Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Fred Dretske's account of knowledge critically, and try to bring out how his account of informational content leads to cases of extreme epistemic good luck in his treatment of knowledge. My main interest, however, is to establish that the cases of epistemic luck arise because Dretske's account of knowledge in a fundamental way fails to take into account the role our actual recognitional capacities and powers of discrimination play in perceptually based knowledge. This result is, (...) I believe, new. The paper has three sections. In Section 1 I give a short exposition of Dretske's theory, and make some necessary qualifications about how it is to be understood. In Section 2 I discuss in greater detail how the theory actually works, and provide some examples I think are very troublesome for Dretske. In Section 3 I argue that these cases establish my main claim. I also show that there are cases of epistemic bad luck due to Dretske's account of how information causes belief. (shrink)

This book is a meticulous study of Aristotle's phronesis and its applications to the fields of personal development or character formation and of ethical ...

The role of narrativity in the constitution of personal identity, a widely discussed topic in recent philosophy, is also an important issue in Robert Musil’s novel “The Man without Qualities.” Apart from a theoretical passage, where the coherence established by life-narratives is explicitly rejected as an illusion, the novel displays various instances of reflection in which characters seek to articulate their identity by narrating parts of their lives. Not all of these self-narratives are presented as flawed; rather, by highlighting the (...) differences between various instances of self-reflection, the novel suggests that a life-narrative has to meet certain standards in order to further self-understanding. The essay seeks to identify these standards by analysing two examples of self-reflection rendered in Musil’s novel. Furthermore, it briefly compares the novel’s dealing with the issue of narrativity and personal identity with recent philosophical approaches, in particular with Charles Taylor’s view that in order to have an identity, human beings have to understand their lives in the form of a narrative that determines their place relative to the good. (shrink)

This volume deals with the transformation of unchurched religious creativity in the late modern West.

The original article, which first appeared in Norwegian, is a detailed study of anamnesis or recollection in Plato and Aristotle. It discusses, first, how recollection is relevant for the understanding of central aspects of the philosophy of Aristotle, and then discusses how the “regained” Platonic-Aristotelian concept of anamnesis can be related to current methodological challenges in modern social research. After having received feedback on the original article from David Bloch, who has recently translated and commented the Aristotelian text “On memory (...) and recollection”, I have decided to rewrite it in English and publish it here. (shrink)

The article discusses relationships and contexts for "reason", "knowledge", and virtue in Aristotle, based on and elaborating some results from Eikeland. It positions Eikeland in relation to Moss but with a side view to Cammick, Kristjansson, and Taylor. These all seem to disagree among themselves but still agree partly in different ways with Eikeland. The text focuses on two questions: 1) the role or tasks of "reason", "knowledge", and "virtue" respectively in setting the end or goal for ethical deliberation, and (...) more generally, 2) the role of dialogue or dialectics in Aristotle's philosophy, including its role concerning question one. The author argues that phrónêsis needs to be interpreted in the context of the totality of Aristotle's philosophy, and explains how this totality is fundamentally dialectical. (shrink)

Myths of the Self is a departure from the standard fare of postmodern thought. In a unique and brilliant turn, Smith argues that the best way of dealing with the topic of the self is a synthesis of a narrative theory of identity, using Ricoeur as a source, along with the constructive "postmodern" metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. The resulting synthesis is a new and potentially invigorating spin on the genesis of postmodern thought.

Jan-Olav Henriksen reconstructs and analyzes Christianity as a cluster of practices that manifest a distinct historically and contextually shaped mode of being in the world. Henriksen suggests that these practices imply a complicated relationship between the tradition in which they originate, the community that emerges from and is constituted by that tradition, and the individuals who appropriate the tradition that these communities mediate through their practices. Thus, to think of Christianity simply in terms of belief is misleading and represents (...) an underdetermination of its distinct character. Henriksen further argues this relationship needs to be described primarily as practices aimed at orientation and transformation. His analysis points to Christianity's similarity to other religions in regard to the functional or pragmatic dimensions it displays. Examining facets such as prayer, the use of scripture, preaching and doctrine, Henriksen emphasizes that the element that makes a practice distinctively Christian is how it relates to and is informed by the Jesus story. (shrink)

