Presents the inside story of the creation of the atomic bomb in terms understandable to the layman, and discusses the crisis of conscience following the demonstration of the bomb's destructive effects on Hiroshima.

Předmětem této studie je analýza jednoho z aktuálně předkládaných řešení tzv. problému dvou kultur, který roku 1959 formuloval Charles Percy Snow, a to tzv. třetí kultuře, kterou v polovině devadesátých let ve stejnojmenné práci představil John Brockman. Mým záměrem zde bude kriticky zhodnotit Brockmanovo pojetí "třetí kultury" a předložit argumenty ve prospěch tvrzení, že v souvislosti s ním ve skutečnosti nelze hovořit o řešení problému dvou kultur, ale jedná se naopak o názorný doklad přetrvávající existence a aktuálnosti (...) tohoto problému. Pro tyto účely bude v textu využit koncept tzv. obchodních zón (trading zones), který zavádí filosof a historik vědy Peter Galison k popisu a vysvětlení možných způsobů interakce a dorozumění vědců napříč nesouměřitelnými vědeckými disciplínami. Jak se pokusím ukázat, tento koncept lze stejně úspěšně aplikovat i na problematiku komunikace právě mezi přírodními vědami a vědami humanitními. (shrink)

The article discusses the importance of practice for conducting research on digital culture. It poses questions about whether one should possess technical competences in the field of digital humanities and in what way they can facilitate research attempting to describe the contemporary world. This issue is analysed using the theory of the third culture developed by Charles Percy Snow. The argument also focuses on other researchers representing various strategies for combining practice with theory, such as: Lev Manovich, (...) Alexander R. Galloway, Jan Stasieńko and Mirosław Filiciak. The aim of the article is to describe the emerging, new image of a humanist studying digital culture, whose new competence may be seen as a remedy for the ongoing crisis of the humanities. (shrink)

Research examining firm and industry effects on performance has primarily focused on the financial aspects of firm performance. Corporate social performance is a major aspect of firm performance that has been under-examined empirically in the literature to date. Adding to the fundamental debate regarding firm versus industry effects on performance, this study uses data drawn from the Kinder, Lydenberg and Domini Co. database to examine the degree to which CSP is related to firm, industry, and temporal factors. The results of (...) these analyses suggest that CSP tends to change in a linear manner over time; however, the slope of this line varies across firms and industries. These findings are supported by several robustness checks accounting for autocorrelation, alternative measures of industry, different samples commonly used when using KLD data to measure CSP, and alternative measures of CSP when using the KLD database. The authors also directly compare firm, industry, and temporal effects between CSP and financial performance. (shrink)

Throughout his literary career Walker Percy read and studied the philosophical thought of Charles Sanders Peirce in an attempt to re-present in language the world as Percy knew it. Beginning in 1984 and ending in 1990, the year of his death, Percy corresponded with Kenneth Laine Ketner about the "semiotic" of Peirce. Their letters - honest, instructive, and often filled with down-home humor - record an epistolary friendship of two men both passionately interested in Peirce's theory (...) of signs. This volume of letters provides a rich philosophical perspective for better understanding the fiction and nonfiction of Walker Percy. (shrink)

