This paper defends Musical Stage Theory as a novel account of the ontology of musical works. Its main claim is that a musical work is a performance. The significance of this argument is twofold. First, it demonstrates the availability of an alternative, and ontologically tenable, view to well-established positions in the current debate on musical metaphysics. Second, it shows how the revisionary approach of Musical Stage Theory actually provides a better account of the ontological status of musical works.

This article examines to what extent a particular case of cross-disciplinary research in the 1930s was structured by mechanistic reasoning. For this purpose, it identifies the interfield theories that allowed biologists and chemists to use each other’s techniques and findings, and that provided the basis for the experiments performed to identify plant growth hormones and to learn more about their role in the mechanism of plant growth. In 1930, chemists and biologists in Utrecht and Pasadena began to cooperatively study plant (...) growth. I will argue that these researchers decided to join forces because they believed to rely on each other’s findings and methods to solve their research problems adequately. In the course of the cooperation, organic chemists arrived at isolating plant growth hormones by using a test method developed in plant physiology. This achievement, in turn, facilitated biologists’ investigation of the mechanism of plant growth. Researchers eventually believed to have the means to study the relation between a substance’s molecular structure and its physiological activity. The way they conceptualized the problem of identifying hormones and unraveling the mechanism of plant growth, as well as their actual research actions are compatible with the new mechanists’ account of mechanism research. The study illustrates that focusing on researchers’ mechanistic reasoning can contribute considerably to explaining the structure of cross-disciplinary research projects. (shrink)

Social scientists associate agent-based simulation (ABS) models with three ideas about explanation: they provide generative explanations, they are models of mechanisms, and they implement methodological individualism. In light of a philosophical account of explanation, we show that these ideas are not necessarily related and offer an account of the explanatory import of ABS models. We also argue that their bottom-up research strategy should be distinguished from methodological individualism.

Falk's paper provides a nice cross-species perspective and an interesting background to formulate a theory of the evolution of human language. However, the author does not provide a complete overview and analysis of the origins of language and takes for granted the “continuity hypothesis.” Also her “infant parking theory” is questionable, as it is not well supported by observations.

According to Dicaearchus, metempsychosis was the best known among Pythagoras’ teachings. In this paper, I investigate two features of Pythagorean metempsychosis: its non-retributive character and its epistemological value. I argue that the Pythagoreans did not conceive of reincarnation as a punishment for the wicked and a reward for the virtuous, but rather as a way to gain experience, knowledge and therefore wisdom. This reading enables us to throw light on the puzzling list of Pythagoras’ past lives, which includes Aethalides son (...) of Hermes, Euphorbus the warrior, Pyrrhus the fisherman and even Alco the harlot. (shrink)

The reactions that science triggers on the people it studies, describes, or theorises about, can affect the science itself and its claims to knowledge. This phenomenon, which we call reactivity, has been discussed in many different areas of the social sciences and the philosophy of science, falling under different rubrics such as the Hawthorne effect, self-fulfilling prophecies, the looping effects of human kinds, the performativity of models, observer effects, experimenter effects and experimenter demand effects. In this paper we review state-of-the-art (...) research that falls under the remit of the philosophy of reactivity by considering ontological, epistemic and moral issues that reactivity raises. Along the way, we devote special attention to articles belonging to this journal's Topical Collection entitled “Reactivity in the Human Sciences”. (shrink)

Duranti gli anni della _Querelle des femmes_ si è assistito ad un’importante crescita di testi in difesa o in detrazione della causa femminile. Una delle caratteristiche principali di questa tendenza letteraria risiede nelle reciproche relazioni che le opere stabiliscono tra loro, attraverso una fitta rete di richiami intertestuali. Il Dialogo _Della Dignità e della nobiltà delle donne_ (1624) dello scrittore marchigiano Cristoforo Bronzini aderisce appieno alla pratica intertestuale che mette a servizio della memoria storico-culturale. Nel presente articolo si analizzano i (...) rapporti intertestuali del trattato seicentesco con opere di scrittrici come Lucrezia Marinella, Moderata Fonte ed Isabella Cervoni, mettendo in rilievo le diverse funzioni che l’intertestualità adempie nei testi della _Querelle des femmes_. (shrink)

