A consensus exists among contemporary philosophers of biology about the history of their field. According to the received view, mainstream philosophy of science in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s focused on physics and general epistemology, neglecting analyses of the 'special sciences', including biology. The subdiscipline of philosophy of biology emerged (and could only have emerged) after the decline of logical positivism in the 1960s and 70s. In this article, I present bibliometric data from four major philosophy of science journals (Erkenntnis, (...) Philosophy of Science, Synthese, and the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science), covering 1930-59, which challenge this view. (shrink)

Recent discussion of mechanism has suggested new approaches to several issues in the philosophy of science, including theory structure, causal explanation, and reductionism. Here, I apply what I take to be the fruits of the 'new mechanical philosophy' to an analysis of a contemporary debate in evolutionary biology about the role of natural selection in speciation. Traditional accounts of that debate focus on the geographic context of genetic divergence--namely, whether divergence in the absence of geographic isolation is possible (or significant). (...) Those accounts are at best incomplete, I argue, because they ignore the mechanisms producing divergence and miss what is at stake in the biological debate. I argue that the biological debate instead concerns the scope of particular speciation mechanisms which assign different roles to natural selection at various stages of divergence. The upshot is a new interpretation of the crux of that debate--namely, whether divergence with gene flow is possible (or significant) and whether the isolating mechanisms producing it are adaptive. (shrink)

I develop a technique for specifying truth-conditions.

The term 'sociobiology' was introduced in E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) as the application of evolutionary theory to social behavior. Sociobiologists claim that many social behaviors have been shaped by natural selection for reproductive success, and they attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary histories of particular behaviors or behavioral strategies. This survey attempts to clarify and evaluate the aim of sociobiology. Given that a neutral account is impossible, this entry does the next best thing. It takes sociobiology as (...) well as its critics seriously. On the one hand, by demonstrating that current studies of evolution and human behavior are based on Darwin's arguments for evolution (properly updated), we gain a strong rationale for thinking that something closer to sociobiology than to disconnectionism is needed to properly understand human sociality. Nevertheless, this survey reconstructs sociobiology in its best light, according to its aims. Consequently, criticism of sociobiology as it is actually practiced is not ignored or dismissed. This approach reveals what is best about sociobiology, while remaining sensitive to many of the problems it has generated. (shrink)

Philosophy after comparative philosophy -- Thinking about Nietzsche and Zen -- Strange saints (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hakuin) -- Convalescence (Nietzsche, James, Hakuin) -- Nietzsche in the pure land (Nietzsche, Shinran, Tanabe) -- Planomenal nourishment (Nietzsche, Deleuze, Dogen) -- Pure experience and philosophy after comparative philosophy.

Puts Schelling in conversation with twentieth-century continental philosophy.

_Reconsiders the contemporary relevance of Schelling’s radical philosophical and religious ecology._.

How are the teachings of a thirteenth-century master relevant today? Twenty contemporary writers unpack Dogen's words and show how we can still find meaning in his teachings. Engaging Dogen's Zen is a practice oriented study of Shushogi (a canonical distillation of Dogen's thought used as a primer in the Soto School of Zen) and Fukanzazengi (Dogen's essential text on the practice of "just sitting," a text recited daily in the Soto School of Zen). It is also a study of the (...) entire self. Here, the principles of Soto Zen practice are unpacked and explained by leading contemporary Buddhists from the living tradition--monks, priests, academics, and community teachers. Tackling Dogen's approach to key issues, such as the preeminence of shikantaza, universal buddha nature, and what it means to be a Mahayana Buddhist, the contributors to the volume help Zen practitioners and any who are trying to deepen their lives to appreciate better the teachings of Soto Zen and make these teachings part of their lives. By revisiting what remains precious in Shushogi and Fukanzazengi, we let them breathe just as we learn to breathe in zazen. We find that Soto practice not only engages Dogen and Sakyamuni, but all of our sisters and brothers, and indeed the great earth itself. Includes essays from Kosho Itagaki, Taigen Dan Leighton, Tenshin Charles Fletcher, Shudo Brian Schroeder, Glen A. Mazis, David Loy, Drew Leder, Steven DeCaroli, Steve Bein, John Maraldo, Michael Schwartz, Tetsuzen Jason M. Wirth, Leah Kalmanson, Erin Jien McCarthy, Dainen David Putney, Steven Heine, Graham Parkes, Mark Unno, Shudo Brian Schroeder, and Kanpu Bret W. Davis. (shrink)

