Scholasticism : the last shall be first -- Romance and epic : honor abandoned because of love -- Conversion : a poor man from a rich man -- Conflict resolution : he humbly delivered himself to justice -- Gender : male and female created he them.
Ecological fitness has been suggested to provide a unifying definition of fitness. However, a metric for this notion of fitness was in most cases unavailable except by proxy with differential reproductive success. In this article, I show how differential persistence of lineages can be used as a way to assess ecological fitness. This view is inspired by a better understanding of the evolution of some clonal plants, colonial organisms, and ecosystems. Differential persistence shows the limitation of an ensemblist noncausal understanding (...) of evolution. Causal explanations are necessary to understand the evolution by natural selection of these biological systems. †To contact the author write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Montreal, P.O. Box 6128, Station Centre‐Ville, Montreal, Quebec, H3C 3J7 Canada; e‐mail: f.bouchard@umontreal.ca. (shrink)
During the last thirty years, most linguists and philosophers have assumed that meaning can be represented symbolically and that the mental processing of language involves the manipulation of symbols. Scholars have assembled strong evidence that there must be linguistic representations at several abstract levels--phonological, syntactic, and semantic--and that those representations are related by a describable system of rules. Because meaning is so complex, linguists often posit an equally complex relationship between semantic and other levels of grammar. The Semantics of Syntax (...) is an elegant and powerful analysis of the relationship between syntax and semantics. Noting that meaning is underdetermined by form even in simple cases, Denis Bouchard argues that it is impossible to build knowledge of the world into grammar and still have a describable grammar. He thus proposes simple semantic representations and simple rules to relate linguistic levels. Focusing on a class of French verbs, Bouchard shows how multiple senses can be accounted for by the assumption of a single abstract core meaning along with background information about how objects behave in the world. He demonstrates that this move simplifies the syntax at no cost to the descriptive power of the semantics. In two important final chapters, he examines the consequences of his approach for standard syntactic theories. (shrink)
Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgements and notes; Editors' introduction Rachel Barney, Tad Brennan and Charles Brittain; Part I. Transitions to Tripartition: 1. Enkrateia and the partition of the soul in the Gorgias Louis-Andre; Dorion; 2. From the Phaedo to the Republic: philosophers, non-philosophers, and the possibility of virtue Iakovos Vasiliou; 3. The soul as a one and a many: Republic 436a8-439d9 Eric Brown; Part II. Moral Psychology and the Parts of the Soul: 4. Erôs before and after tripartition Frisbee (...) Sheffield; 5. Speaking with the same voice as reason: personification in Plato's psychology Rachana Kamtekar; 6. Psychic contingency in the Republic Jennifer Whiting; 7. Curbing one's appetites in Plato's Republic James Wilberding; 8. The nature and object of the spirited part of the soul Tad Brennan; 9. How to see an unencrusted soul: Republic X 611b-612a Raphael Woolf; Part III. Developments in Late Plato: 10. Pictures and passions in the Philebus and Timaeus Jessica Moss; 11. The cognition of appetite in Plato's Timaeus Hendrik Lorenz; 12. Soul and state in Plato's laws Luc Brisson; Part IV. Parts of Soul in the Platonic Tradition: 13. Plutarch on the division of the soul Jan Opsomer; 14. Galen and the tripartite soul Mark Schiefsky; 15. Plotinus and Plato on soul and action Eyjólfur K. Emilsson. (shrink)
This is the first book-length study of Philo of Larissa. Philo (159-84 BC) was the leader of the Platonic Academy in its final period as an Athenian institution, and also the principal philosophical teacher of Cicero. Dr Brittain charts Philo's gradual rejection of the radical scepticism of Carneades (concluding with his notorious 'Roman Books' of 89 BC), and offers philosophical justifications for his initial position of modified scepticism and final advocacy of a fallibilist empiricism. Philo's controversial epistemological views are (...) constructed through their historical context in the late Hellenistic Academy, his wider thought on the history of philosophy, ethics and rhetoric, and his controversies with his pupils Antiochus and Aenesidemus. The appendix contains full testimonia and 'fragments' of Philo. (shrink)
