We argue that ecology in general and biodiversity and ecosystem function research in particular need an understanding of functions which is both ahistorical and evolutionarily grounded. A natural candidate in this context is Bigelow and Pargetter’s evolutionary forward-looking account which, like the causal role account, assigns functions to parts of integrated systems regardless of their past history, but supplements this with an evolutionary dimension that relates functions to their bearers’ ability to thrive and perpetuate themselves. While Bigelow and Pargetter’s account (...) focused on functional organization at the level of organisms, we argue that such an account can be extended to functional organization at the community and ecosystem levels in a way that broadens the scope of the reconciliation between ecosystem ecology and evolutionary biology envisioned by many BEF researchers. By linking an evolutionary forward-looking account of functions to the persistence-based understanding of evolution defended by Bouchard and others, and to the theoretical research on complex adaptive systems, we argue that ecosystems, by forming more or less resilient assemblages, can evolve even while they do not reproduce and form lineages. We thus propose a Persistence Enhancing Propensity account of role functions in ecology to account for this overlap of evolutionary and ecological processes. (shrink)

Transmissible cancers are elusive and understudied parasitic life forms caused by malignant clonal cells (nine lineages are known so far). They emerge by completing sequential steps that include breaking cell cooperation, evade anti‐cancer defences and shedding cells to infect new hosts. Transmissible cancers impair host fitness, and their importance as selective force is likely largely underestimated. It is, therefore, crucial to determine how common they might be in the wild. Here, we draw a parallel between the steps required for a (...) transmissible cancer to emerge and the steps required for an intelligent civilisation to emerge in the Milky Way using a modified Drake equation. Using numerical analyses, we estimate the potential number of extant marine and bivalve species in which transmissible cancers might exist. Our results suggest that transmissible cancers are more common than expected, and that new lineages can be found by screening a large number of species. (shrink)

Familial disclosure of genetic information is an important, long-standing ethical issue that still gives rise to much debate. In France, recent legislation has created an innovative and unprecedented procedure that allows healthcare professionals, under certain conditions, to disclose relevant information to relatives of a person carrying a deleterious genetic mutation. This article will analyse how HCPs in two medical genetics clinics have reacted to these new legal provisions and show how their reticence to inform the patients’ relatives on their behalf (...) leads them to use this option sparingly. (shrink)

Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological—i.e. epistemic—assumptions that cut across various theories and domains of ecology. These assumptions should be clearly addressed, notably for the sake (...) of an effective comparison and integration across domains, and for assessing whether or not to use functional diversity approaches for developing ecological management strategies. The objective of this contribution is to identify and critically analyze the most salient of these assumptions. To this aim, we provide an “epistemic roadmap” that pinpoints these assumptions along a set of historical, conceptual, empirical, theoretical, and normative dimensions. (shrink)

Le nouveau livre de Frédéric Brahami montre comment il faut considérer globalement la réaction des penseurs postrévolutionnaires à la Révolution pour saisir la façon dont s’est élaborée la philosophie politique qui est encore la nôtre, pour autant que nous lisions notre actualité politique à la lumière des sciences sociales. Pour fournir les schèmes de notre pensée politique, il a fallu que les critiques contre-révolutionnaires de la modernité politique soient reprises par les progressistes sensibles à la « question sociale ». (...) La pensée sociale du xixe siècle pouvait alors dégager la raison immanente aux mœurs modernes, en découvrant la double nécessité d’en faire l’objet d’une science et de les comprendre politiquement. Au-delà d’une généalogie alternative et stimulante de la politique moderne, c’est tout une philosophie de l’histoire sociale et intellectuelle qui est là engagée, au terme de laquelle nos sociétés démocratiques apparaissent comme ces sociétés qui ne cessent de se réfléchir elles-mêmes en se pensant politiquement. (shrink)