In this paper I defend a contextualist interpretation of authenticity in musical performance: we judge a performance as authentic not in respect of a stable set of requirements but according to contextually determined factors. This solution is the natural outcome of an independently supported ontological account of musical works: Musical Stage Theory. The aim of the paper is to give new momentum to the debate concerning the notion of authenticity and to challenge a monistic interpretation of authenticity: there is not (...) one authenticity but many. (shrink)

Recent advances in neuroscience have paved the way to innovative applications that cognitively augment and enhance humans in a variety of contexts. This paper aims at providing a snapshot of the current state of the art and a motivated forecast of the most likely developments in the next two decades. Firstly, we survey the main neuroscience technologies for both observing and influencing brain activity, which are necessary ingredients for human cognitive augmentation. We also compare and contrast such technologies, as their (...) individual characteristics (e.g., spatio-temporal resolution, invasiveness, portability, energy requirements and cost) influence their current and future role in human cognitive augmentation. Secondly, we chart the state of the art on neurotechnologies for human cognitive augmentation, keeping an eye both on the applications that already exist and those that are emerging or are likely to emerge in the next two decades. Particularly, we consider applications in the areas of communication, cognitive enhancement, memory, attention monitoring/enhancement, situation awareness and complex problem solving, and we look at what fraction of the population might benefit from such technologies and at the demands they impose in terms of user training. Thirdly, we briefly review the ethical issues associated with current neuroscience technologies. These are important because they may differentially influence both present and future research on (and adoption of) neurotechnologies for human cognitive augmentation: an inferior technology with no significant ethical issues may thrive while a superior technology causing widespread ethical concerns may end up being outlawed. Finally, based on the lessons learned in our analysis, using past trends and considering other related forecasts, we attempt to forecast the most likely future developments of neuroscience technology for human cognitive augmentation and provide informed recommendations for promising future research and exploitation avenues. (shrink)

Under a political dictatorship it is primarily from the margins that an artistic critique can be articulated, as suggested by the examples presented in this article from Romania and Chile during the 1970s and 1980s. By focusing on their threefold marginality—of the artist, the art form, and the subject of art—and by applying to them Jacques Rancière's concept of dissensus, the analysis of artistic variants of marginality sheds light on the relationship of art and politics in totalitarian regimes.

The literature’s interest has been focused on the study of well-being or depression. However, there has been little research that investigates the relationship between well-being and hopelessness (HPL) and the underlying contextual and dispositional variables. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between some contextual (need-supportive interpersonal behavior and need-thwarting interpersonal behavior) and dispositional variables (dispositional optimism, positive/negative affectivity, explanatory style), academic achievement, general well-being, and school HPL in adolescent students. The results showed that general (...) well-being was positively predicted by need-supportive interpersonal behavior, dispositional optimism, positive affectivity, and adaptive explanatory style (attribution to commitment in the school context), while it was negatively predicted by negative affectivity. Meanwhile, school HPL was positively predicted by need-thwarting interpersonal behavior, negative affectivity, dysfunctional explanatory style (attribution to luck in the school context), while it was negatively predicted by attribution to commitment in the school context and academic achievement. These results provide useful data for the implementation of well-being promotion and school HPL prevention. The implications are discussed as follows. (shrink)