Martin was a twenty-nine-year-old anthropologist working on animism in Siberia when a bear leaped on her. He raked her with his claws, put her head into his mouth, and was about to crush her skull when she stabbed him with her ice axe. He loped off into the woods, carrying part of Martin's lower jaw and, if Martin is right, half of her soul—but leaving half of his soul in return. Martin lay bleeding in the snow. She managed to (...) fashion a tourniquet that slowed the bleeding from her leg. Miles away, a friend was fishing. He fell backward and blacked out. When he came to, he knew that something bad had happened to Martin.But was it bad?It certainly seemed so for a while. A Russian helicopter lifted her to hospital. Her wounds were treated, but the hospital seemed more brutal than the bear. She was strapped to the bed, unable to move her arms or legs. She wheezed through a tracheostomy tube. A malevolent nurse rammed food agonizingly into her with a syringe. Copulating doctors and nurses moaned and grunted in the side room next to her. Her jaw was roughly screwed together. On the plane back to France, the low cabin pressure reopened her scars. Her weeping mother dabbed at the blood with a tissue. In the French hospital, Martin took off her bandages in front of the mirror and wept “for my bear, for my old, lost face.”She had been invaded. She was now half-human, half-bear, a Siberian friend had told her: “He didn't want to kill you, he wanted to mark you. Now you are medka, she who lives between the worlds.” To be healed, she had to forgive the bear, for she would not otherwise forgive herself. At night she went “underground” to “speak to my bear.” Her head was “a ball scored with swollen red-claw marks and sutures. I am nothing like myself anymore, and yet I've never looked more like my own spirit; it has been imprinted on my body.”The invading bear had created a bridgehead into her. Other entities followed. The most immediately dangerous were bacteria and surgical scalpels. The surgeons did not know what they were toying with: “My body has become a territory where Western surgeons parley with Siberian bears. Or rather, where they try to establish communication.”The surgeons never did establish communication, and so their sort of healing would not work. Martin knew that she would only find healing in her “lair” in the Siberian forest, from those “who know bears and the questions they bring with them, who still speak with them in their dreams, who know that nothing happens by chance.” And so back she went.There was no epiphany. But there was the quiet healing that comes from recruiting all the agencies in the tundra; in distilling agency itself and dripping it over her wounds. And asking the right questions can heal too. The right questions are questions that are too big for answers.What is this book about? Martin is clear that what did not happen was that “a bear attack[ed] a French anthropologist somewhere in the mountains of Kamchatka.” What did happen was that “a bear and a woman [met] and the frontiers between two worlds implode[d].... Mythical time meets reality; past time joins the present moment; dream meets flesh.”Eye of the Wild poses an unnerving set of fundamental questions about what it means to say, as we all blithely do: “I am”—about how many souls we can accommodate, how we can broker a respectful or at least tolerable conversation between them; about our porosity to the cosmos we comfortingly assert is out there. This book is plangent, frigid, and chilling. It is a mosaic of jagged fragments that, viewed in the right light, perhaps add up to the scarred face of a young woman, all the lovelier for the scars. Yet the fragments do not add up to a proposition, for this is a book about what happens when you are brave enough to go to a place where no proposition could ever land. (shrink)

Lucas van Valckenborch’s Winter Landscape hangs in the Kinsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It was painted four hundred years ago as one of a set of the four seasons. Measured by sales of reproductions, it is one of the most popular paintings in the museum, though it is by no means the most distinguished example of the genre to which it belongs. The picture is a snow scene. In the long series of represented planed that recede from foreground to horizon, (...) fallen snow covers fields and roves. Across the surface of the canvas and scarcely diminishing in scale from bottom to top, touches of white paint represent falling snow. It is not a small painting, and these are not mere feathery indications, but palpable dabs from a loaded brush. To a taste fed on Modernist painting—or, for the pedantic, to a prejudice fuelled by Modernist accounts of painting—it is by virtue of this surprising frankness that the painting achieves more than mere anecdotal charm. It is not the illusion of depth in the picture that holds our sophisticated attention, nor the atmospheric re-creation of a leaden sky, nor do we admit to being engaged by the over-rehearsed animation of the peasants. What gives us pleasurable pause is the strange and distinctive form of skepticism about appearances that is set in play when the allure of imaginative depth meets resistance from the vividness of decorated surface.5 5. Wollheim uses the term ‘twofoldness’ for ‘this strange duality—of seeing the marked surface, and of seeing something in the surface.’ In his account this experience leads to a thematizing of the image, which ‘ushers in representation.’ Translated into his terminology, my suggestion would be that the Winter Landscape can be seen as catering to a Modernistic taste for the thematizing of ‘twofoldness’ itself. Charles Harrison is staff tutor and reader in the history of art at the Open University. He is the author of English Art and Modernism 1900-1939 , and he is now completing a second volume, English Art and Modernism 1940-1985. He is co-author of A Provisional History of Art & Language , and his most recent book—Essays on Art and Language—is due out in 1989. He has been associated with the Art & Language group since 1971 and is editor of the journal Art-Language. (shrink)

