CAMA to work, showing that it can help make sense of various features of ML model evaluation practice, as well as suggest procedures for performing fair inter-model comparisons. (shrink)

The Morris water maze has been put forward in the philosophy of neuroscience as an example of an experimental arrangement that may be used to delineate the cognitive faculty of spatial memory (e.g., Craver and Darden, Theory and method in the neurosciences, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2001; Craver, Explaining the brain: Mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). However, in the experimental and review literature on the water maze throughout the history of its use, (...) we encounter numerous responses to the question of “what” phenomenon it circumscribes ranging from cognitive functions (e.g., “spatial learning”, “spatial navigation”), to representational changes (e.g., “cognitive map formation”) to terms that appear to refer exclusively to observable changes in behavior (e.g., “water maze performance”). To date philosophical analyses of the water maze have not been directed at sorting out what phenomenon the device delineates nor the sources of the different answers to the question of what. I undertake both of these tasks in this paper. I begin with an analysis of Morris’s first published research study using the water maze and demonstrate that he emerged from it with an experimental learning paradigm that at best circumscribed a discrete set of observable changes in behavior. However, it delineated neither a discrete set of representational changes nor a discrete cognitive function. I cite this in combination with a reductionist-oriented research agenda in cellular and molecular neurobiology dating back to the 1980s as two sources of the lack of consistency across the history of the experimental and review literature as to what is under study in the water maze. (shrink)

The field of AI safety seeks to prevent or reduce the harms caused by AI systems. A simple and appealing account of what is distinctive of AI safety as a field holds that this feature is constitutive: a research project falls within the purview of AI safety just in case it aims to prevent or reduce the harms caused by AI systems. Call this appealingly simple account The Safety Conception of AI safety. Despite its simplicity and appeal, we argue that (...) The Safety Conception is in tension with at least two trends in the ways AI safety researchers and organizations think and talk about AI safety: first, a tendency to characterize the goal of AI safety research in terms of catastrophic risks from future systems; second, the increasingly popular idea that AI safety can be thought of as a branch of safety engineering. Adopting the methodology of conceptual engineering, we argue that these trends are unfortunate: when we consider what concept of AI safety it would be best to have, there are compelling reasons to think that The Safety Conception is the answer. Descriptively, The Safety Conception allows us to see how work on topics that have historically been treated as central to the field of AI safety is continuous with work on topics that have historically been treated as more marginal, like bias, misinformation, and privacy. Normatively, taking The Safety Conception seriously means approaching all efforts to prevent or mitigate harms from AI systems based on their merits rather than drawing arbitrary distinctions between them. (shrink)

Optogenetic techniques are described as “revolutionary” for the unprecedented causal control they allow neuroscientists to exert over neural activity in awake behaving animals. In this paper, I demonstrate by means of a case study that optogenetic techniques will only illuminate causal links between the brain and behavior to the extent that their error characteristics are known and, further, that determining these error characteristics requires comparison of optogenetic techniques with techniques having well known error characteristics and consideration of the broader neural (...) and behavioral context in which the targets of optogenetic interventions are situated. (shrink)

This paper explores Kant's concept of the highest good and the postulate of the existence of God arising from it. Kant has two concepts of the highest good standing in tension with one another, an immanent and a transcendent one. I provide a systematic exposition of the constituents of both variants and show how Kant’s arguments are prone to confusion through a conflation of both concepts. I argue that once these confusions are sorted out Kant’s claim regarding the need to (...) postulate God’s existence from a moral point of view makes much more sense. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against two prevailing views of Kant’s Religion. Against commentators such as Michalson and Quinn, who have argued that Kant’s project in Religion is riddled with inconsistencies and circularities, I show that a proper understanding of Kant’s views on grace reveals these do not exist. And contra commentators that attribute to Kant at best a minimalist conception of grace, I show that Kant’s view of it is remarkably robust. I argue that Kant works with three different (...) conceptions of grace. These are: a) grace and the God within, b) grace and the transformation of the fundamental orientation, and c) grace that can be laid hold of; the first and the last play a significant role in his philosophy of religion. (shrink)

In this article, I explain why stabilizing constructs is important to the success of the Research Domain Criteria Project and identify one measure for facilitating such stability.