Current research in artificial intelligence (AI) sheds light on algorithmic bias embedded in AI systems. The underrepresentation of women in the AI design sector of the tech industry, as well as in training datasets, results in technological products that encode gender bias, reinforce stereotypes and reproduce normative notions of gender and femininity. Biased behaviour is notably reflected in anthropomorphic AI systems, such as personal intelligent assistants (PIAs) and chatbots, that are usually feminized through various design parameters, such as names, voices (...) and traits. Gendering of AI entities, however, is often reduced to the encoding of stereotypical behavioural patterns that perpetuate normative assumptions about the role of women in society. The impact of this behaviour on social life increases, as human-to-(anthropomorphic)machine interactions are mirrored in human-to-human social interactions. This article presents current critical research on AI bias, focusing on anthropomorphic systems. Moreover, it discusses the significance of women’s engagement in AI design and programming, by presenting selected case studies of contemporary female media artists and designers. Finally, it suggests that women, through their creative practice, provide feminist and critical approaches to AI design which are essential for imagining alternative, inclusive, ethic and de-biased futures for anthropomorphic AIs. (shrink)

In light of the interrelation between motor and cognitive development and the predictive value of the former for the latter, the secular decline observed in motor coordination ability as early as preschool urges identification of interventions that may jointly impact motor and cognitive efficiency. The aim of this study was twofold. It (1) explored the outcomes of enriched physical education, centered on deliberate play and cognitively challenging variability of practice, on motor coordination and cognitive processing; (2) examined whether motor coordination (...) outcomes mediate intervention effects on children’s cognition, while controlling for moderation by lifestyle factors as outdoor play habits and weight status. Four hundred and sixty children aged 5-10 years participated in a 6-month group randomized intervention in physical education, with or without playful coordinative and cognitive enrichment. The weight status and spontaneous outdoor play habits of children (parental report of outdoor play) were evaluated at baseline. Before and after the intervention, motor developmental level (Movement Assessment Battery for Children) was evaluated in all children, who were then assessed either with a test of working memory (Random Number Generation task), or with a test of attention (from the Cognitive Assessment System, CAS). Children assigned to the ‘enriched’ intervention showed more pronounced improvements in all motor coordination assessments (manual dexterity, ball skills, static/dynamic balance). The beneficial effect on ball skills was amplified by the level of spontaneous outdoor play and weight status. Among indices of executive function and attention, only that of inhibition showed a differential effect of intervention type. Moderated mediation showed that the better outcome of the enriched physical education on ball skills mediated the better inhibition outcome, but only when the enrichment intervention was paralleled by a medium-to-high level of outdoor play. Results suggest that specifically tailored physical activity games provide a unique form of enrichment that impacts children’s cognitive development through motor coordination improvement, particularly object control skills, which are linked to children’s physical activity habits later in life. Outdoor play appears to offer the natural ground for the stimulation by designed physical activity games to take root in children’s mind. (shrink)

The phenomenon of interactive human kinds, namely kinds of people that undergo change in reaction to being studied or theorised about, matters not only for the reliability of scientific claims, but also for its wider, sometimes harmful effects at the group or societal level, such as contributing to negative stigmas or reinforcing existing inequalities. This paper focuses on the latter aspect of interactivity and argues that scientists studying interactive human kinds are responsible for foreseeing harmful effects of their research and (...) for devising ways of mitigating them. (shrink)

The contributors to Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Sport argue that American pragmatism is particularly well suited analyze the experience and development of sport activities. This volume will be a valuable resource in any philosophy of sport class or in a course on pragmatism; it will also be appropriate for kinesiology students. It will give readers a good sense of the themes in the American philosophical tradition as well as those in the burgeoning field of the philosophy of sport.