This paper explores the potential pedagogical benefits of philosophy for resolving conflicts in academia and for introducing students to other disciplines. Following C.P Snow's definition of academic disciplines as representing a culture, the author argues that philosophical study can provide a means to reduce strife between science and the humanities. Defining philosophy as self-reflection and prescribing pedagogical methods which open philosophical study onto cultural studies, the author offers the notion of philosophy as an introduction to a liberal arts education. (...) Such an approach to philosophy seeks to demonstrate the interdependence between philosophy and other disciplines and bears the additional benefit of emphasizing the application of philosophy to students’ lives. (shrink)

The American novelist Walker Percy (1916-90) considered himself a "thief of Peirce", because he found in the views of C.S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, an alternative approach to prevailing reductionist theories in order to understand what we human beings are and what the peculiar nature of our linguistic activity is. -/- This paper describes, quoting widely from Percy, how abduction is the spontaneous activity of our reason by which we couple meanings and experience in our linguistic expressions. (...) This coupling of personal creativity and cultural tradition makes it possible to bridge the gaps between persons and cultures. (shrink)

This article conceptualizes contemporary geopolitical violence in the Arctic through a semiotic register. Different living beings perceive different things, and these differences amount to different worlds, not merely different worldviews. Building on Eduardo Kohn’s reading of the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, and theorists of biosemiotics and ecosemiotics, the article analyses how signs in and between living organisms and their environments are political matters of life and death. Via the themes of invisibility, colors, and snow, the article traces (...) semiotic relations between different living beings and their Arctic ecologies to weave a semiotic understanding of contemporary geopolitical violence in the Arctic and the role of climate change therein. The article defines the violence of climate change as a violence of not being able to recognize oneself, and builds on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s concept of multinaturalism to explain what it means that one world ruins other worlds. (shrink)

Percy has been studied under several headings: Catholic, Southerner, Existentialist. Two such aspects, however, have been neglected: the strong influence of Charles Sanders Peirce, plus Percy’s deep competence in laboratory science. His typescript essay, “Peirce and Modern Semiotic,” presented here, shows that Percy was well ahead of his contemporaries in understanding the scientific and philosophical importance of Peirce’s Semeiotic, the Theory of Semeioses. Percy particularly pointed to the experiential importance of “taking the other’s meaning.” He (...) regarded that common phenomenon as vital, and genuine—a kind of event that behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner or Charles Morris explained away as nothing but a dynamic dyadic causal process. Percy’s essay definitively blocks those reductions. (shrink)

Inspired by Charles Taylor’s locating of Herder and Rousseau’s “expressivism” in Marx’s understanding of the human as artist, I begin this essay by examining expressivism in Taylor, followed by its counterpart in M. H. Abrams’s work, namely the wind as metaphor in British Romantic poetry. I then further explore this expressivism/wind connection in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and Marx’s The German Ideology. Ultimately I conclude that these expressive winds lead to poetic gesture per se, (...) and thereby, to a kind of poetry at the heart of Marx’s philosophy. (shrink)

The article focuses on the concept of reasonableness as described by American philosopher Charles S. Peirce in his writings dating between 1899 and 1908. Pierce's writings considered by the author are found in the books "Contributions to The Nation," vols. 1-4, edited by K. L. Ketner and J. E. Cook, and "Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce," vols. 1-8, edited by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss and A. W. Burks. The author considers 20th century Western philosophies of reason, pragmatism, (...) scientism, thirdness, postmodernism, and philosopher Walker Percy's criticisms of Peirce's arguments regarding reasonableness. (shrink)

There is debate as to whether quantum field theory is, at bottom, a quantum theory of fields or particles. One can take a field approach to the theory, using wave functionals over field configurations, or a particle approach, using wave functions over particle configurations. This article argues for a field approach, presenting three advantages over a particle approach: particle wave functions are not available for photons, a classical field model of the electron gives a superior account of both spin and (...) self-interaction as compared to a classical particle model, and the space of field wave functionals appears to be larger than the space of particle wave functions. The article also describes two important tasks facing proponents of a field approach: legitimize or excise the use of Grassmann numbers for fermionic field values and in wave functional amplitudes, and describe how quantum fields give rise to particle-like behavior. (shrink)