This is an essay on place in light of the ecological crisis as an exercise in what Pierre Charbonnier has recently called ecological reason, that is, “the environmental reflexivity of our species.” How do the roots of our prevailing political and economic relationships to the many lands that sustain us appear retroactively from the perspective of ecological reason? In a kind of tragic reversal, the mad rush to global prosperity and political dignity now appears as the emerging catastrophe of our (...) failure to heed the terrestrial affordances that sustain us. I explicate this problem and root about for responses to it by lacing together the recent work of Charbonnier as well as John Sallis, Bruno Latour, and Brian Burkhart in a single weave of place-specific thinking. How can we begin to rethink place from the ground up? (shrink)

The question of how to handle incidental findings has sparked a heated debate among neuroimaging researchers and medical ethicists, a debate whose urgency stems largely from the recent explosion in the number of imaging studies being conducted and in the sheer volume of scans being acquired. Perhaps the point of greatest controversy within this debate is whether the magnetic resonance imaging scans of all research participants should be reviewed in an active search for pathology and, moreover, whether this search should (...) be performed by a radiologist. Resistance to routine readings performed by radiologists, as opposed to selective review of those scans on which investigators have spotted a possible IF, has been fueled in part by the obvious and enormous cost — financial and logistical — of engaging radiologists to read massive numbers of scans. This cost would be especially burdensome, even prohibitive, to investigators who are not affiliated with a medical center, because of their limited access to radiologists and other medical expertise. (shrink)

This study provides a comparative analysis of students' self-reported beliefs and behaviors related to six analogous pairs of conventional and digital forms of academic cheating. Results from an online survey of undergraduates at two universities (N = 1,305) suggest that students use conventional means more often than digital means to copy homework, collaborate when it is not permitted, and copy from others during an exam. However, engagement in digital plagiarism (cutting and pasting from the Internet) has surpassed conventional plagiarism. Students (...) also reported using digital "cheat sheets" (i.e., notes stored in a digital device) to cheat on tests more often than conventional "cheat sheets." Overall, 32% of students reported no cheating of any kind, 18.2% reported using only conventional methods, 4.2% reported using only digital methods, and 45.6% reported using both conventional and digital methods to cheat. "Digital only" cheaters were less likely than "conventional only" cheaters to report assignment cheating, but the former was more likely than the latter to report engagement in plagiarism. Students who cheated both conventionally and digitally were significantly different from the other three groups in terms of their self-reported engagement in all three types of cheating behavior. Students in this "both" group also had the lowest sense of moral responsibility to refrain from cheating and the greatest tendency to neutralize that responsibility. The scientific and educational implications of these findings are discussed in this study. (shrink)

We weigh the presumed benefts of routinely searching all research scans for incidental fndings against its substantial risks, including false-positive and false-negative fndings, and the possibility of triggering unnecessary, costly evaluations and perhaps harmful treatments. We argue that routinely searching for IFs may not maximize benefts and minimize risks to participants.

The 2003 National Business Ethics Survey, conducted by the Ethics Resource Center, found that respondents who were both young and had short organizational tenure were substantially less likely than other respondents to report misconduct that they observed in the workplace to an authority. We propose that the life-course model of deviance can help account for this attenuation of acquiescence in misbehavior. As employees learn to perceive informal prosocial control during their socialization into the workforce, we hypothesize that they will become (...) more willing to blow the whistle on misconduct. Analysis of the 2003 NBES (n = 1,417, with a subset of 314 who observed misconduct) reveals that young and short-tenured employees do perceive less informal prosocial control, and that informal prosocial control does boost whistle-blowing; however, tests for mediation of the relationship between youth and short-tenure and whistle-blowing by informal social control were largely negative, suggesting that other explanations are still needed. (shrink)

The idea of a “first principle” looms large in Fichte’s thought, and its first real appearance is in his “Aphorisms on Religion and Deism” (1790), which has received little attention. I begin this paper by providing some context on that piece, and then developing a reconstruction of the position presented within it. Next, I establish that Fichte’s views at the time of writing, and for some years prior, are those of the “deist,” and clarify why he sensed he had to (...) leave this stance represented in the “Aphorisms” behind. I conclude that understanding Fichte’s shift away from “deism,” a species of what he would eventually call “dogmatism,” can also help us understand Fichte’s critique of the latter kind of thinking and so shed light on Fichte’s better-known views; and I emphasize that Fichte’s transition from a strict rationalism to a form of Kantianism may be of interest not only to scholarship on Fichte and the period, but likewise to work on rationalism in contemporary metaphysics. Finally, in an appendix I supplement the paper with a first English translation of the entire text of the “Aphorisms,” complete with annotations. (shrink)