In this paper, I show the complementarity of foundationalism and coherentism with respect to any efficient system of beliefs by means of a distinction between two types of proposition drawn from an analogy with an axiomatic system. This distinction is based on the way a given proposition is acknowledged as true, either by declaration (F-proposition) or by preservation (C-proposition). Within such a perspective, i.e., epistemological complementarism, not only can one see how the usual opposition between foundationalism and coherentism is irrelevant, (...) but furthermore one can appreciate the reciprocal relation between these two theories as they refer to two separate epistemological functions involved in the dynamics of constituting and expanding an epistemic system. (shrink)
We argue that a fashionable interpretation of the theory of natural selection as a claim exclusively about populations is mistaken. The interpretation rests on adopting an analysis of fitness as a probabilistic propensity which cannot be substantiated, draws parallels with thermodynamics which are without foundations, and fails to do justice to the fundamental distinction between drift and selection. This distinction requires a notion of fitness as a pairwise comparison between individuals taken two at a time, and so vitiates the interpretation (...) of the theory as one about populations exclusively. (shrink)
Philosophers of biology have been absorbed by the problem of defining evolutionary fitness since Darwin made it central to biological explanation. The apparent problem is obvious. Define fitness as some biologists implicitly do, in terms of actual survival and reproduction, and the principle of natural selection turns into an empty tautology: those organisms which survive and reproduce in larger numbers, survive and reproduce in larger numbers. Accordingly, many writers have sought to provide a definition for ‘fitness’ which avoid this outcome. (...) In particular the definition of fitness as a probabilistic propensity has been widely favored.1 Others, recognizing that no definition both correct and complete can actually be provided, have accepted the consequence that the leading principle of the theory is a definitional truth and attempted to mitigate the impact of this outcome for the empirical character of the theory.2 Still others have argued that ‘fitness’ is properly viewed as a term undefined in the theory of natural selection (on the model of mass—a term undefined in Newtonian mechanics).3 But few have contemplated the solution to this problem proposed by Mohan Matthen and André Ariew (hereafter, MA), in.. (shrink)
The general principle of epistemic closure stipulates that epistemic properties are transmissible through logical means. According to this principle, an epistemic operator, say ε, should satisfy any valid scheme of inference, such as: if ε(p entails q), then ε(p) entails ε(q). The principle of epistemic closure under known entailment (ECKE), a particular instance of epistemic closure, has received a good deal of attention since the last thirty years or so. ECKE states that: if one knows that p entails q, and (...) she knows that p, then she knows that q. It is widely accepted that ECKE constitutes an important piece of the skeptical argument, but the acceptance of an unrestricted version of ECKE is still a matter of debate. On the side of the defenders of ECKE, one finds Stine (1976), Brueckner (1985), Vogel (1990), and Feldman (1995). Others proposed a refutation or a limitation of the principle, like Dretske (1970), Nozick (1981), Hales (1995), Williams (1996), and Sosa (1999). As it turns out, the relevant alternatives view (RAV) elaborated by Dretske, which restricts the scope of ECKE, has been discussed extensively and acknowledged as one of the most important contributions. There is nonetheless a major unsolved difficulty pertaining to Dretske-RAV: the notion of relevant alternatives is defined in such a way that it is bounded by counterfactual possibilities. This ontological import leaves open the door to the skeptic. Some have tried to give more precision to this notion, like Stine (1976), who appealed to a Gricean approach to define relevant alternatives in conversational contexts. My proposal is in accordance with the gist of Dretske’s strategy, i.e. to restrict the validity of ECKE, and I claim that in order to escape the difficulties inherent to RAV one has to introduce a more robust notion, the notion of epistemic context. Epistemic contexts are a subclass of propositional contexts. In that perspective, the closure property is expressed in terms of a property of a relation between epistemic contexts. ECKE holds when and only when either the epistemic context of the premisses is the same as the epistemic context of the conclusion, or the epistemic context change between the premisses and the conclusion is permissible. Permissibility of epistemic context change is a function of consistency. By means of this epistemic context approach, I will show that: (1) epistemic contexts are defined by basic propositions (unchallenged justified beliefs), (2) ECKE holds only under very specific constraints, and (3) the skeptical argument involves a non-permissible change of epistemic context and, by the same token, cannot rely upon ECKE. (shrink)