In this essay I seek to critically evaluate some forms of holism and organicism in biological thought, as a more deflationary echo to Gilbert and Sarkar's reflection on the need for an 'umbrella' concept to convey the new vitality of holistic concepts in biology (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000). Given that some recent discussions in theoretical biology call for an organism concept (from Moreno and Mossio’s work on organization to Kirschner et al.’s research paper in Cell, 2000, building on chemistry to (...) articulate what they called “molecular vitalism,” studying the “vitalistic” properties of molecular, cellular, and organismal function, and Pepper and Herron’s suggestion in their 2008 paper that organisms define a category that evolutionary biology cannot do without), the question, what concept of organicism are they calling for? To what extent are such claims philosophically committed to a non-naturalistic concept of organism as organizing centre, as a foundational rather than heuristic concept – or possibly a “biochauvinism,” to use Di Paolo’s term (Di Paolo 2009)? My aim in this paper is to conceptually clarify the forms of holism and organicism that are involved in these cases (and I acknowledge that the study of early 20th-century holisms [Peterson 2010] indicates that not all of them were in fact ‘organicist’ or ‘biologistic’). I suggest that contemporary holists are still potentially beholden to a certain kind of vitalism or “biochauvinism”; but that when they reduce their claims to mere heuristics, conversely, they risk losing sight of a certain kind of organizational “thickness”, a “vital materiality” (Wheeler 2010) which is characteristic of biological systems (Bechtel 2007). And I ask if it is possible to articulate a concept of biological holism or organicism which is neither an empirical ‘biochauvinism’ nor a metaphysical ‘vitalism’? (shrink)

I argue that lying in business negotiations is pro tanto wrong and no less wrong than lying in other contexts. First, I assert that lying in general is pro tanto wrong. Then, I examine and refute five arguments to the effect that lying in a business context is less wrong than lying in other contexts. The common thought behind these arguments—based on consent, self-defence, the “greater good,” fiduciary duty, and practicality—is that the particular circumstances which are characteristic of business negotiations (...) are such that the wrongness of lying is either mitigated or eliminated completely. I argue that all these “special exemption” arguments fail. I conclude that, in the absence of a credible argument to the contrary, the same moral constraints must apply to lying in business negotiations as apply to lying in other contexts. Furthermore, I show that for the negotiator, there are real practical benefits from not lying. (shrink)

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism—as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu. That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind”. Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not (...) the extension to the study of the mind of the methods of natural philosophy; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader. Rather, Locke says quite directly if we pay heed to such passages, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct”. There would be more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism, but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which falls under what we now call epistemology becomes an ontology—materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality.. Put differently, I want to examine the shift from the logic of ideas in the seventeenth century to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us, to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe, and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds. (shrink)

In his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and a natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of 'genetic' information, described living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence.” Now, Maupertuis was a Leibnizian of sorts; his molecules possessed higher-level, 'mental' properties, recalling La Mettrie's statement in L'Homme-Machine, that Leibnizians have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul.” (...) But Maupertuis also debated this issue with Diderot, who critiqued this theory in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these can only be 'organizational', i.e., properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism. (shrink)

"As a distinctive philosophy, religious humanism emphasizes man's place in an unfathomed universe, reason as an instrument for discovering the truth, free inquiry as a condition for discerning meaning and purpose, and happiness as a fundamental value. "Man's uniqueness emerges partly from homo sapiens' capacity to employ symbols effectively. For this reason, Willard's provocative book is not a celebration of controversy but a sophisticated study exploring the grounds of man's knowledge. Drawing upon phenomenologists such as Alfred Schultz, psychologists such as (...) George Kelley, and argumentation philosophers such as Stephen Toulmin, Willard makes a genuine contribution to intellectual inquiry by extending essential consideration about human knowledge. The [author] demonstrates how 'secular sources' provide a fundamental resource in developing religious understanding from argumentative interactions. "Highly insightful and intellectually refreshing... _Argumentation and the Social Grounds of Knowledge_ provides thought-provoking reading for humanists concerned with rational inquiry, communication theory, religious philosophy, and liberal education." _--Religious Humanism_. (shrink)

Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus (and lesser-known figures in the decades prior), and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz and Stahl in the early 1700s, the question of ‘Life’, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanism to medical Newtonianism, from Stahlian animism to the (...) discourse on the ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medicine, models of living being were constructed in opposition to ‘merely anatomical’, structural, mechanical models. It is therefore striking that the classic narratives of the Scientific Revolution conspicuously avoid any consideration of what status to grant living beings in a newly physicalized universe (I discuss this in Wolfe 2011, 2019 chapt. 1). Neither Harvey, nor Boyle, nor Locke (to name some likely candidates, the latter having studied with Willis and collaborated with Sydenham) ever ask what makes organisms unique, or conversely, what does not. In this chapter I seek to establish how something we might call ‘the knowledge of Life’, to use an expression of Georges Canguilhem’s, emerged as part of early modernity without being part of the mainstream history of life science. This leads to the question, can one can correlate early modern “knowledge of life” with the emergence of a science called ‘biology’? (see Zammito 2018, Wolfe 2019, Bognon-Küss and Wolfe eds. 2019). It was once fashionable to speak of, e.g. ‘precursors of Darwin’, and then Canguilhem and Foucault famously did away with the category of precursor. But how then do we account for the phase that precedes the constitution of a science? With the case of biology, how do we account for the increasing fascination with the ontology of Life during the decades prior to the ‘naming of biology’, as McLaughlin has called it, at the end of the eighteenth century? This increased focus on Life and the ontology of Life sits awkwardly, both with mainstream narratives of the Scientific Revolution and of the history of biology. In seeking to address this increased focus (in which vitalism plays a role but was by no means the only conceptual actor: Wolfe 2020), I critically examine Foucault’s notorious claim (Foucault 1966) that there was no such thing as ‘Life’ in the eighteenth century and thus no such thing as biology. (shrink)

Jones and Coleman are among a handful of otherwise normal as a child and the number 5 was red and 6 was green. This the- people who have synesthesia. They experience the ordinary ory does not answer why only some people retain such vivid world in extraordinary ways and seem to inhabit a mysterious sensory memories, however. You might _think _of cold when you no-man’s-land between fantasy and reality. For them the sens- look at a picture of an ice cube, (...) but you probably do not feel es—touch, taste, hearing, vision and smell—get mixed up in- cold, no matter how many encounters you may have had with stead of remaining separate. ice and snow during your youth. Modern scientists have known about synesthesia since Another prevalent idea is that synesthetes are merely being 1880, when Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, pub- metaphorical when they describe the note C flat as “red” or say lished a paper in _Nature _on the phenomenon. But most have that chicken tastes “pointy”—just as you and I might speak of brushed it aside as fakery, an artifact of drug use (LSD and a “loud” shirt or “sharp” cheddar cheese. Our ordinary lan- mescaline can produce similar effects) or a mere curiosity. guage is replete with such sense-related metaphors, and perhaps About four years ago, however, we and others began to un- synesthetes are just especially gifted in this regard. cover brain processes that could account for synesthesia. Along We began trying to find out whether synesthesia is a gen- the way, we also found new clues to some of the most mysteri- uine sensory experience in 1999. This deceptively simple ques- ous aspects of the human mind, such as the emergence of ab- tion had plagued researchers in this field for decades. One nat- stract thought, metaphor and perhaps even language. ural approach is to start by asking the subjects outright: “Is this A common explanation of synesthesia is that the affected just a memory, or do you actually see the color as if it were right people are simply experiencing childhood memories and asso- in front of you?” When we tried asking this question, we did ciations.. (shrink)

long version of review forthcoming in much shorter version in Classical Review.