Before her death in 1673, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, expressed a wish that her philosophical work would experience a ‘glorious resurrection’ in future ages. During her lifetime, and for almost three centuries afterwards, her writings were destined to ‘lye still in the soft and easie Bed of Oblivion’. But more recently, Cavendish has received a measure of the fame she so desired. She is celebrated by feminists, literary theorists, and historians. There are regular conferences organised by the International (...) Margaret Cavendish Society, and there have been several biographies, as well as essay collections, journal issues, scholarly editions, and anthologies devoted to her work. In terms of studies in the history and philosophy of science, however, Cavendish has yet to achieve her resurrection in full. While there have been journal articles and book chapters, and a 2001 edition of her Observations, there have been (until now) no book-length studies of her philosophy, and there is currently no modern edition of her other major work, the Philosophical Letters. This essay-length review of Lisa Sarasohn’s The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish highlights why Cavendish should still hold interest for philosophers today. (shrink)

This paper offers a critique of an account of explanatory integration that claims that explanations of cognitive capacities by functional analyses and mechanistic explanations can be seamlessly integrated. It is shown that achieving such explanatory integration requires that the terms designating cognitive capacities in the two forms of explanation are stable but that experimental practice in the mind-brain sciences currently is not directed at achieving such stability. A positive proposal for changing experimental practice so as to promote such stability is (...) put forward and its implications for explanatory integration are briefly considered. (shrink)

Do neurobiologists aim to discover natural kinds? I address this question in this chapter via a critical analysis of classification practices operative across the 43-year history of research on long-term potentiation. I suggest that this 43-year history supports the idea that the structure of scientific practice surrounding LTP research has remained an obstacle to the discovery of natural kinds as philosophers of science have traditionally conceived them.

Ian Hacking instigated a revolution in 20th century philosophy of science by putting experiments (“interventions”) at the top of a philosophical agenda that historically had focused nearly exclusively on representations (“theories”). In this paper, I focus on a set of conceptual tools Hacking (1992) put forward to understand how laboratory sciences become stable and to explain what such stability meant for the prospects of unity of science and kind discovery in experimental science. I first use Hacking’s tools to understand sources (...) of instability and disunity in rodent behavioral neuroscience. I then use them to understand recent grass-roots collaborative open science initiatives aimed at establishing stability in this research area and tease out some implications for unity of science and kind creation and discovery in cognitive neuroscience. -/- . (shrink)

In this chapter I investigate the kinds of changes that psychiatric kinds undergo when they become explanatory targets of areas of sciences that are not “mature” and are in the early stages of discovering mechanisms. The two areas of science that are the targets of my analysis are cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology.

Many scholars point to the close association between early modern science and the rise of rational arguments in favour of the existence of witches. For some commentators, it is a poor reflection on science that its methods so easily lent themselves to the unjust persecution of innocent men and women. In this paper, I examine a debate about witches between a woman philosopher, Margaret Cavendish , and a fellow of the Royal Society, Joseph Glanvill . I argue that Cavendish is (...) the voice of reason in this exchange—not because she supports the modern-day view that witches do not exist, but because she shows that Glanvill’s arguments about witches betray his own scientific principles. Cavendish’s responses to Glanvill suggest that, when applied consistently, the principles of early modern science could in fact promote a healthy scepticism toward the existence of witches. (shrink)

