La crise financière de 2007-2008 et la crise économique subséquente ont mis en avant deux blocages majeurs : les dysfonctionnements profonds et répétés des institutions et des instruments financiers ainsi que le silence moral des gestion­naires de la finance à propos des responsabilités liées à l’exercice de leur métier. À partir de l’expérience française, le présent article vise à faire le point sur l’évolution de l’enseignement de l’éthique dans les programmes en finance depuis la crise, et ce, à partir de (...) trois questions : dans quelle mesure le sens éthique a-t‑il évolué chez les praticiens de la finance depuis la crise de 2007-2008 ? En quoi l’enseignement de l’éthique en finance, comme lieu de formation principal des gestionnaires en finance, a-t-il changé depuis 2008, et quels sont les blocages et les changements ? Quelles initiatives et perspectives pourraient dépasser la situa­tion actuelle ? (shrink)

This paper attacks the perennial philosophical and scientific quest for a simple and unified vision of the world. Without denying the attraction of this vision, I argue that such a goal often seriously distorts our understanding of complex phenomena. The argument is illustrated with reference to simplistic attempts to provide extremely general views of biology, and especially of human nature, through the theory of evolution. Although that theory is a fundamental ingredient of our scientific world view, it provides only one (...) of a number of perspectives that are required for an understanding of biology in general, and human behaviour in paticular. The argument is connected to the replacement of views of science in terms of universal laws with views that emphasise ranges of models more locally suited to specific phenomena. (shrink)

How should philosophy approach religious experience, which by definition surpasses its competence? Can philosophy do more than describe the religious experience without discussing its object? Can religion make genuine truth claims - especially when the prevalence of suffering and evil in the world seems to belie those claims? These are some of the basic questions raised in this engaging collection of essays by philosopher Louis Dupre. According to Dupre, a philosophical analysis of faith must take account of the unique system (...) of symbols in which it expresses its beliefs, rituals, and modes of worship. The justification of religious symbols has become a particular problem in an age that tends to separate the objective from the subjective, interpreting the former literally and denying objective reality to the latter. Dupre's essays on von Balthasar's theory of religious form and on the nature of ritual attempt to restore the original meaning of religious symbols, while integrating them with the modern emphasis on human creativity. "As this slim but remarkable book of essays makes abundantly clear, its author bids fair to have an influence that will last into the next century, at the last: there is something about his philosophy that seems not just nourishing for a day or hour but perennially satisfying. " - Commonweal "Dupr writes with the clarity of an analytical philosopher about the issues of experience dear to phenomenologists and with a depth of historical understanding and sensitivity to the life of faith that is rare now in philosophy. In short, this book is that all too unusual phenomenon, religious philosophy. It is done very well, indeed." - Theology Today " This is a wise and thought-provoking collection." - Modern Theology. (shrink)

This paper attacks the perennial philosophical and scientific quest for a simple and unified vision of the world. Without denying the attraction of this vision, I argue that such a goal often seriously distorts our understanding of complex phenomena. The argument is illustrated with reference to simplistic attempts to provide extremely general views of biology, and especially of human nature, through the theory of evolution. Although that theory is a fundamental ingredient of our scientific world view, it provides only one (...) of a number of perspectives that are required for an understanding of biology in general, and human behaviour in paticular. The argument is connected to the replacement of views of science in terms of universal laws with views that emphasise ranges of models more locally suited to specific phenomena. (shrink)