A common and enduring early modern intuition is that materialists reduce organisms in general and human beings in particular to automata. Wasn’t a famous book of the time entitled L’Homme-Machine? In fact, the machine is employed as an analogy, and there was a specifically materialist form of embodiment, in which the body is not reduced to an inanimate machine, but is conceived as an affective, flesh-and-blood entity. We discuss how mechanist and vitalist models of organism exist in a more complementary (...) relation than hitherto imagined, with conceptions of embodiment resulting from experimental physiology. From La Mettrie to Bernard, mechanism, body and embodiment are constantly overlapping, modifying and overdetermining one another; embodiment came to be scientifically addressed under the successive figures of vie organique and then milieu intérieur, thereby overcoming the often lamented divide between scientific image and living experience. (shrink)

A reflection on overcoming Natur vs Geisteswissenschaften oppositions in thinking about the 'cultured brain' and plasticity.

Early modern automata, understood as efforts to ‘model’ life, to grasp its singular properties and/or to unveil and demystify its seeming inaccessibility and mystery, are not just fascinating liminal, boundary, hybrid, crossover or go-between objects, while they are all of those of course. They also pose a direct challenge to some of our common conceptions about mechanism and embodiment. They challenge the simplicity of the distinction between a purported ‘mechanistic’ worldpicture, its ontology and its goals, and on the other hand (...) an attempt to understand ourselves and animals more broadly as flesh-and-blood, affective entities (that is, not just breathing and perspiring, but also desiring and ‘sanguine’ machines, as La Mettrie might have put it). In what follows I reflect on the complexity of early modern mechanism faced with the (living) body, and its mirror image, contemporary theories of embodiment. At times, embodiment theory seems to be governed by a fascination with what the Artificial Life researcher Ezequiel Di Paolo has called ‘biochauvinism’ (Di Paolo, “Extended Life”): an unquestioned belief that ‘living bodies are special’. Yet how does the theorist define this special status? The question is apparently a simple one, or at least promptly yields an aporia which appears simple: to borrow a provocative phrase from Terry Eagleton, embodiment theory is obsessed by the body but terrified of biology. Yet at the same time, at least since Hubert Dreyfus and Andy Clark’s groundbreaking works, embodiment has been a legit part of cognitive science, yielding the even more recently emerged field of ‘embodied cognition’ (see the work of Larry Shapiro), which seeks to depart from traditional cognitive science, especially the latter’s understanding of cognition as computational, in order to instead underscore “the significance of an organism’s body in how and what the organism thinks,” in Shapiro’s words. (shrink)

This book features new essays by philosophers, psychologists, and a theologian on the important topic of virtue development. The essays engage with work from multiple disciplines and thereby seek to bridge disciplinary divides. The volume is a significant contribution to the emerging interdisciplinary field of virtue development studies.

This anthology of selections from the works of noted philosophers affords the student an immediate contact with the unique historical background of the philosophy of science. The selections, many of which have not been readily accessible, follow the development of the philosophy of science from 1786 to 1927. Each selection is preceded by a brief introduction by the editor designed to familiarize the reader with a particular philosopher and provide insights into his work. Joseph J. Kockelmans divides the selections into (...) several sections. Part 1, from 17861850, includes chapters by Immanuel Kant, on the metaphysical foundations of natural science, John Frederick William Herschel, on experience and the analysis of phenomena, William Whewell, on the nature and conditions of inductive science, and John Stuart Mill, on induction and the law of universal causation; part 2, from 18701899, includes chapters by Hermann Von Helmholtz, on the origin and significance of geometrical axioms, William Stanley Jevons, on the philosophy of inductive inference, John Bernard Stallo, on the kinetic theory of gasses and the conditions of the validity of scientific hypotheses, Ernst Mach, on the economical nature of physical inquiry, Karl Pearson, on perceptual and conceptual space, Emile Boutroux, on mechanical laws, Heinrich Hertz, on the appropriateness, correctness, and permissibility of scientific theories, and Ludwig Boltzmann, on the fundamental principles and basic equations of mechanics. The third part, covering the first decade of the twentieth century, includes chapters by Henri Jules Poincare, on science and reality, Charles Peirce, on Induction, Pierre Marie Duhem, on the laws of physics, William Ostwald, on energetism and mechanics, Emile Meyerson, on identity of thought and nature as the final goal of science, Ernst Cassirer, on functional concepts of natural science; part 4, from 19101927, includes chapters by Charles Dunbar Broad, on phenomenalism, Alfred North Whitehead, on time, space, and material, Bertrand Russell, on the world of physics and the world of sense, Norman Robert Cambbell, on the meaning of science, Moritz Schlick, on basic issues of the philosophy of natural science, and Percy Williams Bridgman, on the concepts of space, time, and causality. Philosophy of Science provides a concise single volume text to the discipline and enables students to understand and evaluate the various trends in our contemporary philosophy of science. Joseph J. Kockelmans is professor emeritus of philosophy at the Pennsylvania State Univers. (shrink)