Le nouveau livre de Frédéric Brahami montre comment il faut considérer globalement la réaction des penseurs postrévolutionnaires à la Révolution pour saisir la façon dont s’est élaborée la philosophie politique qui est encore la nôtre, pour autant que nous lisions notre actualité politique à la lumière des sciences sociales. Pour fournir les schèmes de notre pensée politique, il a fallu que les critiques contre-révolutionnaires de la modernité politique soient reprises par les progressistes sensibles à la « question sociale ». (...) La pensée sociale du xixe siècle pouvait alors dégager la raison immanente aux mœurs modernes, en découvrant la double nécessité d’en faire l’objet d’une science et de les comprendre politiquement. Au-delà d’une généalogie alternative et stimulante de la politique moderne, c’est tout une philosophie de l’histoire sociale et intellectuelle qui est là engagée, au terme de laquelle nos sociétés démocratiques apparaissent comme ces sociétés qui ne cessent de se réfléchir elles-mêmes en se pensant politiquement. (shrink)

This paper analyzes community ecologist Charles Elton’s ideas on animal communities, and situates them with respect to the classical opposition between organicist–holistic and individualistic–reductionist ecological views drawn by many historians of ecology. It is argued that Elton espoused a moderate ecological holism, which drew a middle way between the stricter ecological holism advocated by organicist ecologists and the merely aggregationist views advocated by some of their opponents. It is also argued that Elton’s moderate ecological holism resonated with his preference for (...) analogies between ecological communities and human societies over more common ones between communities and individual organisms. I discuss, on the one hand, how the functionalist-interactionist approach to community ecology introduced by Elton entailed a view of ecological communities as more or less self-maintaining functionally organized wholes, and how his ideas on this matter were incorporated into their views by organicist ecologists Frederic Clements, Victor Shelford, and Warder C. Allee et al. On the other hand, I identify some important divergences between Elton’s ecological ideas and those of organicist ecologists. Specifically, I show how Elton’s ideas on species distribution, animal migrations, and ecological succession entailed a view of animal communities as exhibiting a weaker degree of part-whole integration than that attributed to them by Clements and Shelford; and how Elton’s mixed stance on the balance of nature idea and his associated views on community stability attributed to communities a weaker form of self-regulation than that attributed to them by Allee et al. (shrink)

Un passage biffé d’une lettre à Antoine Arnauld du 14 janvier 1688 rappelle un projet ancien chez Leibniz, celui d’augmenter l’extension de la logique démonstrative. Il écrit : « votre Art de penser contient déjà de belles méditations, qu’on peut augmenter et pousser plus avant ». Le compliment est évidemment fort ambigu, et rappelle la fonction que Leibniz donne parfois à des auteurs appartenant grosso modo au même espace intellectuel que Descartes ou Pascal, c’est-à-dire celle d’avoir comme...

Haeusermann et al. (Citation2023) draw three overall conclusions from their study on closed loop neuromodulation and self-perception in clinical treatment of refractory epilepsy. The first is that closed-loop neuromodulation devices did not substantially change epileptic patient’s personalities or self-perception postoperatively. The second is that some patients and caregivers attributed observed changes in personality and self-perception to the epilepsy itself and not to the DBS treatments. The third is that the devices provided participants with novel ways to make sense of their (...) illness. These findings further demonstrate a misalignment between some neuroethicists’ concerns about putative postoperative changes to personality, and the empirical evidence for such changes. Haeusermann et al. nonetheless concede that “neurotechnology directed at persisting rather than episodic clinical phenomena could have greater implications for personality or self-perception, either because they operate more continuously or are directed at clinical phenomena that are more stably integrated into patients’ self-concepts” (41). We acknowledge that the hypothesis that participants did not report changes because they were only episodically and not continually stimulated offers an interesting line for future investigation. Nonetheless, we would like to propose that potential postoperative personality changes might be correlated with the pathophysiology itself, rather than the stimulation effects of the technology. Generally, we advance the view that unintended effects solely induced by the technology cannot be excluded per se. Regardless, this comment aims to highlight that ethicists’ starting premise should be that patients suffering from diverse pathophysiology, or patients who are treated with stimulation in different brain regions and with differing parameters, would likely not react in the same way to treatment. (shrink)

