Articulates the fundamental importance of ontology to Hans Jonas’s environmental ethics.

Aristotle is often named as the first zoologist or biologist because of his writings on animals. Although Aristotle’s major intention in these books was to illustrate his ideas of how knowledge and understanding might advance, at least one modern biologist (C. Darwin) has recognized Aristotle's depth and breadth as being of surviving merit. Of greater surprise is the ongoing attention that his works continue to receive, including publications in contemporary scientific journals. This review identifies 38 peer-reviewed papers on various topics (...) from Aristotle’s biological writings that have been published during the last 50 years. These papers are described according to content (genetics, population biology, anatomy, brain, movement), specific creatures (fish, scorpions, elephants, insects, birds), publication outlet, distribution over the fifty year period surveyed, and visible trends in the topics studied. It is concluded that, in the highly-competitive field of peer-reviewed scientific publication and citation, Aristotle's biology continues to excite the interest of scientists and remains salient to modern science itself. (shrink)

El artículo propone poner a prueba la idea comúnmente admitida de que en la concepción aristotélica las emociones tienen una función o fin en el ámbito biológico. Me propongo probar que esta concepción sería más propia de otras posturas, como la tomista y la cartesiana, y especialmente de la darwiniana y neo-darwiniana. Tras presentar en la sección 2 el tipo de explicaciones teleológicas que Aristóteles admite y emplea en biología, analizo en la parte 3 la concepción de las emociones de (...) Descartes y en especial de Darwin y muestro que ellas se adaptan bien al modelo explicativo teleológico aristotélico. En la sección 4, ofrezco varios argumentos con apoyo en los textos biológicos de Aristóteles para mostrar que, en cambio, este tipo de explicaciones teleológicas de las emociones no aparecen con claridad en los escritos biológicos del estagirita, toda vez que lo que encontramos allí es, más bien, explicaciones fisiológico materialistas del carácter de los animales. Por último, sugiero una asimetría con el tratamiento de las emociones desde el punto de vista de la racionalidad práctica que desarrollaré en trabajos ulteriores. (shrink)

This dissertation undertakes a philosophical analysis of “natural capital” and argues that this concept has prompted economists to view Nature in a radically novel manner. Formerly, economists referred to Nature and natural products as a collection of inert materials to be drawn upon in isolation and then rearranged by human agents to produce commodities. More recently, nature is depicted as a collection of active, modifiable, and economically valuable processes, often construed as ecosystems that produce marketable goods and services gratis. Nature (...) is depicted as consisting of various unproduced mechanisms or “natural machines” that are first discovered and then channeled so as to serve human ends. In short, nature as an ideal is a kind of garden that is characterized by natural objects purposefully arranged by intentional human agents. This dissertation first lays out working definitions of the key terms, such as capital and Nature, and then traces the historical roots of natural capital in the writings of eminent classical political economists, such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. I then examine the question of substitutes for “critical natural capital”, and argue that the preservation paradox is warranted: no one can restore or preserve a part of Nature without turning it into an artifact. Following the recent work of Debra Satz and Michael Sandel, I finish my dissertation by situating the question of natural capital in the broader context of whether some goods should not be for sale, particularly those I define as Basic Ecological Goods. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a way of doing philosophy. It is “traditional” philosophy, but with a little something extra: In addition to the expected philosophical arguments and engagement, x-phi involves the use of empirical methods to test the empirical claims that arise. This extra bit strikes some as a new, perhaps radical, addition to philosophical practice. We don’t think so. As this chapter will show, empirical claims have been common across the history of Western philosophy, as have appeals to (...) empirical observation in attempting to support or subvert these claims. While conceptions of philosophy have changed over time, across these changes we find philosophers employing empirical methods in pursuing their philosophical questions. Our primary aim in this chapter is to illustrate this fact. We begin by discussing the relevance of history to experimental philosophy (Section 2), then offer a necessarily condensed and highly selective history of empirical work in Western philosophy, ranging from the ancients (Section 3), to the early moderns (Section 4), to the late moderns (Section 5), and on to the present (Section 6). (shrink)

The use of teleological language in biology is burdened with many difficulties. Speakers in everyday and scientific discourse confuse functions with purposes and misunderstand functionality, finality, and intentionality. The paper is structured into three sections. In the first part the difference between Platonic supranatural and Aristotelian quasi-natural account of teleology will be explained, with examples from the history of philosophy of biology. The second part will present the Darwinian approach to etiology that constitutes a more sound alternative to the teleological (...) explanation. In the last section I will briefly introduce the teleological bias that is studied by developmental and cognitive psychologists. I believe that this psychological inclination is the real source of intuitive worldviews that are incompatible with contemporary science. (shrink)