Cognitive reflection is recognized as an important skill, which is necessary for making advantageous decisions. Even though gender differences in the Cognitive Reflection test appear to be robust across multiple studies, little research has examined the source of the gender gap in performance. In Study 1, we tested the invariance of the scale across genders. In Study 2, we investigated the role of math anxiety, mathematical reasoning, and gender in CRT performance. The results attested the measurement equivalence of the Cognitive (...) Reflection Test – Long, when administered to male and female students. Additionally, the results of the mediation analysis showed an indirect effect of gender on CRT-L performance through mathematical reasoning and math anxiety. The direct effect of gender was no longer statistically significant after accounting for the other variables. The current findings suggest that cognitive reflection is affected by numerical skills and related feelings. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that successful evidence-based policy should rely on two kinds of evidence: statistical and mechanistic. The former is held to be evidence that a policy brings about the desired outcome, and the latter concerns how it does so. Although agreeing with the spirit of this proposal, we argue that the underlying conception of mechanistic evidence as evidence that is different in kind from correlational, difference-making or statistical evidence, does not correctly capture the role that information about (...) mechanisms should play in evidence-based policy. We offer an alternative account of mechanistic evidence as information concerning the causal pathway connecting the policy intervention to its outcome. Not only can this be analyzed as evidence of difference-making, it is also to be found at any level and is obtainable by a broad range of methods, both experimental and observational. Using behavioral policy as an illustration, we draw the implications of this revised understanding of mechanistic evidence for debates concerning policy extrapolation, evidence hierarchies, and evidence integration. (shrink)

Philosophers of the social sciences are increasingly convinced that macro-and micro-explanations are complementary. Whereas macro-explanations are broad, micro-explanations are deep. I distinguish between weak and strong complementarity: Strongly complementary explanations improve one another when integrated, weakly complementary explanations do not. To demonstrate the explanatory autonomy of different levels of explanation, explanatory pluralists mostly presuppose the weak form of complementarity. By scrutinizing the notions of explanatory depth and breadth, I argue that macro- and micro-accounts of the same phenomenon are more often (...) strongly complementary. This invites a revision of the pluralist position in which integration promotes explanatory progress. Key Words: explanatory pluralism • social science • explanatory depth • explanatory breadth • mechanism. (shrink)

Contemporary scholarship concerning science diplomacy is increasingly taking a historical approach. In our introduction to this special issue, we argue that this approach promises insight into science diplomacy because of the tools historians of science bring to their work. In particular, we observe that not only are historians of science currently poised to chart the diplomatic aspects involved in the transnational circulation of technoscientific knowledge, materials, and expertise. They are ready to bring critical global analysis to an important phenomenon that (...) has too often been treated as a benign diplomacy device deployed by the Global North without equal reference to the Global South. Through cases discussed in the articles of the special issue, however, we see that historically, in the Global South as well as the Global North, science diplomacy has often functioned to mediate the circulation of technoscientific knowledge and materials, and its historical study helps to better illuminate the resulting knowledge-power nexus. (shrink)

Our society is experiencing a radical transformation through photographic multimedia. The photographic gaze is the dominant mode of the daily visual relationship with reality, due to the extreme pervasiveness of photography in every field of our experience. Starting from some empirical considerations, this paper will reflect on this trend in terms of visual perception of reality in general, focusing on works of art. Since visual art is made to be perceived as an object, this field of experience is congenial to (...) examine the implications of the capillary multimedia conveyance in our perceptive dependence on photographic images. The consequences are significant both in the historical-artistic methodology and in the education of the gaze applied to art, especially for the younger generations. The transformation in progress should not, however, be interpreted in negative terms, nor as an obstacle to the understanding of the world, but as a terrain of shared experience, on which to work with more conscious instruments. (shrink)

The history of the theory of general relativity presents unique features. After its discovery, the theory was immediately confirmed and rapidly changed established notions of space and time. The further implications of general relativity, however, remained largely unexplored until the mid 1950s, when it came into focus as a physical theory and gradually returned to the mainstream of physics. This essay presents a historiographical framework for assessing the history of general relativity by taking into account in an integrated narrative intellectual (...) developments, epistemological problems, and technological advances; the characteristics of post–World War II and Cold War science; and newly emerging institutional settings. It argues that such a framework can help us understand this renaissance of general relativity as a result of two main factors: the recognition of the untapped potential of general relativity and an explicit effort at community building, which allowed this formerly disparate and dispersed field to benefit from the postwar changes in the scientific landscape. (shrink)