. Computational chemistry grew in a new era of “desktop modeling,” which coincided with a growing demand for modeling software, especially from the pharmaceutical industry. Parameterization of models in computational chemistry is an arduous enterprise, and we argue that this activity leads, in this specific context, to tensions among scientists regarding the epistemic opacity transparency of parameterized methods and the software implementing them. We relate one flame war from the Computational Chemistry mailing List in order to assess in detail the (...) relationships between modeling methods, parameterization, software and the various forms of their enclosure or disclosure. Our claim is that parameterization issues are an important and often neglected source of epistemic opacity and that this opacity is entangled in methods and software alike. Models and software must be addressed together to understand the epistemological tensions at stake. (shrink)

This book is a unique introductory overview of decision theory. It is completely non-technical, without a single formula in the book. Written in a crisp and clear style it succinctly covers the full range of philosophical issues of rationality and decision theory, including game theory, social choice theory, prisoner's dilemma and much else. The book aims to expand the scope and enrich the foundations of decision theory. By addressing such issues as ambivalence, inner conflict, and the constraints imposed upon us (...) by our attachments to others, Frederic Schick reveals that our thinking is often more subtle than standard theories of rationality allow. Only a theory that respects that subtlety can illumine what is otherwise puzzling. The book contains many examples drawn from history and literature dealing with subjects such as love, war, friendship, and crime. (shrink)

Nietzsche once proclaimed himself the 'Buddha of Europe', and throughout his life Buddhism held enormous interest for him. While he followed Buddhist thinking in demolishing what he regarded as the two-headed delusion of Being and Self, he saw himself as advocating a response to the ensuing nihilist crisis that was diametrically opposed to that of his Indian counterpart. In this book Antoine Panaïoti explores the deep and complex relations between Nietzsche's views and Buddhist philosophy. He discusses the psychological models (...) and theories which underlie their supposedly opposing ethics of 'great health' and explodes the apparent dichotomy between Nietzsche's Dionysian life-affirmation and Buddhist life-negation, arguing for a novel, hybrid response to the challenge of formulating a tenable post-nihilist ethics. His book will interest students and scholars of Nietzsche's philosophy, Buddhist thought and the metaphysical, existential and ethical issues that emerge with the demise of theism. (shrink)

One important concern regarding implantable Brain Computer Interfaces is the fear that the intervention will negatively change a patient’s sense of identity or agency. In particular, there is concern that the user will be psychologically worse-off following treatment despite postoperative functional improvements. Clinical observations from similar implantable brain technologies, such as deep brain stimulation, show a small but significant proportion of patients report feelings of strangeness or difficulty adjusting to a new concept of themselves characterized by a maladaptive je ne (...) sais quoi despite clear motor improvement. Despite the growing number of cases in the DBS literature, there is currently no accepted or standardized tool in neuroethics specifically designed to capture the phenomenological postoperative experience of patients implanted with DBS or BCI devices. Given potential risks of postoperative maladaptation, it is important for the field of neuroethics to develop a qualitative instrument that can serve as a shared method for capturing postoperative variations in patient experience of identity and agency. The goal of this article is to introduce an instrument we have developed for this purpose and call for further neuroethical efforts to assess the phenomenology of implantable brain device use. (shrink)