In standard decision theory, the probability function ought to be updated in light of evidence, but the utility function generally stays fixed. However, there is nothing in the formal theory that prevents one from instead updating the utility function, while keeping the probability function fixed. Moreover, there are good arguments for updating the utilities and not just the probabilities. Hence, the first puzzle is whether there is anything that justifies updating beliefs, but not desires, in light of evidence. The paper (...) argues that there is not, but that this raises a second puzzle. (shrink)

Bayesian inference is limited in scope because it cannot be applied in idealized contexts where none of the hypotheses under consideration is true and because it is committed to always using the likelihood as a measure of evidential favouring, even when that is inappropriate. The purpose of this article is to study inductive inference in a very general setting where finding the truth is not necessarily the goal and where the measure of evidential favouring is not necessarily the likelihood. I (...) use an accuracy argument to argue for probabilism and I develop a new kind of argument to argue for two general updating rules, both of which are reasonable in different contexts. One of the updating rules has standard Bayesian updating, Bissiri et al.’s general Bayesian updating, Douven’s IBE-based updating, and Vassend’s ]) quasi-Bayesian updating as special cases. The other updating rule is novel. (shrink)

Scientists often study hypotheses that they know to be false. This creates an interpretive problem for Bayesians because the probability assigned to a hypothesis is typically interpreted as the probability that the hypothesis is true. I argue that solving the interpretive problem requires coming up with a new semantics for Bayesian inference. I present and contrast two new semantic frameworks, and I argue that both of them support the claim that there is pervasive pragmatic encroachment on whether a given Bayesian (...) probability assignment is rational. (shrink)

Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions.

One of the main goals of Bayesian epistemology is to justify the rational norms credence functions ought to obey. Accuracy arguments attempt to justify these norms from the assumption that the source of value for credences relevant to their epistemic status is their accuracy. This assumption and some standard decision-theoretic principles are used to argue for norms like Probabilism, the thesis that an agent’s credence function is rational only if it obeys the probability axioms. We introduce an example that shows (...) that the accuracy arguments for Probabilism given by Joyce and Pettigrew fail, and that Probabilism in fact turns out to be false given Pettigrew’s way of conceiving of the goal of having accurate credences. Finally, we use our discussion of Pettigrew’s framework to draw an important general lesson about normative theorizing that relies on the positing of ideal agents. (shrink)

This volume comprises systematic as well as historical essays, including contributions intended to give comprehensive overviews of such areas as genetic phenomenology, transcendental phenomenology, philosophy and history of logic and mathematics, Kant, hermeneutics, Hegel, and philosophy of language. The book is addressed to phenomenologists, particularly those who are interested in some or all of the areas mentioned. In his introduction Joseph J. Kockelmans indicates that these diverse areas enter into dialogue in the work of Thomas M. Seebohm, whom the editors (...) and authors wish to honor, and the systematic papers mirror the state of the art of research in the above-mentioned disciplines. (shrink)

This paper defends moral realism against Sharon Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value” (this journal, 2006). I argue by separation of cases: From the assumption that a certain normative claim is true, I argue that the first horn of the dilemma is tenable for realists. Then, from the assumption that the same normative claim is false, I argue that the second horn is tenable. Either way, then, the Darwinian dilemma does not add anything to realists’ epistemic worries.

According to a widespread but implicit thesis in Bayesian confirmation theory, two confirmation measures are considered equivalent if they are ordinally equivalent—call this the “ordinal equivalence thesis” (OET). I argue that adopting OET has significant costs. First, adopting OET renders one incapable of determining whether a piece of evidence substantially favors one hypothesis over another. Second, OET must be rejected if merely ordinal conclusions are to be drawn from the expected value of a confirmation measure. Furthermore, several arguments and applications (...) of confirmation measures given in the literature already rely on a rejection of OET. I also contrast OET with stronger equivalence theses and show that they do not have the same costs as OET. On the other hand, adopting a thesis stronger than OET has costs of its own, since a rejection of OET ostensibly implies that people’s epistemic states have a very fine-grained quantitative structure. However, I suggest that the normative upshot of the paper in fact has a conditional form, and that other Bayesian norms can also fruitfully be construed as having a similar conditional form. (shrink)

Charles Stein discovered a paradox in 1955 that many statisticians think is of fundamental importance. Here we explore its philosophical implications. We outline the nature of Stein’s result and of subsequent work on shrinkage estimators; then we describe how these results are related to Bayesianism and to model selection criteria like AIC. We also discuss their bearing on scientific realism and instrumentalism. We argue that results concerning shrinkage estimators underwrite a surprising form of holistic pragmatism.