Jeffrey conditionalization is a rule for updating degrees of belief in light of uncertain evidence. It is usually assumed that the partitions involved in Jeffrey conditionalization are finite and only contain positive-credence elements. But there are interesting examples, involving continuous quantities, in which this is not the case. Q1 Can Jeffrey conditionalization be generalized to accommodate continuous cases? Meanwhile, several authors, such as Kenny Easwaran and Michael Rescorla, have been interested in Kolmogorov’s theory of regular conditional distributions as a possible (...) framework for conditional probability which handles probability-zero events. However the theory faces a major shortcoming: it seems messy and ad hoc. Q2 Is there some axiomatic theory which would justify and constrain the use of rcds, thus serving as a possible foundation for conditional probability? These two questions appear unrelated, but they are not, and this paper answers both. We show that when one appropriately generalizes Jeffrey conditionalization as in Q1, one obtains a framework which necessitates the use of rcds. It is then a short step to develop a general theory which addresses Q2, which we call the theory of extensions. The theory is a formal model of conditioning which recovers Bayesian conditionalization, Jeffrey conditionalization, and conditionalization via rcds as special cases. (shrink)

What is theHistorical epistemologyhistorical epistemologyGayon, JeanOn historical epistemology of the life sciences? In what way does it differ from historico-philosophical reflection on “foundational” or “conceptual” issues in the sciences tout court? This is a question to which Jean Gayon and his mentor Georges CanguilhemCanguilhem, Georges devoted a considerable amount of effort, yielding somewhat different answers, as I will try to show. One obvious difference, as P.-O. MéthotMéthot, Pierre-Olivier has shown, is Gayon’s appropriation of anglophone philosophy of biology; another is Canguilhem'sCanguilhem, (...) Georges way of presenting his work as restricted to contextualized, historicist claims while in fact it is shot through with strong normative (and at times metaphysical) claims on Life, normativity, and value. In this essay I reflect on how to conduct historical epistemologiesHistorical epistemology of the life sciences, focusing on two interrelated cases I have worked on in the past: vitalismVitalism (history of) and the constitution of biology. (shrink)

In earlier work I wrestled with the question of the “ontological status” of organisms. It proved difficult to come to a clear decision, because there are many candidates for what such a status is or would be and of course many definitions of what organisms are. But what happens when we turn to theoretical projects “about” organisms that fall under the heading “organicist”? I first suggest that organicist projects have a problem: a combination of invoking Kant, or at least a (...) Kantian “regulative ideal,” usually presented as the epistemological component (or alternately, the complete overall vision) of a vision of organism – as instantiating natural purposes, as a type of “wholeWhole, wholes” distinct from a merely mechanistically specifiable set of parts, etc. – and a more ontological statement about the inherent or essential features of organisms, typically presented according to a combination of a “list of heroes” or “laundry list” of properties of organisms. This amounts to a category mistake. Other problems concern the too-strict oppositions between mechanism and organi(ci)sm, and symmetrical tendencies to “ontologize” (thus objectifying) properties of organisms and to “subjectify” them (turning them into philosophies of subjectivity). I don’t mean to suggest that no one should be an organicist or that Kant is a name that should be banished from civilized society. Rather, to borrow awkwardly from Sade, “organicists, one more effort!” if one wants a naturalistic, non-foundationalist concept of organicism, which is indeed quite active in recent theoretical biology, and which arguably was already alive in the organismic and even vitalist theories of thinkers like Goldstein and Canguilhem. (shrink)