Assembly of minimal genomes revealed many genes encoding unknown functions. Three overlooked functional categories account for some of them. Cells are prone to make errors and age. As a first key function, discrimination between proper and changed entities is indispensable. Discrimination requires management of information, an authentic, yet abstract, cur- rency of reality. For example proteins age, sometimes very fast. The cell must identify, then get rid of old proteins without destroying young ones. Implementing discrimination in cells leads to the (...) second set of functions, usually ignored. Being abstract, information must nevertheless be embodied into material entities, with unavoidable idiosyncratic properties. This brings about novel unmet needs. Hence, the buildup of cells elicits specific but awkward material implementations, ‘kludges’ that become essential under particular settings, while difficult to identify. Finally, a third functional category char- acterizes the need for growth, with metabolic implementations allowing the cell to put together the growth of its cytoplasm, membranes, and genome, spanning different spatial dimensions. Solving this metabolic quandary, critical for engineering novel synthetic biology chassis, uncovered an unexpected role for CTP synthetase as the coordinator of nonhomothetic growth. Because a significant number of SynBio constructs aim at creating cell factories we expect that they will be attacked by viruses (it is not by chance that the function of the CRISPR system was identified in industrial settings). Substantiating the role of CTP, natural selection has dealt with this hurdle via synthesis of the antimetabolite 30-deoxy-30,40-didehydro- CTP, recruited for antiviral immunity in all domains of life. (shrink)

Before the Darwinian revolution species were thought to be universals. Since then, numerous attempts have been made to propose new definitions. The twentieth-century German philosopher Nicolai Hartmann defined 'species' as an individual system of processes and a process of life of a higher-order. To provide a clear understanding of Hartmann's conception of species, I first present his method of definition. Then I look at Hartmann's Philosophie der Natur (1950) to present his concepts of "organism" and "species." And I end the (...) paper by pointing out two possible systematic inconsistencies. (shrink)

Brief, accessible, and affordable, these pocket-sized volumes offer the essential introductions to the great philosophers of the Western tradition-from Plato to Wittgenstein.

The epistemology of models has to face a conundrum: models are often described as highly idealised, and yet they are considered to be vehicles for scientific explanations. Truth-oriented—veritist—conceptions of explanation seem thereby undermined by this contradiction. In this article, I will show how this apparent paradox can be avoided by appealing to the notion of fiction. If fictionalism is often thought to lead to various flavours of instrumentalism, thereby weakening the veritist hopes, the fiction view of models offers a framework (...) much richer than it seems at first sight. To do so, I will call upon the concepts of modality, counterfactual structure and credible worlds. In the end, veritism of explanation and fiction can indeed go hand in hand, but the scope of explanations we can hope to draw from models must be more precisely delineated. (shrink)

To fulfill their crucial duty of relieving suffering in their patients, physicians may have to administer palliative sedation when they implement treatment-limitation decisions such as the withdrawal of life-supporting interventions in patients with poor prognosis chronic severe brain injury. The issue of palliative sedation deserves particular attention in adults with serious brain injuries and in neonates with severe and irreversible brain lesions, who are unable to express pain or to state their wishes. In France, treatment limitation decisions for these patients (...) are left to the physicians. Treatment-limitation decisions are made collegially, based on the presence of irreversible brain lesions responsible for chronic severe disorders of consciousness. Before these decisions are implemented, they are communicated to the relatives. Because the presence and severity of pain cannot be assessed in these patients, palliative analgesia and/or sedation should be administered. However, palliative sedation is a complex strategy that requires safeguards to prevent a drift toward hastening death or performing covert euthanasia. In addition to the law on patients' rights at the end of life passed in France on April 22, 2005, a recent revision of Article 37 of the French code of medical ethics both acknowledges that treatment-limitation decisions and palliative sedation may be required in patients with severe brain injuries and provides legal and ethical safeguards against a shift towards euthanasia. This legislation may hold value as a model for other countries where euthanasia is illegal and for countries such as Belgium and Netherlands where euthanasia is legal but not allowed in patients incapable of asking for euthanasia but in whom a treatment limitation decision has been made. (shrink)

Introduction -- 1e Intermed consid -- Marx -- Simmel -- Weber -- Lukács -- 2e intermed consid -- Horkheimer -- Adorno -- 3e intermed consid -- Habermas I -- Habermas II -- Habermas III -- Conclusion -- Postscript -- Bibliography.