The traditional home for the concept of a natural kind in biology is of course taxonomy, the sorting of organisms into a nested hierarchy of kinds. Many taxonomists and most philosophers of biology now deny that it is possible to sort organisms into natural kinds. Many do not think that biological taxonomy sorts them into kinds at all, but rather identifies them as parts of historical individuals. But at any rate if the species, genera and so on of biological taxonomy (...) are kinds at all, there are various respects in which they fall short of the traditional requirements of naturalness. The members of biological taxa lack essential properties that make them members of a particular kind: any properties specific enough to belong only to members of the kind cannot be assumed to belong to all members of the kind. And if there are laws applying to members of biological taxa they are laws of very minor and local importance and, in view of the preceding point, at best probabilistic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:846 BOOK REVIEWS Marx's Socwl Critique of Culture. By Loms DUPRE. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Pp. ix + 299. $30.00 (cloth) and $9.95 (paper). Modernity has produced in equal measure material abundance and critical disdain. Its critics may he roughly divided into two groups. Negative critics deny all value to modernity and long for a glorious past or a perfect future; the romanticism of an Othmar Spann (...) or the utopian anarchism of a Mikhail Bakunin provide excellent examples of this type. Of more interest to political theory, however, are the dialectical critics who both affirm and deny the modern project; Rousseau and Marx are the greatest thinkers in this category. Louis Dupre is certainly a critic of modernity. The nature of his complaint remains to he determined. I should begin by saying that Dupre's hook neither condemns nor worships Marx. From the start he sets for himself the unfashionable task of understanding his author before passing judgment on his ideas. Hence, Dupre explicitly distinguishes interpretation from critique and devotes most of this hook to elucidating Marx's ideas. Some readers would perhaps agree with Hahermas that interpretation is always critique, hut I find that Dupre generally maintains this distinction in these pages. I turn first to his reading of Marx. This is not a hook about what might he called high culture, a civilization 's achievements in expressing the human spirit. Dupre relies little on Marx and Engel's scattered reflections on art and society, and he spends relatively few pages on the Frankfurt School and their critique of contemporary popular culture. Dupre is rather a philosopher using Marx to think about culture in a fundamental way. His subject is modernity itself and particularly Marx's criticism of the essentially modern separation of culture and activity. The first part of the hook focuses on Marx's conception of alienation. For almost half a century questions about the unity of Marx's early and late writings have accompanied explications of Entfremdung. Dupre sides with those who see a unity of purpose in the works of the young and the old Marx. Although the idea of alienation appears rarely in Das Kapital, Dupre argues that Marx continually attacked bourgeois society for separating subject and object. Culture thus becomes in capitalist societies an object of exchange value that stands in opposition to its producers, a commodity like all others. The second chapter pursues Marx's belief that alienation must he understood socially and historically. Here Dupre provides a subtle interpretation of Marx's conceptions of base and superstructure. He concludes that Marx rejected the logical extremes of determinism and voluntarism BOOK REVIEWS 847 in history. Instead, the rational will of the proletariat was viewed as the culmination of social development. Yet, as Dupre notes, Marx's belief in the general principle that history is progressive turns on his specific analysis of the spread of capitalism; the generalization about history depends in the end on unproven assumptions about the development of capitalism. Dupre devotes his third chapter to a broad and learned discussion of the role of the dialectic in Marx and Marxist political theory. Marx himself did not provide a complete and clear account of dialectical contradiction; any tension that might lead to the destruction of capitalism fell within Marx's understanding of contradiction. Dupre's conclusion that Marx ultimately founded his dialectical method on an undefended teleology will, I think, ring true to most students of the subject. His discussion of the realist interpretation of the dialectic will occasion controversy largely because Dupre believes Engel's methodological ideas in Anti-Dukring can he legitimately associated with Marx's views. This is an important and damning link, for, of course, the scientism enunciated in Anti-Dukring took Marxism a long way toward both the relatively benign orthodoxy of the German Social Democrats and the horrible monism of Stalin. For Marx, however, the dialectic was more than anything else a way of positing the loss of social and culture unity and of foreseeing their reintegration. His exposition of Marx's atempt to unify economic and social activity contains a thoughtful reconstruction of the concept of value in classical economics... (shrink)