Abstract: In this paper, I respond to James Sterba’s recent book ‘Is a Good God Logically Possible?’ I show that Sterba concludes that God is not logically possible by ignoring three important issues: (a) the different functions of leeway indeterminism (and the political freedom presupposed by it) and autonomy (the two are very different things, even though both go under the name of freedom), (b) the differences in the conditions of agency in God and in creatures, (there is non-parity in (...) how each must apply the single moral law), and (c) the non-parity between our knowledge and God’s. I provide a brief summary of Sterba’s arguments, and I develop the following points: 1. Sterba’s argument against a Free-Will Defense hinges on his conflation of political freedom and autonomy; 2. Sterba’s crucial premise for his argument against soul-making theodicies (namely, that the “Pauline Principle” should be applied univocally across God and creatures) is false; 3. Sterba’s arguments against skeptical theism depend on his assumption that our knowledge is comparable to that of God. In each case, Sterba either does not recognize non-parity between God and creatures or does not recognize the difference between the profane (e.g., political matters) and the sacred, (e.g., spiritual matters having to do with the inner nature of the soul’s development). (shrink)

Some scholars have identified a puzzle in the writings of Mary Astell (1666–1731), a deeply religious feminist thinker of the early modern period. On the one hand, Astell strongly urges her fellow women to preserve their independence of judgement from men; yet, on the other, she insists upon those same women maintaining a submissive deference to the Anglican church. These two positions appear to be incompatible. In this paper, I propose a historical-contextualist solution to the puzzle: I argue that the (...) seeming inconsistency can be dispelled through a close examination of (i) the concepts of selfhood and self-government in Anglican women’s devotional texts of the period, and of (ii) the role that these concepts play in Astell’s feminist arguments. (shrink)

In the 1706 third edition of her Reflections upon Marriage, Mary Astell alludes to John Locke’s definition of slavery in her descriptions of marriage. She describes the state of married women as being ‘subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another Man’ (Locke, Two Treatises, II.22). Recent scholars maintain that Astell does not seriously regard marriage as a form of slavery in the Lockean sense. In this paper, I defend the contrary position: I argue that Astell does seriously (...) regard marriage as a form of slavery for women and that she condemns this state of affairs as morally wrong. I also show that, far from criticizing Locke, Astell draws on key passages in his Thoughts concerning Education to urge that women be educated to retain their liberty. (shrink)

Efforts by governments, firms, and patients to deliver pioneering drugs for critical health needs face a challenge of diminishing efficiency in developing those medicines. While multi-sectoral collaborations involving firms, researchers, patients, and policymakers are widely recognized as crucial for countering this decline, existing incentives to engage in drug development predominantly target drug manufacturers and thereby do little to stimulate collaborative innovation. In this mini review, we consider the unexplored potential within pharmaceutical regulations to create novel incentives to encourage a diverse (...) set of actors from the public and private spheres to engage in the kind of collaborative knowledge exchange requisite for fostering enhanced innovation in early drug development. (shrink)

Crime is a serious social problem, but its causes are not exclusively social. There is growing consensus that explaining and preventing it requires interdisciplinary research efforts. Indeed, the landscape of contemporary criminology includes a variety of theoretical models that incorporate psychological, biological and sociological factors. These multi-disciplinary approaches, however, have yet to radically advance scientific understandings of crime and shed light on how to manage it. In this paper, using conceptual tools on offer in the philosophy of science in combination (...) with theoretical work represented in this special volume of Psychology, Crime and Law, I provide some perspective on why explanatory progress in criminology has remained elusive and evaluate some positive proposals for attaining it. -/- . (shrink)