The Russian philosopher Nikolai Onufrievich Lossky adhered to an evolutionary metaphysics of reincarnation according to which the world is constituted of immortal souls or monads, which he calls ‘substantival agents.’ These substantival agents can evolve or devolve depending on the goodness or badness of their behavior. Such evolution requires the possibility for monads to reincarnate into the bodies of creatures of a higher or of a lower level on the scala perfectionis. According to this theory, a substantival agent can evolve (...) by being gradually reincarnated multiple times through a sort of process of metamorphosis from the level of the most elementary particles all the way up to the level of human beings or even higher. In ‘Ученiе Лейбница о перевоплощенiи какъ метаморфозѣ’, Lossky argues that the works of Leibniz contain scattered elements of such a systematic evolutionary doctrine of reincarnation as metamorphosis and he attempts to reconstitute this doctrine. The present article is intended as an historical introduction to the translation of Lossky’s ‘Leibniz’s Doctrine of Reincarnation as Metamorphosis.’. (shrink)

Deux décennies après les premières vagues de démocratisation en Afrique, le temps n'est-il pas venu d'instruire le " procès " de la démocratie ?

Philosophy is one of the most intimidating and difficult of disciplines, as any of its students can attest. This book is an important entry in a distinctive new series from Routledge: The Great Philosophers . Breaking down obstacles to understanding the ideas of history's greatest thinkers, these brief, accessible, and affordable volumes offer essential introductions to the great philosophers of the Western tradition from Plato to Wittgenstein. In just 64 pages, each author, a specialist on his subject, places the philosopher (...) and his ideas into historical perspective. Each volume explains, in simple terms, the basic concepts, enriching the narrative through the effective use of biographical detail. And instead of attempting to explain the philosopher's entire intellectual history, which can be daunting, this series takes one central theme in each philosopher's work, using it to unfold the philosopher's thoughts. (shrink)

In the present article I attribute to the common topic in the Rhetoric a two-fold suggestive function and a guarantee function. These three functions are possible because this type of topic, while often quite abstract, nevertheless contains thought-steering, substantial terms, and formulates a generally empirical or normative endoxon. Assuming that according to Aristotle an enthymeme has at least two premises, it would appear that a common topic is the abstract principle behind the often implicit major premise. This means that the (...) topic may be regarded as the – generalizing – if-then statement in a modern argumentation scheme. Therefore it should be possible to see the enthymemes of Rhetoric 2.23 as a combination of a logical argument form (which can usually be reconstructed as modus ponens) and an argumentation scheme – even though we may not attribute this idea to Aristotle himself. (shrink)

This book is a guide to working with social science concepts. Concepts are the prisms through which we see the social world. They are foundational to the social science enterprise, and the quality of investigations hinges in part on how well researchers make use of them. Most social science concepts are drawn from ordinary language used in everyday ways; however, many social scientists "reconfigure" ordinary words to meet their research needs. They tinker with the meanings of words to fit their (...) theoretical aims and make them precise, useful tools of measurement and comparison. This book examines social science concepts through an interpretivist lens with the aim of providing concrete conceptual guidance for future research. Specifically, this book seeks to: 1) identify characteristic dangers that attend the making and use of reconfigured concepts; 2) lay out ways in which a select number of interpretivist approaches have been used to mitigate these dangers; 3) introduce practical tools that rework these interpretivist approaches into explicit and useable research methods; 4) show concretely how these elucidation tools can be gainfully used by social scientists working both within and outside of the interpretivist tradition. It will be an essential guide for social science research. (shrink)