Si notre aujourd’hui est gouverné par le temps à gagner, par le culte de la performance, et par l’information, la question qui subsiste et résiste est celle du questionnement de l’existence : quelle forme donner à son existence?Cette question est le problème de la formation et de l’éducation, à l’encontre du formatage général, posée par Nietzsche dans Schopenhauer éducateur. Rencontre par la lecture du philosophe-éducateur, qui émancipe, invite et incite à l’écoute de soi et de l’autre en soi, dans un (...) désapprentissage contre notre temps (celui essentiellement de la hâte, du gain et du profit, du management et de la gestion) qui ouvre à une transformation du soi, à la fois éthique et esthétique. (shrink)

L’expérience est la plupart du temps entendue selon la vulgate philosophique et épistémologique comme une expérimentation technoscientifique. Mais cette acception oublie un sens plus originaire de l’experientia. Ce sens est le temps. Or si l’on regarde ce que signifie l’expérience « temporale », c’est-à-dire extatique, on s’aperçoit qu’elle est une mise à l’épreuve, un éprouver hors de soi, c’est-à-dire l’expérience affectuelle d’un irreprésentable. C’est de cela dont témoignent les artistes, et spécialement les écrivains Clarice Lispector avec le « é da (...) coisa » et Samuel Beckett avec l’« Innommable ». Ces mots, à l’épreuve de l’échec, témoignent de ce qui, dans la vie comme existence, est plus que la vie, ouvrant aux autres mondes et aux nouveaux possibles. (shrink)

C’est selon la perspective de l’image comme représentation que nous examinons et mettons en parallèle les œuvres de Marcel Duchamp et de Francis Bacon. Duchamp s’extirpe de l’univers de la peinture, émancipe l’art de son champ exclusivement pictural, « rétinien ». Bacon emprunte une voie intermédiaire : celle de la « forme sensible », de la « Figure », c’est-à-dire du « figural ». Qu’il s’agisse de la déformation avec Bacon ou de la transformation avec Duchamp, la représentation n’est telle (...) que parce qu’elle témoigne d’un quelque chose, irreprésentable ou imprésentable, qui l’excède : l’événement de la Figure se nomme ainsi dé-figure et trans-figure. (shrink)

Je m'intéresse ici à la question de savoir ce qu’il y a de descriptif dans la phénoménologie et ce qu’il y a de phénoménologique dans l’usage de la notion de description dans la philosophie contemporaine. Pour répondre à cette question, je retrace, dans un premier temps, les origines de la notion de psychologie descriptive au dix-neuvième siècle et j’identifie ensuite quelques-uns des traits caractéristiques du concept husserlien de description; dans un deuxième temps, j’examinerai quelques aspects du concept de description tel (...) qu’on l’utilise dans la tradition analytique depuis le dernier Wittgenstein en portant une attention particulière à la question de savoir s’il recoupe ou non le concept husserlien; dans la troisième partie, j’esquisse rapidement le problème de la conscience dans la perspective d’un fossé de l’explication et j’examine brièvement la question de savoir si et à quelle condition la phénoménologie descriptive peut y apporter sa contribution. (shrink)

Brief survey for the general reader of the rise of modern thought, seen as a gradual liberation from the shackles of medieval scholasticism.

Over the past fifteen years there has been a considerable amount of debate concerning what theoretical population dynamic models tell us about the nature of natural selection and drift. On the causal interpretation, these models describe the causes of population change. On the statistical interpretation, the models of population dynamics models specify statistical parameters that explain, predict, and quantify changes in population structure, without identifying the causes of those changes. Selection and drift are part of a statistical description of population (...) change; they are not discrete, apportionable causes. Our objective here is to provide a definitive statement of the statistical position, so as to allay some confusions in the current literature. We outline four commitments that are central to statisticalism. They are: 1. Natural Selection is a higher order effect; 2. Trait fitness is primitive; 3. Modern Synthesis (MS)-models are substrate neutral; 4. MS-selection and drift are model-relative. (shrink)