BackgroundDeciphering the amount of work provided by different co-authors of a scientific paper has been a recurrent problem in science. Despite the myriad of metrics available, the scientific community still largely relies on the position in the list of authors to evaluate contributions, a metric that attributes subjective and unfounded credit to co-authors. We propose an easy to apply, universally comparable and fair metric to measure and report co-authors contribution in the scientific literature. MethodsThe proposed Author Contribution Index (ACI) is (...) based on contribution percentages provided by the authors, preferably at the time of submission. Researchers can use ACI to compare the contributions of different authors, describe the contribution profile of a particular researcher or analyse how contribution changes through time. We provide such an analysis based on contribution percentages provided by 97 scientists from the field of ecology who voluntarily responded to an online anonymous survey.ResultsACI is simple to understand and to implement because it is based solely on percentage contributions and the number of co-authors. It provides a continuous score that reflects the contribution of one author as compared to the average contribution of all other authors. For example, ACI(i) = 3, means that author i contributed three times more than what the other authors contributed on average. Our analysis comprised 836 papers published in 2014-2016 and revealed patterns of ACI values that relate to career advancement.ConclusionThere are many examples of author contribution indices that have been proposed but none has really been adopted by scientific journals. Many of the proposed solutions are either too complicated, not accurate enough or not comparable across articles, authors and disciplines. The author contribution index presented here addresses these three major issues and has the potential to contribute to more transparency in the science literature. If adopted by scientific journals, it could provide job seekers, recruiters and evaluating bodies with a tool to gather information that is essential to them and cannot be easily and accurately obtained otherwise. We also suggest that scientists use the index regardless of whether it is implemented by journals or not. (shrink)

On the True Sense of Art collects essays by philosophers responding to John Sallis's Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art as well as his other works on the philosophy of art, including Force of Imagination and Logic of Imagination. Each of the chapters, by some of the leading thinkers in Continental philosophy, engages Sallis's work on both ancient and new senses of aesthetics--a transfiguration of aesthetics--as a beginning that is always beginning again. With a responsive essay by Sallis himself, (...) On the True Sense of Art forms a critical introduction to the thought of this generation's most important aesthetician. (shrink)

Herr Royce ist doch ein bedeutender Denker und darf nur als solcher behandelt werden.("Royce is an important thinker, and may only be treated as such.")Scholars of pragmatism and of phenomenology have observed striking similarities between Josiah Royce and Edmund Husserl, foundational thinkers at the origins of two major philosophical movements whose effects are still strongly felt in the present day—Royce being considered a central founder of American pragmatic idealism, and Husserl of modern German phenomenology. Other scholars have noted striking similarities (...) between Royce's thought and that of the broader circle of phenomenology.2Can we discover in these relations definitive historical influences, rather than .. (shrink)

This paper develops the outlines of a pragmatic, adaptive management-based approach toward the control of invasive nonnative species (INS) through a case study of Kings Bay/crystal River, a large artesian springs ecosystem that is one of Florida’s most important habitats for endangered West Indian manatees (Trichechus manatus). Building upon recent critiques of invasion biology, principles of adaptive management, and our own interview and participant–observer research, we argue that this case study represents an example in which rigid application of invasion biology’s (...) a␣priori imperative to minimize INS has produced counterproductive results from both an ecological and social standpoint. As such, we recommend that INS control in Kings Bay should be relaxed in conjunction with an overall program of adaptive ecosystem management that includes meaningful participation and input from non-institutional stakeholders. However, we also note that adaptive management and INS control are by no means mutually exclusive, in Kings Bay or elsewhere. Instead, we suggest that adaptive management offers a means by which INS control efforts can emerge from—and be evaluated through—ongoing scientific research and participatory dialogue about the condition of specific places, rather than non-contextual assumptions about the harmfulness of INS as a general class. (shrink)

These 14 essays bring Schelling in tune with such luminaries as Heidegger, Derrida, Bataille, Foucault, Deleuze, Levinas, and Irigaray and situate him squarely in the centre of current themes.