Members of the New Academy presented their sceptical position as the culmination of a progressive development in the history of philosophy, which began when certain Presocratics started to reflect on the epistemic status of their theoretical claims concerning the natures of things. The Academics' dogmatic opponents accused them of misrepresenting the early philosophers in an illegitimate attempt to claim respectable precedents for their dangerous position. The ensuing debate over the extent to which some form of scepticism might properly be attributed (...) to the Presocratics is reflected in various passages in Cicero's "Academica." In this essay, we try to get clearer about the precise nature of the Academics' historical claim and their view of the general lesson to be learned from reflection on the history of philosophy down to their own time. The Academics saw the Presocratics as providing some kind of support for the thesis that things are non-cognitive, or, more specifically, that neither the senses nor reason furnishes a criterion of truth. As this view is susceptible to both 'dialectical' and non-dialectical readings, we consider the prospects for each. We also examine the evidence for the varied functions both of the Academics' specific appeals to individual Presocratics and of their collections of the Presocratics' divergent opinions. What emerges is a better understanding of why the Academics were concerned with claiming the Presocratics as sceptical ancestors and of the precise manner in which they advanced this claim. (shrink)
A new assessment of Aristotle Politics 3.11 shows that most of the arguments contained in this chapter are strictly analogical and should not be granted too much weight in Aristotle's overall conception of popular government. A close analysis of the four analogies used by Aristotle to illustrate the so-called “wisdom of the many” brings to light both the negative and the positive conclusions allowed by this chapter, the following in particular: 1) the partial inclusion of the people in government decisions (...) is desirable insofar as the people are affected by these decisions; 2) the people's judgements are most qualified in some areas of political life, such as the audit of the magistrates; 3) the optimal distribution of power in the political community is made in accordance with the relative merits of all its members. (shrink)
E. O. Wilson (1974: 54) describes the problem that social organisms pose: “On what bases do we distinguish the extremely modified members of an invertebrate colony from the organs of a metazoan animal?” This framing of the issue has inspired many to look more closely at how groups of organisms form and behave as emergent individuals. The possible existence of “superorganisms” test our best intuitions about what can count and act as genuine biological individuals and how we should study them. (...) As we will discuss, colonies of certain organisms display many of the properties that we usually reserve only to individual organisms. Although there is good reason to believe that many social insects form genuine emergent biological individuals, the conclusion offered here is of a slightly different sort. I will argue that to understand some social insects' interactions and the emergent traits they give rise to, it may be helpful to shift our understanding from a community-level approach to an ecosystem-level approach. I will argue that viewing certain insect colonies (termites) as parts of ecosystems allows us to better understand some of the adaptations that have emerged from their evolution. (shrink)
One of intuitions driving the acceptance of a neat structured tree of life is the assumption that organisms and the lineages they form have somewhat stable spatial and temporal boundaries. The phenomenon of symbiosis shows us that such ‘fixist’ assumptions does not correspond to how the natural world actually works. The implications of lateral gene transfer (LGT) have been discussed elsewhere; I wish to stress a related point. I will focus on lateral function transfer (LFT) and will argue, using examples (...) of what many would call ‘superorganisms’, that the emergence of symbiotic individuals revives the importance of functional and adaptationist thinking in how we conceptualize the lineages of biological individuals. The consequence of the argument is that, if we really want to hold onto tree of life thinking, we had better accept that new saplings appear and disappear all the time. (shrink)
Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Workshop in History and Philosophy of Biology, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, March 23-24 2001 Session 4: Evolutionary Indeterminism.