What are the motivational bases that help explain the various normative judgements that social agents make, and the normative reasoning they employ? Answering this question leads us to consider the relationships between thoughts and emotions. Emotions will be described as thought-dependent and thought-directing, and as being intimately related to normativity. They are conceived as the grounds that motivate social agents to articulate their reasoning with respect to the values and norms they face and/or share in their social collective. It is (...) argued that because they are modes of thinking, emotions generate cognitive activities that relate to the making of evaluative and deontic judgements, the utterance of speech acts, the mastering of normative concepts and the building of arguments. Furthermore, each type of emotion generates its own constitutive judgements and structures normative thinking according to its own logic. The main thesis is that emotions provide sociological explanations for social agents’ thinking and speech, for emotions are precisely what motivate and, especially, structure normative reasoning and language. Being observable in language, emotions allow us to explain a) how social subjects reason and argue through norms and values, and b) how social subjects through their speech acts can contribute to the (un-)making of the social world. (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)

Intentional explanation, according to Elster, seeks to elucidate an action by showing that it was intentionally conducted, in order to bring about certain goals . Intentional actions furthermore, are rational actions: they imply that agents establish a connection between the goals they target and the means that are appropriate to reach them, by way of different beliefs about the means, the goals and the environment. But how should we understand intentional actions in the light of philosophical research on emotions, rationality, (...) and normativity? This question is the departure point of this article. Various philosophers have analyzed the relationships between rationality and emotion, those between emotion and normativity, and those between emotion and intentional action. Nonetheless, their theses are scattered and do not offer an integrative view on how rationality, normativity and emotions work from the standpoint of intentional explanation. By using de Sousa’s distinction between the epistemic and the strategic modes of rationality as a theoretical framework, this article proposes therefore to remedy this deficit by unifying these philosophical insights with the goal of elaborating a theory of intentional explanation which brings together rationality, normativity and emotions. (shrink)

C'est une vieille évidence qu'il n'est rien sujet à plus de continuelle agitation que les lois. Et en effet, l'ordre juridique est toujours instable. Il traduit un point d'équilibre momentané, qui n'était pas le seul possible, ni le seul prévisible. Le meilleur des Codes n'a jamais pu le fixer. Son contenu évolue sans cesse. Car, à l'image de la vie, le champ du droit est un espace ouvert, où s'affrontent un chaos de forces en perpétuel mouvement. Ni Providence, ni Progrès (...) n'y apparaissent avec certitude, l'esprit souffle apparemment où il veut et nul ne sait où il va. La preuve en est que la meilleure des règles en un temps donné finit toujours par avoir des effets pervers et qu'il est peu de lois vicieuses qui n'aient parfois d'heureux effets. Dans ces conditions, il ne faut pas attendre de l'enseignement du droit qu'il fournisse un catalogue de recettes pratiques, stables et sûres. Son seul but devrait être d'apprendre à poser les bonnes questions, qui sont presque toujours les mêmes, pour parvenir un jour à trouver de bonnes réponses, toujours provisoires. Or, aucune démarche n'est plus propice à la réalisation d'un tel but que la méthode historique. Elle révèle qu'il n'y a jamais de solution bonne et durable et que chaque civilisation, chaque génération doit trouver elle même ses propres réponses, avec une étroite marge de manœuvre. Pour trouver sa voie, explique l'auteur, ni la science, ni la philosophie ne livrent de clé. Si l'une peut l'éclairer et l'autre le guider, le droit n'est ni assimilable à une science, ni réductible à une philosophie. C'est un art subtil, qui nécessite de se plier à une discipline spécifique, mais dont la parfaite maîtrise dépasse celle des règles techniques qui lui sont indispensables. Elle suppose la sagesse d'admettre les pesanteurs, la complexité et la relativité de la vie, ainsi que la sérénité d'accepter ce qui ne peut être changé, le courage de modifier ce qui peut l'être et le désir de chercher à distinguer l'un de l'autre sans parti-pris. Ceci requiert une tournure d'esprit et une culture à laquelle il ne paraît pas concevable d'accéder sans le secours de l'expérience et le recours à l'histoire. (shrink)