This paper conducts a cost–benefit analysis of Australia’s Covid-19 lockdown strategy relative to pursuit of a mitigation strategy in March 2020. The estimated additional deaths from a mitigation strategy are 11,500 to 40,000, implying a Cost per Quality Adjusted Life Year saved by locking down of at least 11 times the generally employed figure of $100,000 for health interventions in Australia. The lockdowns do not then seem to have been justified by reference to the standard benchmark. Consideration of the information (...) available to the Australian government in March 2020 yields a similar ratio and therefore the same conclusion that lockdown was not warranted. If Australia experiences a new outbreak, and cannot contain it without resort to a nationwide lockdown, the death toll from adopting a mitigation strategy at this point would be even less than had it done so in March 2020, due to the vaccination campaign, lessons learned since March 2020, and because the period over which the virus would then inflict casualties would now be much less than the period from March 2020. This would favour a mitigation policy even more strongly than in March 2020. This approach of assessing the savings in quality adjusted life years and comparing them to a standard benchmark figure ensures that all quality adjusted life years saved by various health interventions are treated equally, which accords with the ethical principle of equity across people. (shrink)

Despite the recent upsurge of interest in the investigation of creativity, the question of how to measure creativity is arguably underdiscussed. The aim of this paper is to address this gap, proposing a multidimensional account of creativity which identifies problem-solving, evaluation, and naivety as measurable features that are common among creative processes. The benefits that result from the adoption of this model are twofold: integrating discussions on creativity in various domains and offering the tools to assess creativity across systems of (...) different kinds. By situating creativity within this framework, I aim to contribute to a non-anthropocentric, more comprehensive understanding of the notion, and to debates on natural and artificial creativity. (shrink)

This paper investigates Abelard’s first argument against the ‘material essence’ realist view on universals in the Logica ‘Ingredientibus’. It analyses three different interpretations of the argument, those of Alain de Libera, Peter King and Martin Tweedale. Much depends on the manuscript reading ‘iam corpus’ in a crucial passage. The paper argues against the manuscript reading and in favour of the emendation ‘non corpus’ suggested by the editor, Bernhard Geyer. The emended reading is supported by comparison with similar arguments of Abelard (...) and his school found in published and unpublished sources. (shrink)

This paper explores how a new theory on the ontology of musical works, Musical Stage Theory, can address the problem of change in musical works. A natural consequence of the ontological framework of this theory is that musical works change intrinsically through a change in the sonic-structural properties of performances. From this a surprising consequence follows: everyone can change a musical work. Still, it seems that some changes matter more than others. The article offers a revisionary reply to this concern (...) by arguing that normative change is not a change in the ontological nature of the work but rather in its authenticity conditions. (shrink)

Recent studies suggest that covering the face inhibits the recognition of identity and emotional expressions. However, it might also make the eyes more salient, since they are a reliable index to orient our social and spatial attention. This study investigates whether the pervasive interaction with people with face masks fostered by the COVID-19 pandemic modulates the processing of spatial information essential to shift attention according to other’s eye-gaze direction, and whether this potential modulation interacts with motor responses. Participants were presented (...) with face cues orienting their gaze to a congruent or incongruent target letter location while wearing a surgical mask, a patch, or nothing. The task required to discriminate the identity of the lateralized target letters by pressing one of two lateralized response keys, in a corresponding or a non-corresponding position with respect to the target. Results showed that GCE was not modulated by the presence of the Mask, but it occurred in the No-Mask condition, confirming previous studies. Crucially, the GCE interacted with Simon effect in the Mask and Control conditions, though in different ways. While in the Mask condition the GCE emerged only when target and response positions corresponded, in the Control condition it emerged only when they did not correspond. These results indicate that people with face masks induce us to jointly orient our visual attention in the direction of the seen gaze in those conditions resembling a general approaching behavior. This is likely promoted by the fact that we tend to perceive wearing the mask as a personal safety measure and, thus, someone wearing the face mask is perceived as a trustworthy person. In contrast, people with a patch on their face can be perceived as more threatening, therefore inducing a GCE in those conditions associated with a general avoidance behavior. (shrink)