What is Life? This is the question asked by Denis Noble in this very personal and at times deeply lyrical book. Noble is a renowned physiologist and systems biologist, and he argues that the genome is not life itself: to understand what life is, we must view it at a variety of different levels, all interacting with each other in a complex web. It is that emergent web, full of feedback between levels, from the gene to the wider environment, (...) that is life. (shrink)

We distinguish dynamical and statistical interpretations of evolutionary theory. We argue that only the statistical interpretation preserves the presumed relation between natural selection and drift. On these grounds we claim that the dynamical conception of evolutionary theory as a theory of forces is mistaken. Selection and drift are not forces. Nor do selection and drift explanations appeal to the (sub-population-level) causes of population level change. Instead they explain by appeal to the statistical structure of populations. We briefly discuss the implications (...) of the statistical interpretation of selection for various debates within the philosophy of biologythe `explananda of selection' debate and the `units of selection' debate. (shrink)

This paper comprises a case study illustrating ethical and practical challenges for a Ugandan hospital-based social worker early in the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by a commentary. The hospital was under-resourced, with staff and patients experiencing lack of information and panic. The social worker, Denis Adia, recounts his responses to new and ethically challenging situations, including persuading Muslim patients to stop fasting for the good of their health; deciding to keep a baby in hospital with parents although this was against (...) the rules; and supporting a stigmatised former patient in the face of intimidation by colleagues. He reflects on the importance of recognising each person’s unique needs and circumstances, seeing this as a vital role for social workers. The case is followed by a commentary from a UK academic (Sarah Banks), who notes the cognitive and emotional effort (‘ethics work’) undertaken by the social worker to: see the ethical aspects of particular situations; take account of patients’ specific needs; ensure they are treated with respect; promote their well-being; and perform as a good social worker. Banks draws attention to the key role of the virtue of courage in pandemic conditions, which involves working with new risks and facing fears with confidence. (shrink)

There are two competing interpretations of the modern synthesis theory of evolution: the dynamical (also know as ‘traditional’) and the statistical. The dynamical interpretation maintains that explanations offered under the auspices of the modern synthesis theory articulate the causes of evolution. It interprets selection and drift as causes of population change. The statistical interpretation holds that modern synthesis explanations merely cite the statistical structure of populations. This paper offers a defense of statisticalism. It argues that a change in trait frequencies (...) in a population can be attributed only to selection or drift against the background of a particular statistical description of the population. The traditionalist supposition that selection and drift are description‐independent causes of population change leads the dynamical interpretation into a dilemma: it must face a contradiction or accept the loss of explanatory power. (shrink)

According to Aristotelian essentialism, the nature of an organism is constituted of a particular goal-directed disposition to produce an organism typical of its kind. This paper argues—against the prevailing orthodoxy—that essentialism of this sort is indispensable to evolutionary biology. The most powerful anti-essentialist arguments purport to show that the natures of organisms play no explanatory role in modern synthesis biology. I argue that recent evolutionary developmental biology provides compelling evidence to the contrary. Developmental biology shows that one must appeal to (...) the capacities of organisms to explain what makes adaptive evolution adaptive. Moreover, the specific capacities in question are precisely those that, according to Aristotle, constitute the nature of an organism. Essentialism 1.1 Aristotelian biological kinds Evolutionary anti-essentialism 2.1 Taxonomic anti-essentialism 2.2 Explanatory anti-essentialism Adaptation 3.1 Stability 3.2 Mutability 3.3 Phenotypic plasticity and adaptive evolution The natures of organisms Conclusion. (shrink)

There are two general approaches to characterising biological functions. One originates with Cummins. According to this approach, the function of a part of a system is just its causal contribution to some specified activity of the system. Call this the ‘C-function’ concept. The other approach ties the function of a trait to some aspect of its evolutionary significance. Call this the ‘E-function’ concept. According to the latter view, a trait's function is determined by the forces of natural selection. The C-function (...) and E-function concepts are clearly quite different, but there is an important relation between them which heretofore has gone unnoticed. The purpose of this paper is to outline that relation.This is not the first paper to discuss the relation of C-function and E-function. Previous attempts all follow either one of two strategies. The first proposes that the two concepts are ‘unified.’ The other proposes that they are radically distinct and apply to wholly different fields within biology. (shrink)