According to the causal theory of action---briefly, "causalism"---actions are distinguished from other events in the world by being caused by mental states of the agent. I argue that the standard argument for causalism is in fact unsuccessful, and then sketch an alternative account of action. The dominance of causalism is largely due to an apparently simple argument of Donald Davidson's: the only way to make sense of the connection between an action and the reason for which it is performed is (...) to suppose that the reason causes the action. In response, I first show that Davidson's argument has a more complicated structure than is usually supposed, turning essentially on consideration of cases in which an agent acts on one reason rather than another. Davidson's proposal is that causalism offers the best explanation of this contrastive phenomenon. ;I argue that, in order to explain Davidson's contrastive phenomenon successfully, the causalist must appeal to the additional notion of motivational strength. This undermines the causalist's argument because noncausalists can also invoke the idea that some reasons are motivationally stronger than others to explain Davidson's contrastive phenomenon. Thus, whichever side has the better account of motivational strength will have the more plausible theory of action. Standard theories of motivational strength, including causal theories, are all arguably unsatisfactory, but I conclude that a version of interpretationism offers a better account of motivational strength, suitable for a noncausal theory of action. (shrink)

When a person in pain seeks medical attention, but his doctors cannot help him, a quest begins for alternative treatment, with its attendant imperative to identify the difference between genuine solace and snake oil. This is the task undertaken by Scott Waterman, and the situation faced by millions of people in chronic pain for whom conventional medicine proves ineffective, and who likewise then embark on a desperate search for comfort.Alternative treatments sit on a spectrum of empirical plausibility, from some like (...) hypnosis or mindfulness with demonstrable mechanisms of action in the brain and nervous system to others like Reiki and craniosacral therapy that purport to channel mysterious energy fields beyond the... (shrink)

This paper presents methods to visualize the structure of trees that occur in genetic programming. These methods allow for the inspection of structure of entire trees even though several thousands of nodes may be involved. The methods also scale to allow for the inspection of structure for entire populations and for complete trials even though millions of nodes may be involved. Examples are given that demonstrate how this new way of “seeing” can afford a potentially rich way of understanding dynamics (...) that underpin genetic programming. The examples indicate further studies that might be enabled by visualizing structure at these scales. (shrink)

Essays exploring a rich intersection between phenomenology and idealism with contemporary relevance.

An intellectual biography of John Wallis, professor of mathematics at Oxford. Despite war, church upheaval, and a revolution in science, Wallis advanced mathematics and natural philosophy within the university, bridging old and new.

In his doctoral dissertation On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Arthur Schopenhauer there outlines a critique of Euclidean geometry on the basis of the changing nature of mathematics, and hence of demonstration, as a result of Kantian idealism. According to Schopenhauer, Euclid treats geometry synthetically, proceeding from the simple to the complex, from the known to the unknown, “synthesizing” later proofs on the basis of earlier ones. Such a method, although proving the case logically, nevertheless fails to attain the raison (...) d’être of the entity. In order to obtain this, a separate method is required, which Schopenhauer refers to as “analysis,” thus echoing a method already in practice among the early Greek geometers, with however some significant differences. In this essay, I here discuss Schopenhauer’s criticism of synthesis in Euclid’s Elements, and the nature and relevance of his own method of analysis. (shrink)

This is a philosophical rumination on Shawn Loht’s important extension of “film as philosophy” into a Heideggerian phenomenological account of the philosophical response that cinema can engender. After considering the importance of these kinds of approaches, I turn to Loht’s phenomenological engagement with Terrence Malick’s early masterpiece, Days of Heaven (1978). After sympathetically reviewing his “interpretation”, I expand upon its delineation of “earth and world” to include the “fallenness” of the world as well as the possibility of a metanōetic awakening (...) to the vocation of “mud doctor”, that is, to heal the rift between earth and world, a rift made more exigent by world war, economic exploitation, and the ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Schelling argued that early modern science had discarded the ancient teaching of matter – the world soul (die Weltseele or anima mundi, the unity of soul and body, eternity and time, absolute possibility and existence) – «into the common grave they dug for nature and have brought about the death of all science». In order to put science on a more philosophical tract, Schelling retrieved the work of Giordano Bruno as part of his «handful» of thinkers who in a contemporary (...) context appear on the border between an ancient but still vital sense of philosophy and the emerging scientific study of nature. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPhenomenologies of sport predominantly focus on an analysis of the experience of participating in sport, either as a part of a team or individually. In this essay, the author argues that a vital avenue for the phenomenology of sport has not been adequately explored, that is, an analysis of the experience of the spectator. Taking up Heidegger’s phenomenological method as outlined in Being and Time, the author argues that Heidegger’s notions of the they-self, idle talk, and falling prey offer critical (...) insights into why sports-talk among fans comes to focus on truth and blame. The object of the phenomenology of sport is thus suggested to be not limited solely to the field of play but is also, as the title suggests, in the bleachers as well. (shrink)