In this article, I propose a narrative approach to moral experience through dramatic play and writing. Inspired by the narrative approach to moral conflicts recommended by Mark B. Tappan and Lyn Mikel Brown and by the Que?bec drama programme, this approach works with multiple dimensions of the students' lives and give them a chance to benefit from their own moral experience. This approach to moral education is based on action research conducted in secondary moral education classes in Que?bec (Canada) and (...) in Belgium. (shrink)
Plant succession is a phenomenon ascribed to vegetation dynamics at the scale of the plant community. The study of plant succession implies the analysis of the species involved and their relationships. Depending on the research done, the characteristics of trees have been studied according to either static, dimensional or partial approaches. We have revised the principal theories of succession, the methods of describing structure and development of tree and relationship established between tree species' attributes and their successional status. During studies (...) of succession, we propose that the profile of plant species be completed by including the organizational attributes of their structure as well as their development dynamics. We suggest an approach to the architecture that gives a general overview of the mode of development, revealing, among other things, that a limited number of architectural models may be found in nature. We hypothesize that community dynamics, in succession, may to a certain degree arise from the dynamic nature of plant development. This line of reasoning is in accordance with the current school of thought on process structuralism. (shrink)
Our intuitive assumption that only organisms are the real individuals in the natural world is at odds with developments in cell biology, ecology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and other fields. Although organisms have served for centuries as nature's paradigmatic individuals, science suggests that organisms are only one of the many ways in which the natural world could be organized. When living beings work together--as in ant colonies, beehives, and bacteria-metazoan symbiosis--new collective individuals can emerge. In this book, leading scholars consider the (...) biological and philosophical implications of the emergence of these new collective individuals from associations of living beings. The topics they consider range from metaphysical issues to biological research on natural selection, sociobiology, and symbiosis. (shrink)
Cette étude a pour objectif de présenter les articulations et les implications du modèle tout-partie dans l'ontologie lavellienne. Pour Lavelle, l'être ne doit pas être conçu comme une donnée, mais plutôt comme un tout dynamique qui confère à chaque partie une égale densité ontologique et à l'intérieur duquel s'articulent toutes les relations entre les parties. Ce modèle entraîne d'importantes conséquences : au plan logique, la notion d'être est universelle et univoque ; au plan ontologique, l'être n'est pas susceptible de degrés (...) et le néant ne peut être que relatif ; enfin, au plan épistémologique, la connaissance est homogène à l'être et la méthode analytique est la seule qui puisse rendre justice à la complétude de l'être-tout. This study aims at presenting the articulations and the implications of the whole-part model in the Lavellian ontology. According to Lavelle, the being should not be conceived as a datum, but rather as a dynamic whole which confers to each part the very same ontological density and within which all the relations between parts are articulated. This model entails important consequences : at the logical level, the notion of being is universal and univocal ; at the ontological level, being is not susceptible of degrees and nothingness can be only relative ; finally, at the epistemological level, knowledge is homogeneous with being and the analytical method alone can do justice to the completeness of the being-whole. (shrink)
This paper examines the Québec Education Program (QEP), particularly the new course in ethics and religious culture (ERC), in the light of Habermas?s conception of the moral and ethical uses of practical reason. Habermas?s discursive theory of morality is used to assess the program?s understanding of what it means to be competent in moral matters. Specifically, the paper considers whether or not the program limits the exercise of practical reason to its purely pragmatic form, and the extent to which the (...) program takes into account the intersection between the subjective and social world of learners. The Québec program serves as a context for thinking about the level(s) of practical reason an ethics education program ought to cultivate in learners. (shrink)
Charles Brittain (2009). Introduction. In Heda Segvic (ed.), From Protagoras to Aristotle: Essays in Ancient Moral Philosophy. Princeton University Press.score: 30.0
In “Two Ways of Thinking About Fitness and Natural Selection” (Matthen and Ariew [2002]; henceforth “Two Ways”), we asked how one should think of the relationship between the various factors invoked to explain evolutionary change – selection, drift, genetic constraints, and so on. We suggested that these factors are not related to one another as “forces” are in classical mechanics. We think it incoherent, for instance, to think of natural selection and drift as separate and opposed “forces” in evolutionary change (...) – that it makes sense to say, for instance, that selection contributed 80% to the actual evolutionary history of the human eye, and drift only 20%. We proposed instead a statistical view of the Theory of Evolution, a view in which fitness is not a cause of evolution, but rather a measure of growth. We also argued for a “hierarchical realization model” for thinking about the relationship between evolutionary factors such as those mentioned above, and suggested that in a “fully specified model”, as we call it below, there is no distinction between natural selection and evolution. (shrink)
Particularly during the past twenty five years, there has been an outstanding advance in the study of ancient skepticism, both in its Pyrrhonian and Academic varieties. This is reflected in the publication of a considerable number of works about the nature and consistency of those philosophical outlooks, as well as about their influence on the development of early modern philosophy and their relevance to present day epistemological discussions. Most of these works concern Pyrrhonian skepticism. This predominance of interest in Pyrrhonism (...) over Academic skepticism also manifests itself in the fact that, whereas in recent years several new translations of Sextus Empiricus' writings (our principal source for Pyrrhonism) have appeared in the most important European languages, the same has not happened with Cicero's Academica, which is our main source of information about the philosophy of the skeptical Academy. Even though Sextus'. (shrink)