Summary This paper analyses documents from several US archives in order to examine the controversy that raged within the US scientific community over Dayton C. Miller's ether-drift experiments. In 1925, Miller announced that his repetitions of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment had shown a slight but positive result: an ether-drift of about 10 kilometres per second. Miller's discovery triggered a long debate in the US scientific community about the validity of Einstein's relativity theories. Between 1926 and 1930 some researchers repeated the (...) Michelson-Morley experiment, but no one found the same effect as Miller had. The inability to confirm Miller's result, paired with the fact that no other ether theory existed that could compete with special relativity theory, made his result an enigmatic one. It thus remained of little interest to the scientific community until 1954, when Robert S. Shankland and three colleagues reanalysed the data and proposed that Miller's periodic fringe shift could be attributed to temperature effects. Whereas most of the scientific community readily accepted this explanation as the conclusion of the matter, some contemporary anti-relativists have contested Shankland's methodology up to now. The historical accounts of Miller's experiments provide contradictory reports of the reaction of the US scientific community and do not analyse the mechanisms of the controversy. I will address this shortcoming with an examination of private correspondence of several actors involved in these experiments between 1921 and 1955. A complex interconnection of epistemic elements, sociological factors, and personal interests played a fundamental role in the closure of this experimental controversy in the early 1930s, as well as in the reception of Shankland's reanalysis in the 1950s. (shrink)

This article explores the ethical concept of neutrality through use of a psychiatric clinical vignette. In this case a psychiatry resident is faced with the treatment of a patient who was found by the FBI to be in possession of child pornography. Although not accused of any other crimes, the patient was a fugitive from the law and requesting treatment for pedophilia. Faced with the pressures of limited resources and anxiety about the patient's dangerousness to others, the resident and his (...) supervisor tried to strike a balance between the ethical principles of neutrality and beneficence. Through this vignette, the importance of neutrality, as well as how it can be compromised by other pressures such as expediency and anxiety, is explored. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOver the last decade, Europe’s immigration regulations have raised concerns regarding human rights and divided the public opinion on transnational movement, particularly with the ever-growi...

Recent studies have shown that we should re-think the value creation process leveraging the utility functions of multiple stakeholders . Following this approach, we develop a case study that shows a real example of shared value creation. The case focuses on Palm, a small Italian pallet manufacturer that has adopted a socially and environmentally conscious business model that produces value for multiple stakeholders.

The Pythagorean women are a group of female philosophers who were followers of Pythagoras and are credited with authoring a series of letters and treatises. In both stages of the history of Pythagoreanism – namely, the fifth-century Pythagorean societies and the Hellenistic Pythagorean writings – the Pythagorean woman is viewed as an intellectual, a thinker, a teacher, and a philosopher. The purpose of this Element is to answer the question: what kind of philosopher is the Pythagorean woman? The traditional picture (...) of the Pythagorean female sage is that of an expert of the household. The author argues that the available evidence is more complex and conveys the idea of the Pythagorean woman as both an expert on the female sphere and a well-rounded thinker philosophising about the principles of the cosmos, human society, the immortality of the soul, numbers, and harmonics. (shrink)

This article explores the state of the art in relation to the theme of living and working together in organizations and proposes a new theoretical model. A thorough examination of literature highlights that there are almost no works specifically coping with this theme, defining its theoretical perspective and specifying the choice of proposed indicators. Several, instead, are the works indirectly dealing with living and working together in organizations, mostly considered equivalent to the quality of interpersonal relationships, or developed starting from (...) the theme of diversity and conflict. In reference to the social context, an important defining effort was carried out by Renzo Carli, who defines living together [convivenza in Italian] as the symbolic component of a social relationship, generated by three components: belonging systems, strangers and rules of the game. Living together means integrating these three elements of a relationship in order to create innovative products. This article proposes a... (shrink)

