Exploring the role of values in scientific inquiry, Hugh Lacey examines the nature and meaning of values, and looks at challenges to the view, posed by postmodernists, feminists, radical ecologists, Third-World advocates and religious fundamentalists, that science is value free. He also focuses on discussions of 'development', especially in Third World countries. This paperback edition includes a new preface.

Hugh Lacey (1939) é pesquisador emérito na Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, Estados Unidos, onde começou a lecionar em 1972. É Doutor em História e Filosofia da Ciência pela Universidade de Indiana (EUA), tendosido professor visitante na Universidade de São Paulo em diversas ocasiões (1973, 1996, 2000 e 2004). Seus trabalhos atribuem lugares próprios aos valores dentro da tecnociência, procurando mostrar que a abordagem científica materialista precisa assumir também o lugar que as coisas ocupam em sistemas ecológicos e sociais. Lacey é (...) autor de diversos artigos e livros, entre os quais estão Valores e Atividade Científica 1, Valores e Atividade Científica 2, A Controvérsia sobre os transgênicos: questões científicas e éticas, entre outros. (shrink)

If evolutionary history were to be replayed from the beginning, what would be the same, and what would be likely different? Would there be a human-like species, multicellularity, or even DNA? There is a great variety in the answers biologists give to this question, despite having the same access to empirical data and biological theory. For instance, Stephen J. Gould has claimed that evolutionary history is radically contingent, while Conway Morris holds that it converges onto specific biological structures that are (...) favored by natural selection. Others such have proposed that evolutionary history is characterized by an inexorable increase in complexity, while others see it as an evolutionary arms race. In this dissertation I investigate the fundaments underlying claims biologists make about contingency and directionality in evolutionary history as a whole. The topics of convergence and contingency have received attention from philosophers of biology in recent years, but the foundations of interpretations of evolutionary history as a whole remains a relatively neglected field. Hence the primary objective of this dissertation was not to defend this or that account, but rather to show a method by which these fundamental issues can be identified and analyzed constructively. The dissertation is organized into two parts, each dedicated to a single problem. The first part concerns the problem of ‘description dependence’: claims about the contingency of evolutionary outcomes depend on how these outcomes and the evolutionary process itself are described. I set out to map the different ways in which the contingency of outcomes changes as the phenomena are described in more and in less detail, and as broader or narrower subsets of evolutionary history are taken into account. That such an analysis is useful to pursue, I attempt to show by applying it to two of the most prominent interpretations of evolutionary history, those of Gould and Conway Morris. According to how their claims about evolutionary history are analyzed, one can arrive at opposing conclusions about the contingency of evolutionary outcomes. The second part concerns the problem of ‘causal complexity’: evolutionary history is a complex mess of unrelated causal processes, and for every generalization there is an exception. This raises the question whether non-speculative generalizations over evolutionary history as a whole are even possible. Limiting the scope of the investigation to the mechanism of natural selection alone, I consider first whether and how natural selection may be expected to give rise to trends at all. Some philosophers reject that natural selection is a cause at all, and that all evolution is simply an accumulation of births and deaths. If any trend occurs at all, it is due to a confluence of unrelated causal processes that could easily not have occurred. I argue against this by showing that these philosophers overlook the issue of time-scale: causal processes may make a difference for reproductive outcome at a time-scale of a single generation without them making a difference at the time-scale of multiple generations. With this distinction in mind, one can argue that natural selection causes a population to tend towards equilibrium. If a yet longer time-scale is taken – not that of multiple generations in a single environment, but that of many species and genuses across many environments – the challenge of causal complexity becomes much more difficult to overcome. Drawing on the phenomenon of phenotypic plasticity and niche construction, I argue that selection for plasticity ‘feeds’ on this complexity and variability in the environment. The trend in plasticity is unique in this regard, since trends in other types of adaptation are interrupted by the variability of complex environments. (shrink)

The last two decades have witnessed a virtual explosion of research in Socratic philosophy. This volume collects essays that represent the range and diversity of that vast literature, including historical and philosophical essays devoted to a single Platonic dialogue, as well as essays devoted to the Socratic method, Socratic epistemology, and Socratic ethics. With lists of suggested further readings, an extensive bibliography on recent Socratic research, and an index locorum, this unique and much-needed anthology makes the study of Socratic philosophy (...) accessible to both scholars and non-specialists. (shrink)

Impossible Presence brings together new work in film studies, critical theory, art history, and anthropology for a multifaceted exploration of the continuing proliferation of visual images in the modern era. It also asks what this proliferation—and the changing technologies that support it—mean for the ways in which images are read today and how they communicate with viewers and spectators. Framed by Terry Smith's introduction, the essays focus on two kinds of strangeness involved in experiencing visual images in the modern era. (...) The first, explored in the book's first half, involves the appearance of oddities or phantasmagoria in early photographs and cinema. The second type of strangeness involves art from marginalized groups and indigenous peoples, and the communicative formations that result from the trafficking of images between people from vastly different cultures. With a stellar list of contributors, Impossible Presence offers a wide-ranging look at the fate of the visual image in modernity, modern art, and popular culture. Contributors: Jean Baudrillard Marshall Berman Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe Elizabeth Grosz Tom Gunning Peter Hutchings Fred R. Myers Javier Sanjines Richard Shiff Hugh J. Silverman Terry Smith. (shrink)