The Modern Synthesis has dominated biology for 80 years. It was formulated in 1942, a decade before the major achievements of molecular biology, including the Double Helix and the Central Dogma. When first formulated in the 1950s these discoveries and concepts seemed initially to completely justify the central genetic assumptions of the Modern Synthesis. The Double Helix provided the basis for highly accurate DNA replication, while the Central Dogma was viewed as supporting the Weismann Barrier, so excluding the inheritance of (...) acquired characteristics. This article examines the language of the Modern Synthesis and reveals that it is based on four important misinterpretations of what molecular biology had shown, so forming the basis of the four Illusions: 1. Natural Selection; 2. The Weismann Barrier; 3. The Rejection of Darwin’s Gemmules; 4. The Central Dogma. A multi-level organisation view of biology avoids these illusions through the principle of biological relativity. Molecular biology does not therefore confirm the assumptions of the Modern Synthesis. (shrink)

This paper examines a doctrine which David Lewis has called 'Humean Supervenience' (hereafter 'HS'), and a problem which certain imaginary cases seem to generate for HS. They include rotating perfect spheres or discs, and flowing rivers, imagined as composed of matter which is perfectly homogeneous right down to the individual points. Before considering these examples, I shall introduce the doctrine they seem to challenge.

What are the processes, from conception to adulthood, that enable a single cell to grow into a sentient adult? Neuroconstructivism is a pioneering 2 volume work that sets out a whole new framework for considering the complex topic of development, integrating data from cognitive studies, computational work, and neuroimaging.

Viruses have been virtually absent from philosophy of biology. In this editorial introduction, we explain why we think viruses are philosophically important. We focus on six issues, and we show how they relate to classic questions of philosophy of biology and even general philosophy.

It is commonly thought that evolution is a chance process, an idea found in popular writings on evolution, but also in academic writing in a broad range of scientific disciplines: scientific, philosophical and theological. One problem is that words such as ‘chance’ and ‘random’ are used with a range of different meanings according to context, and in evolutionary biology the word ‘chance’ is sometimes used in a way that is different from its use in mathematics and philosophy. The present article (...) aims to clarify the range of meanings and to argue the case that the evolutionary process is far from being a ‘theory of chance’ from biological, mathematical, or indeed philosophical and theological perspectives. (shrink)

The concept of the environment appears to be indispensably involved in adaptive explanation. Quite what its role is, however, is a matter of some dispute. The environment is customarily viewed as the dual of the organism; a wholly external, discrete, autonomous cause of evolution. On this view, the external environment is the principal cause of the adaptedness of form, and the determinant of what it is to be an adaptation. I argue that this conception of the environment neither adequately explains (...) nor individuates evolutionary adaptations. Instead, adaptation, properly construed, is an evolutionary response to affordances. The environment, traditionally construed, underdetermines an organism’s affordances. Instead, I argue that the environment takes its place in evolutionary models not as a discrete causal entity, but as an abstraction. (shrink)

Introduction In ancient rome, legend has it, a plebeian revolt was once quelled when the tribune Menenius Agrippa argued ...