The year 1968 is universally considered a watershed in history, as the world was experiencing an accelerated growth of anti-establishment protests that would have long-lasting impacts on the cultural, social, and political spheres of human life. On September 26, amid social and political unrest across the globe, 62 physicists gathered in Geneva to found the European Physical Society. Among these were the official representatives of the national physical societies of 18 countries in both Eastern and Western Europe, who signed the (...) constitution in spite of the political divides of the Cold War. According to the main proponent of the society, Italian physicist Gilberto Bernardini, the success of the initiative was the realization of a dream: the institutional formation of a single community of European physicists, a representation of a culturally unified Europe that he described as a “single highly civilized nation.” The analysis of as yet unexplored archival materials of Bernardini and other protagonists in the establishment of the society has enabled an investigation of the historical development of science diplomacy in two interconnected ways: first, by elucidating how the actors involved, especially those in Western Europe, interpreted their role as diplomats amid particularly turbulent reconfigurations of international political relations; second, by interpreting the attempt to institutionalize transnational scientific networks with the establishment of a non-governmental organization as a tool to influence world political affairs. It will first be shown that the political ideal of a culturally unified Europe was deeply intertwined with the socio-professional interests of a specific community, mostly involved with CERN. I will argue that, in the process of establishing the society, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact armed forces led many of the Western physicists involved in this process to reframe the role of the European Physical Society as a tool to diffuse liberal-democratic values and to support political dissidents in Eastern Europe. (shrink)

1. In the last decade, technological systems based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) architectures entered our lives at an increasingly fast pace. Virtual assistants facilitate our daily tasks, recom...

This chapter argues that our ambiguity toward renewable technologies arises from our understanding that the nature of the machine is somehow alien and external to us. Historically, we have thought of the machine as lacking cultural signification. As a result, the machine has been relegated to mere utility rather than having any axiological or human reality. Thinking of the machine as utterly other has exercised a certain xenophobia or misoneism as well as an uncritical technophilia. This ambiguity arises from our (...) acceptance that technology is based on the principle of conservation, a sameness underlying change that is traceable to Aristotle’s theory of causality with its implicit ontological distinction between natural and human made objects. To overcome such teleology, we need a different ontological ground on which to consider the concept of technology. Gilbert Simondon gives us such tools. His work is slowly surfacing with thinkers such as Bernard Stiegler and more recently in the English-speaking academy with thinkers such as Elizabeth Grosz and Andrew Feenberg. 1 This chapter will show how both Aristotle’s phenomenology of technology and Simondon’s ontogenesis can help to think though the challenges of renewable technologies associated with climate change. It will outline Aristotle’s phenomenology of technology and illustrate the intersection and departure of Simondon’s ontogenetic epistemology through his three-phase principle of individuation: elemental phase, individual phase, and ensemble phase. For Simondon all objects become whole (sunolos) though a process of individuation, which explains the coming into being and the existence of beings of all kinds. There are three phases: the elemental which is the spontaneous excess of being; individuation is the successive multistability of being where being splits becoming both the individual and the many; and finally the ensemble . (shrink)

The question of whether the idealized models of theoretical economics are explanatory has been the subject of intense philosophical debate. It is sometimes presupposed that either a model provides the actual explanation or it does not provide an explanation at all. Yet, two sets of issues are relevant to the evaluation of model-based explanation: what conditions should a model satisfy in order to count as explanatory and does the model satisfy those conditions. My aim in this paper is to unpack (...) this distinction and show that separating the first set of issues from the second is crucial to an accurate diagnosis of the distinctive challenges that economic models pose. Along the way I sketch a view of model-based explanation in economics that focuses on the role that non-empirical and empirical strategies play in increasing confidence in the adequacy of a given model-based explanation. (shrink)