Nineteenth century Christian thought about self and relationality was stamped by the reception of Kant’s groundbreaking revision to the Cartesian cogito. For René Descartes (1596-1650), the self is a thinking thing (res cogitans), a simple substance retaining its unity and identity over time. For Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), on the other hand, consciousness is not a substance but an ongoing activity having a double constitution, or two moments: first, the original activity of consciousness, what Kant would call original apperception, and second, (...) the reflected self, the “I think” as object of reflection. Both are essential to the possibility of an awareness of a unified experience. Such an awareness is achieved only insofar as the self is capable of reflecting on its activity of thinking. As such, the possibility of self-consciousness, or the capacity to reflect on one’s own acts of thought is essential to the constitution of the self. This new model of the mind became the starting point to the thought of central 19th century figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). This chapter will explore their reception of Kant’s model of self-consciousness, the controversies surrounding its development and exposition, and the advantages of this model for theological reflection. The idea of mind as essentially capable of reflection provided an account of how the self can stand in an ontologically immediate relation to God constitutive of the self, while at the same time allowing that the self’s consciousness of itself is distinct from this original moment, so that a limited or false consciousness of self is possible. As such the task of the self is to recognize (that is, to realize in and through self-consciousness) who it most truly is, both in relation to God, and in relation to self and other. (shrink)

Some scholars suggest that John Locke’s revisions to the chapter “Of Power” for the 1694 second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding may be indebted to the Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth. Their claims rest on evidence that Locke may have had access to Cudworth’s unpublished manuscript treatises on free will. In this paper, I examine an alternative suggestion – the claim that Cudworth’s daughter, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and not Cudworth himself, may have exerted an influence on Locke’s revisions. I (...) discuss the plausibility of this claim in light of the relevant historical and textual evidence. (shrink)

This article explores the early Schleiermacher's attempts to deal with difficult philosophical problems arising from Kant's ethics, specifically Kant's notion of transcendental freedom. How do we connect a transcendentally free act with the nature of the subject? Insofar as the act is transcendentally free, it cannot be understood in terms of causes, and this means that it cannot be connected with the previous state of the individual before he or she engaged in the act. I work through Schleiermacher's grappling with (...) this problem by taking a thorough look at some of Schleiermacher's early essays and reviews. My main focus will be Schleiermacher's early essay On Freedom, written between 1790-92. I will, however, also be taking a look at Schleiermacher's notes on Kant's second Critique (1789), the third of his Dialogues on Freedom(1789), and his critical review of Kant's Anthropology from a PragmaticPointof View (1799). (shrink)

This paper is a response to a commentary by Walter Glannon (2016, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience) on my paper "Stabilizing Constructs Across Research Fields as a Way to Foster the Integrative Approach of the Research Domain Criteria Project".

This paper examines Aristotle's attempt to describe space in terms of place in the Physics, and shows why Aristotle rejected both Platonic and Atomistic understandings of space.

This essay analyzes the category of “the holy” as developed by Rudolf Otto, examining his division of the holy into rational and non-rational elements. While rational elements of the holy are closely tied to ethics, another aspect of the holy can only be apprehended through sui generis feelings irreducible to other mental states. But how do non-rational elements relate to rational, ethical categories? I trace the distinction between rational and non-rational elements in Otto’s analysis to Kant’s two faculty psychology: the (...) holy is apprehended in one way through feeling, in another way through thought, but a single ultimate reality is experienced. (shrink)

Many neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases and other brain disorders are accompanied by impairments in high-level cognitive functions including memory, attention, motivation, and decision-making. Despite several decades of extensive research, neuroscience is little closer to discovering new treatments. Key impediments include the absence of validated and robust cognitive assessment tools for facilitating translation from animal models to humans. In this review, we describe a state-of-the-art platform poised to overcome these impediments and improve the success of translational research, the Mouse Translational Research (...) Accelerator Platform (MouseTRAP), which is centered on the touchscreen cognitive testing system for rodents. It integrates touchscreen-based tests of high-level cognitive assessment with state-of-the art neurotechnology to record and manipulate molecular and circuit level activity in vivo in animal models during human-relevant cognitive performance. The platform also is integrated with two Open Science platforms designed to facilitate knowledge and data-sharing practices within the rodent touchscreen community, touchscreencognition and mousebytes. Touchscreencognition includes the Wall, showcasing touchscreen news and publications, the Forum, for community discussion, and Training, which includes courses, videos, SOPs, and symposia. To get started, interested researchers simply create user accounts. We describe the origins of the touchscreen testing system, the novel lines of research it has facilitated, and its increasingly widespread use in translational research, which is attributable in part to knowledge-sharing efforts over the past decade. We then identify the unique features of MouseTRAP that stand to potentially revolutionize translational research, and describe new initiatives to partner with similar platforms such as McGill’s M3 platform. (shrink)