Two hundred years after Darwin’s birth, the evolution of living systems is an accepted fact but there is scope for controversy on the mechanisms involved in such a process. Mainstream neo-Darwinism champions the role of natural selection (NS) as the fundamental cause of the evolutionary process as well as of random, contingent events at the genetic level as the main source of variation upon which NS performs its causal role. Thus, according to neo-Darwinism the course of biological evolution is quite (...) unpredictable and the past can only be partially reconstructed by means of a historical narrative.This second-class status for biology within the natural sciences as a merely descriptive, historical science results from the chronic neglect of biological form in the neo-Darwinian discourse. Hereunder I discuss the need for reintroducing form as the central object of biology, aiming at the identification of the general and fundamental principles of biological form. Such a formal biology may go beyond simple historical description achieving a complete, rational explanation of how previous and current morphologies corresponding to identifiable species were established, and so providing a rational foundation for predicting the possible outcomes of future biological evolution on earth and perhaps elsewhere in the universe. (shrink)

Felsefe tarihinin hiç şüphesiz en önemli filozoflarından biri olan Aristoteles (M.Ö. 384-322), aynı zamanda bilim tarihinin de en önemli kişilerindendir. Yaşadığı dönemde henüz bilim ve felsefe ayrılmamıştır; bununla birlikte Aristoteles, bilimsel ve sistemli düşünmenin, örnekleme yapmanın, bilim insanının doğaya öğrenmek için yaklaşmasının ilkelerini, ilk kez bu derece düzenli şekilde ortaya koyan kişi olmuştur. Dört neden kuramı söz konusu ilkelerin temelini oluşturmaktadır. Bu çalışmada günümüz biyolojisinin en kapsamlı tartışmalarından biri olan ‘fenotipin ne olduğu ve nasıl oluştuğu’ konusunun, Aristoteles’in dört neden kuramı (...) ile ilişkisi incelenmiştir. Genotip, fenotip ve çevrenin son derece karmaşık yolları içeren etkileşim ağı, araştırılması için birden fazla nedensel sorgulamayı gerektirir ki bu sorgulama bir anlamda Aristoteles’in dört neden kuramının, maddi, formel ve fail nedenlerinin bir arada sorgulanmasına benzerdir. (shrink)

Understanding modeling in biology requires understanding how biology is organized as a discipline and how this organization influences the research practices of biologists. Biology includes a wide range of sub-disciplines, such as cell biology, population biology, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, and systems biology among others. Biologists in sub-disciplines such as cell, molecular, and systems biology believe that the use of a few experimental models allows them to discover biological universals, whereas biologists in sub-disciplines such as ecology and evolutionary biology believe (...) that the use of many different experimental and mathematical models is necessary in order to do this. Many practitioners of both approaches misunderstand best practices of modeling, especially those related to model testing. We stress the need for biologists to better engage with best practices and for philosophers of biology providing normative guidance for biologists to better engage with current developments in biology. This is especially important as biology transitions from a “data-poor” to a “data-rich” discipline. If 21st century biology is going to capitalize on the unprecedented availability of ecological, evolutionary, and molecular data, of computational resources, and of mathematical and statistical tools, biologists will need a better understanding of what modeling is and can be. (shrink)

A number of areas of biology raise questions about what is of value in the natural environment and how we ought to behave towards it: conservation biology, environmental science, and ecology, to name a few. Based on my experience teaching students from these and similar majors, I argue that the field of environmental ethics has much to teach these students. They come to me with pent-up questions and a feeling that more is needed to fully engage in their subjects, and (...) I believe some exposure to environmental ethics can help focus their interests and goals. I identify three primary areas in which environmental ethics can con- tribute to their education. The first is an examination of who (or what) should be considered to be part of our moral community (i.e., the community to whom we owe direct duties). Is it humans only? Or does it include all sentient life? Or all life? Or ecosystems considered holistically? Often, readings implicitly assume one or more of these answers; the goal is to make the student more sensitive to these implicit claims and to get them to think about the different reasons that support them. The second area, related to the first, is the application of the different answers concerning the extent of the ethical community to real environmental issues and problems. Students need to be aware of how the different answers concerning the moral community can imply conflicting answers for how we should act in certain cases and to think about ways to move toward conflict resolution. The third area in which environmental ethics can contribute is a more conceptual one, focusing on central concepts such as biodiversity, sustainability, species, and ecosystems. Exploring and evaluating various meanings of these terms will make students more reflective and thoughtful citizens and biologists, sensitive to the implications that different conceptual choices make. (shrink)