Current profess ional and la y lore ove rlook the ro le of hone sty in develop ing and s ustaining intimate relationships. We w ish to ass ert its importa nce. W e begin b y analyz ing the no tion of intimac y. An intim ate encounter or exchange, we argue, is one in which one verbally or non-verbally privately reveals something about oneself, and does so in a sensitive, trusting way. An intimate relationship is one marked by (...) regular intimate encounters or excha nges. Then, we co nsider two sorts of cases wh ere it is widely thought permissible, if not lauda tory, to lie to one 's intimates. In discrediting these presumably central cases of justified dishonesty, we put forward general considerations requiring hones ty. We e nd by s ugges ting how 'meta honesty'--hone sty about one's own efforts at communication, including one's efforts to be honest--is particularly important in intimate relationships. (shrink)

Pragmatism is a philosophical movement developed near the turn of the century in the work of several prominent American philosophers, most notably, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Although many contemporary analytic philosophers never studied American Philosophy in graduate school, analytic philosophy has been significantly shaped by philosophers strongly influenced by that tradition, most especially W.V. Quine, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty. Like other philosophical movements, it developed in response to the then-dominant philosophical wisdom. What unified (...) pragmatism was its rejection of certain epistemological assumptions about the nature of truth, objectivity, and rationality. The rejection of these assumptions springs from the pragmatist's belief that practice is primary in philosophy. Meaningful inquiry originates in practice. Theorizing is valuable, for sure, but its value arises from practice, is informed by practice, and, its proper aim is to clarify, coordinate, and inform practice. Theorizing divorced from practice is useless. (shrink)

The definitive ethics resource. By the time the second edition is published, it will have more than 850 entries (more than 200 revised since the first edition), averaging more than 4,000 words. Authors are known authorities, coming from more than 30 countries from all six inhabited continents. Essays were double-blind reviewed.

This is not a random collection of essays, but a book on a single theme. Written by separate hands, mainly by literary critics at Cambridge, it was planned as a whole and executed with a common purpose: to produce the first literary study of the English moralists of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The authors share two convictions: they believe that the study of literature demands an understanding of whatever moral philosophy is embodied in it; and (...) they believe that philosophical writings are capable of being tested by the techniques of literary criticism. In this book, such works as Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Hume's Enquiries are viewed as whole works, not as repositories of philosophical propositions, nor as episodes in the history of English thought. (shrink)

The universe as a whole.--Matter and energy.--Life and consciousness.--The fallacy of vitalism.--Materialism.--Idealism.

In the most striking syntheses of ideas within his thought, and especially when he tries to relate the empirical world investigated by science to other ...

Many neuroimaging studies of semantic memory have argued that knowledge of an object's perceptual properties are represented in a modality-specific manner. These studies often base their argument on finding activation in the left-hemisphere fusiform gyrus-a region assumed to be involved in perceptual processing-when the participant is verifying verbal statements about objects and properties. In this paper, we report an extension of one of these influential papers-Kan, Barsalou, Solomon, Minor, and Thompson-Schill (2003 )-and present evidence for an amodal component in the (...) representation and processing of perceptual knowledge. Participants were required to verify object-property statements (e.g., "cat-whiskers?"; "bear-wings?") while they were being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We replicated Kan et al.'s activation in the left fusiform gyrus, but also found activation in regions of left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and middle-temporal gyrus, areas known to reflect amodal processes or representations. Further, only activations in the left IFG, an amodal area, were correlated with measures of behavioural performance. (shrink)

Public concern for ecological and environmental values is making the job of forest management increasingly complex and uncertain and is gradually undermining the domination of timber value as the primary organizing goal of forest policy. The key question is how to balance the pursuit of short-term economic self-interests with the long-term public good. I articulate a moral theory that affirms the existence of a public good that is understood teleologically as an objective purpose to be pursued. I argue that there (...) is a connection between the philosophical and moral concept of creativity and the scientific concept of biological diversity. I suggest that these concepts are both linked to the political question of the public good. The maximization of the ethical good of creativity according to this theory is linked to the maximization of the public good. In forestry, the management of forest ecosystems in order to maximize their creative good is linked to the maximization of the public good and vice versa. This ethical theory isessentially a religious one in the neoclassical theistic tradition, in which authentic human existence is defined in terms of our relationship to reality and a metaphysically and cosmologically informed world view. (shrink)

This paper examines the issue of global child labor. The treatment is grounded in the classical economics of Adam smith and the more recent writings of human capital theorists. Using this framework, the universal problem of child labor in newly industrializing countries is investigated. Child labor is placed in its historical context with a brief review of practices in the United States and Great Britain at the time those countries were industrializing. Then, child labor is examined in its contemporary global (...) context. We argue that, as countries industrialize, they tend to follow predictable patterns of development – including use of and eventual abandonment of child labor. We argue that this convergence under the logic of industrial capitalism supports a universalist approach to human rights (that would condemn child labor) over a more tolerant cultural relativist approach. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The effects of Derrida's writings have been widespread in literary circles, where they have transformed current work in literary theory. By contrast Derrida's philosophical writings--which deal with the whole range of western thought from Plato to Foucault--have not received adequate attention by philosophers. Organized around Derrida's readings of major figures in the history of philosophy, ____Derrida and Deconstruction __ focuses on and assesses his specifically philosophical contribution. Contemporary continental philosophers assess Derrida's account of philosophical tradition, with each contributor providing a (...) critical study of Derrida's position on a philosopher she or he has already studied in depth These figures include Plato, Meister Eckhart, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Foucault. (shrink)