Il est donc devenu banal de dire que Marx n'a pas laissé de théorie achevée de l'Etat et de la politique. Nombreux sont cependant les textes dans lesquels Marx apporte des éléments décisifs à l'analyse de la dimension politique d'une conjoncture et sur l'évolution des formes étatiques du XIXe siècle. Mais on ne trouve pas chez lui une théorie de l'Etat moderne équivalente à son analyse des rapports de production dans le " capital ". Cela laisse en suspens des problèmes (...) d'importance. Ainsi, comment concevoir le lien entre le rapport salarial, la forme juridique et la représentation politique? Il en est de même pour les phénomènes bureaucratiques. Cela lègue aussi un point aveugle sur une question cruciale : que faut-il entendre par dépérissement de l'Etat? Antoine Artous aborde ces problèmes sans chercher à les esquiver, au travers d'un effort pour "faire parler les textes de Marx". Il ne s'agit pas de restituer une pensée mal comprise ou trahie. Il s'agit d'une lecture critique qui n'hésite pas à relever les lacunes, à mettre Marx à l'épreuve de sa postérité. Un dialogue ainsi s'organise avec des auteurs tels que Max Weber, Nicos Poulantzas ou Ernst Bloch. Pour Antoine Artous, l'œuvre de Marx ne peut sortir indemne de l'inscription historique du marxisme dans ce siècle. Croire le contraire serait illusoire. Elle apparaît néanmoins incontournable pour qui veut penser la formidable rupture dans l'histoire des sociétés que représente l'avènement de l'Etat moderne. Incontournable aussi pour qui veut réfléchir sur les perspectives politiques des luttes d'émancipation. (shrink)

The paper presents a research programme for the neuroscience of consciousness called 'neurophenomenology' and illustrates it with a recent pilot study . At a theoretical level, neurophenomenology pursues an embodied and large-scale dynamical approach to the neurophysiology of consciousness . At a methodological level, the neurophenomenological strategy is to make rigorous and extensive use of first-person data about subjective experience as a heuristic to describe and quantify the large-scale neurodynamics of consciousness . The paper focuses on neurophenomenology in relation to (...) three challenging methodological issues about incorporating first-person data into cognitive neuroscience: first-person reports can be biased or inaccurate; the process of generating first-person reports about an experience can modify that experience; and there is an 'explanatory gap' in our understanding of how to relate first-person, phenomenological data to third-person, biobehavioural data. (shrink)

The Rhetoric to Alexander (about 340 B.C.) contains a list of proofs (pisteis) and other types of argumentation which may be seen as the oldest surviving typology of argumentation schemes (avant la lettre). In the present article this typology is derived and compared with modern proposals. The conclusion is that the oldest typology is surprisingly similar to the most recent classifications.

When developing phylogenetic systematics, the entomologist Willi Hennig adopted elements from Nicolai Hartmann’s ontology. In this historical essay I take on the task of documenting this adoption. I argue that in order to build a metaphysical foundation for phylogenetic systematics, Hennig adopted from Hartmann four main metaphysical theses. These are (1) that what is real is what is temporal; (2) that the criterion of individuality is to have duration; (3) that species are supra-individuals; and (4) that there are levels of (...) reality, each of which may be subject to different kinds of law. Reliance on Hartmann’s metaphysics allowed Hennig to ground some of the main theoretical principles of phylogenetic systematics, namely that the biological categories—from the semaphoront to the highest rank—have reality and individuality despite not being universals, and that they form a hierarchy of levels, each of which may require different kinds of explanation. Hartmann’s metaphysics thereby provided a philosophical justification for Hennig’s phylogenetic systematics, both as a theory and as a method of classification. (shrink)

The lasting effects of the debate over canon-formation during the 1980s affected the whole field of Humanities, which became increasingly engaged in interrogating the origin and function of the Western canon. In philosophy, a great deal of criticism was, as a result, directed at the traditional narrative of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophies—a critique informed by postcolonialism as well as feminist historiography. D. F. Norton, L. Loeb and many others1 attempted to demonstrate the weaknesses of the tripartite division between rationalism, empiricism and (...) critical philosophy.2 As time went on, symptoms of dissatisfaction with what has... (shrink)