According to a prominent view of evolutionary theory, natural selection and the processes of development compete for explanatory relevance. Natural selection theory explains the evolution of biological form insofar as it is adaptive. Development is relevant to the explanation of form only insofar as it constrains the adaptation-promoting effects of selection. I argue that this view of evolutionary theory is erroneous. I outline an alternative, according to which natural selection explains adaptive evolution by appeal to the statistical structure of populations, (...) and development explains the causes of adaptive evolution at the level of individuals. Only together can a statistical theory of selection and a mechanical theory of development explain why populations of organisms comprise individuals that are adapted to their conditions of existence. (shrink)

April 15, 2024: This article published in Early View in error. The article will republish shortly.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among philosophers of memory in the questions of how to characterize and to account for the temporal phenomenology of episodic memory. One prominent suggestion has been that episodic memory involves a feeling of pastness, the elaboration of which has given rise to two main approaches. On the intentionalist approach, the feeling of pastness is explained in terms of what episodic memory represents. In particular, Fernández has argued that it can be explained (...) in terms of memory representing itself as being caused by a past perceptual experience. On the metacognitive approach, which we have recently developed in, the feeling of pastness results from the monitoring and interpretation of the processing features of episodic remembering. In this paper, we show that the metacognitive approach should be preferred over the intentionalist approach. We argue that intentionalism, and Fernández’ causal self-referential view in particular, ultimately fail as accounts of the feeling of pastness. The difficulties faced by intentionalism allows us to single out three constraints that any satisfactory account of the temporal phenomenology of episodic remembering needs to meet. We conclude by arguing that the metacognitive view satisfies those constraints in a neat way, and as such, that it should be preferred over intentionalism. (shrink)

Whenever a structure with a particularly interesting computability-theoretic property is found, it is natural to ask whether similar examples can be found within well-known classes of algebraic structures, such as groups, rings, lattices, and so forth. One way to give positive answers to this question is to adapt the original proof to the new setting. However, this can be an unnecessary duplication of effort, and lacks generality. Another method is to code the original structure into a structure in the given (...) class in a way that is effective enough to preserve the property in which we are interested. In this paper, we show how to transfer a number of computability-theoretic properties from directed graphs to structures in the following classes: symmetric, irreflexive graphs; partial orderings; lattices; rings ; integral domains of arbitrary characteristic; commutative semigroups; and 2-step nilpotent groups. This allows us to show that several theorems about degree spectra of relations on computable structures, nonpreservation of computable categoricity, and degree spectra of structures remain true when we restrict our attention to structures in any of the classes on this list. The codings we present are general enough to be viewed as establishing that the theories mentioned above are computably complete in the sense that, for a wide range of computability-theoretic nonstructure type properties, if there are any examples of structures with such properties then there are such examples that are models of each of these theories. (shrink)

The Social Scientist's Bestiary addresses a number of important theoretical and philosophical issues in the social sciences from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of science. It is intended to guide social scientists - researchers, teachers and students - so that they will not fall victim to the beasts they will encounter in the course of their enquiries. Such beasts include holism, post-positivistic work in the philosophy of science, Kuhnian relativism, the denial of objectivity, hermeneutics and several others, both good and (...) bad. (shrink)

Though Heidegger’s Being and Time is often cited as one of the most important philosophical works of the last hundred years, its Division Two has received relatively little attention. This outstanding collection corrects that, examining some of the central themes of Division Two and their wide-ranging and challenging implications. An international team of leading philosophers explore the crucial notions that articulate Heidegger’s concept of authenticity, including death, anxiety, conscience, guilt, resolution and temporality. In doing so, they clarify the bearing of (...) Division Two’s reflections on our understanding of intentionality, normativity, responsibility, autonomy and selfhood. These discussions raise important questions about how we may need to rethink the morals of Division One of Being and Time , the broader project to which that book was devoted, the shaping influence of figures such as Aristotle and Kierkegaard, as well as Heidegger’s relationship with his contemporaries and successors. Essential reading for students and scholars of Heidegger’s thought, and anyone interested in key debates in phenomenology, ethics, metaphilosophy and philosophy of mind. Contributors: William Blattner, Clare Carlisle, Taylor Carman, Steven Galt Crowell, Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Sophia Dandelet, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Guignon, Jeffrey Haynes, Stephan Käufer, Denis McManus, Stephen Mulhall, George Pattison, Peter Poellner, Katherine Withy, Mark A. Wrathall. (shrink)