According to some scholars, Mary Astell’s feminist programme is severely limited by its focus on self-improvement rather than wider social change. In response, I highlight the role of ‘virtuous friendship’ in Astell’s 1694 work, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Building on classical ideals and traditional Christian principles, Astell promotes the morally transformative power of virtuous friendship among women. By examining the significance of such friendship to Astell’s feminism, we can see that she did in fact aim to bring about (...) reformation of society and not just the individual. (shrink)

This article investigates several consequences of a recent trend in philosophy of mind to shift the relata of realization from mental state–physical state to function‐mechanism. It is shown, by applying both frameworks to the neuroscientific case study of memory consolidation, that, although this shift can be used to avoid the immediate antireductionist consequences of the traditional argument from multiple realizability, what is gained is a far more modest form of reductionism than recent philosophical accounts have intimated and neuroscientists themselves have (...) claimed. (shrink)

This is my introduction as editor to The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher.

In 2007, ten world-renowned neuroscientists proposed “A Decade of the Mind Initiative.” The contention was that, despite the successes of the Decade of the Brain, “a fundamental understanding of how the brain gives rise to the mind [was] still lacking” (2007, 1321). The primary aims of the decade of the mind were “to build on the progress of the recent Decade of the Brain (1990-99)” by focusing on “four broad but intertwined areas” of research, including: healing and protecting, understanding, enriching, (...) and modeling the mind. These four aims were to be the result of “transdisciplinary and multiagency” research spanning “across disparate fields, such as cognitive science, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, mathematics, engineering, and computer science.” The proposal for a decade of the mind prompted many questions (See Spitzer 2008). In this chapter, I address three of them: (1) How do proponents of this new decade conceive of the mind? (2) Why should a decade be devoted to understanding it? (3) What should this decade look like? (shrink)

One might be inclined to assume, given the mouse donning its cover, that the behavior of interest in Nicole Nelson's book Model Behavior (2018) is that of organisms like mice that are widely used as “stand-ins” for investigating the causes of human behavior. Instead, Nelson's ethnographic study focuses on the strategies adopted by a community of rodent behavioral researchers to identify and respond to epistemic challenges they face in using mice as models to understand the causes of disordered human behaviors (...) associated with mental illness. Although Nelson never explicitly describes the knowledge production activities in which her behavioral geneticist research subjects engage as “exemplary”, the question of whether or not these activities constitute “model behavior(s)”—generalizable norms for engaging in scientific research—is one of the many thought-provoking questions raised by her book. As a philosopher of science interested in this question, I take it up here. (shrink)