The Platonic definition of courage as the ‘knowledge of the fearful and the hopeful’ is often eschewed by philosophers of sport. In fact, the passionate nature of sport itself seems to testify against such a definition. Hence, accounts of courage within sport tend to emphasize the affective dimension of courage at the expense of the cognitive dimension. This essay argues in defense of the Platonic vision of courage as a species of knowledge as opposed to contemporary attempts to recover the (...) affective dimension of courage, as exemplified by John Corlett. I shall argue that far from producing an overly intellectualized vision of courage, treating courage as a species of knowledge, even within sport, throws valuable light on the exercise of courage in sport and on the shape of sport itself with regards to the exercise of virtue. (shrink)

Following the Kantian critique of metaphysics, the conscious subject is discovered to be an insurmountable obstacle with respect to knowledge of things themselves. For this reason, Kant concludes that metaphysics as the science of being as being is impossible. In this essay, the possibilities of metaphysics in light of the problem of subjectivity are reexamined. The nature and relationship between the conscious subject and the embodiment of the subject is first examined. Following this, the subject’s “encounter with being” within consciousness (...) is analyzed yielding two fundamental structures that are determined to hold with respect to being in relation to the conscious subject. Further examination of the act of reflection coupled with judgment reveals that these structures may in fact be transcended, from which an encounter with being as such follows. On the basis of reflection and judgment, metaphysics is thereby determined to be possible. (shrink)

The Manhattan skyline is one of the great wonders of the modern world. But how and why did it form? Much has been written about the city's architecture and its general history, but little work has explored the economic forces that created the skyline. In Building the Skyline, Jason Barr chronicles the economic history of the Manhattan skyline. In the process, he debunks some widely held misconceptions about the city's history. Starting with Manhattan's natural and geological history, Barr moves (...) on to how these formations influenced early land use and the development of neighborhoods, including the dense tenement neighborhoods of Five Points and the Lower East Side, and how these early decisions eventually impacted the location of skyscrapers built during the Skyscraper Revolution at the end of the 19th century. Barr then explores the economic history of skyscrapers and the skyline, investigating the reasons for their heights, frequencies, locations, and shapes. He discusses why skyscrapers emerged downtown and why they appeared three miles to the north in midtown-but not in between the two areas. Contrary to popular belief, this was not due to the depths of Manhattan's bedrock, nor the presence of Grand Central Station. Rather, midtown's emergence was a response to the economic and demographic forces that were taking place north of 14th Street after the Civil War. Building the Skyline also presents the first rigorous investigation of the causes of the building boom during the Roaring Twenties. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the boom was largely a rational response to the economic growth of the nation and city. The last chapter investigates the value of Manhattan Island and the relationship between skyscrapers and land prices. Finally, an Epilogue offers policy recommendations for a resilient and robust future skyline. (shrink)

A recent phylogenetic survey of the New World orioles (genus Icterus; Omland et al. 1999) suggested that the Baltimore Oriole (I. galbula) and the Black-backed Oriole (I. abeillei) are sister taxa. That survey examined mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from a single representative of each species in the genus. Here, we examine mtDNA sequences from 15 Blackbacked and 20 Baltimore Orioles. The two species appear to be very recently diverged, with average sequence divergences for both cytochrome b (cyt b) and the control (...) region indicating a probable late Pleistocene split. Despite this very recent divergence, there is one fixed base-pair difference between the species in cyt b and another in the control region, suggesting that one or both species have undergone a bottleneck during or since speciation. This molecular evidence of recent divergence suggests that male plumage differences between Black-backed and Baltimore Orioles evolved very rapidly. (shrink)