Little is known about the shaping and development of Anne Conway’s thought in relation to her early modern contemporaries. In one part of her only surviving treatise, The Principles, Conway criticises “those doctors” who uphold a dualist theory of soul and body, a mechanist conception of body (as dead and inert), and the view that the soul is “intimate present” in the body. In this paper, I argue that here she targets Walter Charleton, a well-known defender of Epicurean atomism in (...) mid-seventeenth-century England. My intention is to highlight the sophistication of Conway’s theory of soul-body relations vis-a-vis that of Charleton. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that scientific practice in the neurosciences of cognition is not conducive to the discovery of natural kinds of cognitive capacities. The “neurosciences of cognition” include cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology, two research areas that aim to understand how the brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. Some philosophers of neuroscience have claimed that explanatory progress in these research areas ultimately will result in the discovery of the underlying mechanisms of cognitive capacities. Once such mechanistic understanding (...) is achieved, cognitive capacities purportedly will be relegated into natural kind categories that correspond to real divisions in the causal structure of the world. I provide reasons here, however, in support of the claim that the neurosciences of cognition currently are not on a trajectory for discovering natural kinds. As I explain, this has to do with how mechanistic explanations of cognitive capacities are developed. Mechanistic explanations and the kinds they explain are abstract representational byproducts of the conceptual, experimental and integrative practices of neuroscientists. If these practices are not coordinated towards developing mechanistic explanations that mirror the causal structure of the world, then natural kinds of cognitive capacities will not be discovered. I provide reasons to think that such coordination is currently lacking in the neurosciences of cognition and indicate where changes in these practices appropriate to the natural kinds ideal would be required if achieving this ideal is indeed the goal. However, I suggest that an evaluation of current practices in these research areas is suggestive that discovering natural kinds of cognitive capacities is not the goal. (shrink)

There is a tendency in contemporary jurisprudence to regard political authority and, more particularly, legal intervention in human affairs as having no justification unless it can be defended by what Laing calls the principle of modern liberal autonomy (MLA). According to this principle, if consenting adults want to do something, unless it does specific harm to others here and now, the law has no business intervening. Harm to the self and general harm to society can constitute no justification for legal (...) regulation or prohibition. So pervasive is this understanding of legal intervention in human affairs, that it is common now to encounter arguments in favour of permissive laws on, for example, private drug use, pornography, sexual and reproductive choice, based on the idea that to intervene in these areas would constitute a breach of the liberal ideal. The only alternative to modern liberal autonomy is assumed to be radical oppression, in which the State intervenes in the individual’s life to impose unwarranted measures designed to further its own ends. The legacy of Stalin, Hitler and other modern tyrants has undermined conceptual appeals to the common good. So widespread is this liberal assumption in the Western, English-speaking world that critics of the outlook embodied by MLA are customarily regarded with suspicion and charged with paternalism, narrow-mindedness and intolerance. Laing highlights contradictions inherent in the modern liberal tradition. She argues that there is a certain reliance on the notion of the common good within the natural law tradition that is instructive. According to this view, the common good constitutes a mean between two extremes: on the one hand, contemporary liberalism’s over-insistence on radical individual autonomy and, on the other hand, totalitarianism’s over-emphasis on collective social benefit. There is, I will argue, substantial terrain between the conceptual excesses of modern liberalism and oppressive tyranny that needs to be acknowledged and discussed. (shrink)

In this article, I critically examine a number of recent editions of philosophical works by early modern women. I argue that the proliferation of such texts is likely to have positive implications for the study of early modern philosophy. By taking a historical-contextualist approach to women’s writings, these editions contribute to the goal of a thorough, unbiased, and impartial account of early modern thought. Their accessibility and teachability also draw attention to historical-philosophical ideas, methods, and genres that could have worth (...) and relevance today. Above all, these texts are valuable for helping to correct a one-sided, male-biased understanding of the philosophical past. (shrink)

This paper explores the reception of Kant's understanding of consciousness by both Romantics and Idealists from 1785 to 1799, and traces its impact on the theory of religion. I first look at Kant's understanding of consciousness as developed in the first Critique, and then looks at how figures such as Fichte, Jacobi, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schleiermacher received this theory of consciousness and its implications for their understanding of religion.

Neuroscience is a laboratory-based science that spans multiple levels of analysis from molecular genetics to behavior. At every level of analysis experiments are designed in order to answer empirical questions about phenomena of interest. Understanding the nature and structure of experimentation in neuroscience is fundamental for assessing the quality of the evidence produced by such experiments and the kinds of claims that are warranted by the data. This article provides a general conceptual framework for thinking about evidence and experimentation in (...) neuroscience with a particular focus on two research areas: cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology. (shrink)