This paper presents a theory of algorithms designed to optimize highly interactive systems (multi-diminsional, multi-peak, nonlinear functions). Two applications are discussed: one concerns cognitive systems capable of learning and generalization, and one concerns calculations dealing with the "origin of life" from "organic soups". The algorithms are intrinsically parallel--each function argument processed serves as a carrier for information about a tremendous number of regions (hyperplanes) in the function's domain. Each region is automatically ranked according to the estimated average value of the (...) function over that region, and the rankings are compactly stored in the algorithm's data base (M l-tuples store approximately M-2 l/2 rankings). Thus, the algorithm implicitly processes hyperplanes by manipulating function arguments. (shrink)

In this Very Short Introduction, John H. Holland, one of the leading figures in the field, introduces the key elements and conceptual framework of complexity. From complex physical systems such as fluid flow and the difficulties of predicting weather, to complex adaptive systems such as the diverse and interdependent ecosystems of rainforests, he uses simple examples to illustrate the approach and insights provided by complexity theory.

In this Very Short Introduction, John H. Holland, one of the leading figures in the field, introduces the key elements and conceptual framework of complexity. From complex physical systems such as fluid flow and the difficulties of predicting weather, to complex adaptive systems such as the diverse and interdependent ecosystems of rainforests, he uses simple examples to illustrate the approach and insights provided by complexity theory.

The idea for this collection of essays arose out of conversations I had with D. Z. Phillips in Claremont in 2000: a set of philosophical essays recognizing and arising out of something I took to be both interesting and good going on at University College, Swansea, roughly from the 1950s into the 1990s. I envisioned eight essays, each in some way taking up the work of one of eight individuals - Rush Rhees, Peter Winch, R. F. Holland, J. R. (...) Jones, H. O. Mounce, D. Z. Phillips, Ilham Dilman, and R. W. Beardsmore - each of whom taught at Swansea for a substantial period during those years, these being followed by a ninth essay providing something of an overview of the other eight essays and thereby of philosophy at Swansea during the same period. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Works cited Additional recommended readings.

This book explores how and when biology emerged as a science in Germany. Beginning with the debate about organism between Georg Ernst Stahl and Gottfried Leibniz at the start of the eighteenth century, John Zammito traces the development of a new research program, culminating in 1800, in the formulation of developmental morphology. He shows how over the course of the century, naturalists undertook to transform some domains of natural history into a distinct branch of natural philosophy, which attempted not (...) only to describe but to explain the natural world and became, ultimately, the science of biology. (shrink)

Through the back door: the problem of history and the African American philosopher/philosophy -- The problem of philosophy: metaphilosophical considerations -- The search for values: axiology in ebony -- Philosophy of science: African American deliberations -- Mapping the disciplinary contours of the philosophy of religion: reason, faith, and African American religious culture.

Most scholars think not. But in this pioneering book, John H. Zammito challenges that view by revealing a precritical Kant who was immensely more influential than the one philosophers think they know.

In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and (...) the Sturm und Drang movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a "Kantian" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism. The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom. "A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique."-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's ;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X "An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. "--John W. Burbidge, Review of Metaphysics "There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it."--Frederick Beiser, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-226-97861-3 (alk. paper) — isbn 0-226-97862-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Science — Philosophy. 2. Science — History. 3. Progress. I. Title. Q175 .Z25 2004 501 — dc2i 200301 1970 ...

In theology, by W.L. Rowe.--Divine foreknowledge and human freedom, by A. Kenny.--Some puzzles concerning omnipotence, by G.I. Mavrodes.--The paradox of the stone, by C.W. Savage.--Creation ex nihilo, by J. Donnelly.--The miraculous, by R.F. Holland.--On miracles, by P.J. Dietl.--The tacit structure of religious knowing, by J.H. Gill.--On the observability of the self, by R.M. Chisholm.--Re-examining Kierkegaard's "Teleological suspension of the ethical," by J. Donnelly.

Kant’s philosophy of science takes on sharp contour in terms of his interaction with the practicing life scientists of his day, particularly Johann Blumenbach and the latter’s student, Christoph Girtanner, who in 1796 attempted to synthesize the ideas of Kant and Blumenbach. Indeed, Kant’s engagement with the life sciences played a far more substantial role in his transcendental philosophy than has been recognized hitherto. The theory of epigenesis, especially in light of Kant’s famous analogy in the first Critique, posed crucial (...) questions regarding the ‘looseness of fit’ between the constitutive and the regulative in Kant’s theory of empirical law. A detailed examination of Kant’s struggle with epigenesis between 1784 and 1790 demonstrates his grave reservations about its hylozoist implications, leading to his even stronger insistence on the discrimination of constitutive from regulative uses of reason. The continuing relevance of these issues for Kant’s philosophy of science is clear from the work of Buchdahl and its contemporary reception. (shrink)

In a recent essay, Donald Dripps advanced what he calls a “commodification theory” of rape, offered as an alternative to understanding rape in terms of lack of consent. Under the “commodification theory,” rape is understood as the expropriation of sexual services, i.e., obtaining sex through “illegitimate” means. One aim of Dripps's effort was to show the inadequacy of consent approaches to understanding rape. Robin West, while accepting Dripps's critique of consent theories, criticizes Dripps's commodification approach. In its place, West suggests (...) a more phenomenological approach. The author argues that neither Dripps nor West offers convincing critiques of consent-based theories; the alternatives they offer presuppose the vitality of a consent-based approach to understanding rape; and that both Dripps and West consistently conflate more general moral and political issues with that of the nature of rape. (shrink)

Introduction : Philosophy of sports and the African American experience : perceptual observations and conceptual considerations -- What's philosophy got to do with it? : on the meaning of sports and the African American experience -- The emergence of the African American athlete in slavery : a materialist philosophical interpretation -- Who's on first? : the concept of African American firsts and the legacy of the "color line" -- The Black athlete and the 'white shadow' : the matter of philosophy (...) of history and the problem of the "color line" -- Keeping Black women in their "place" : the triple burden of sexism, racism and class exploitation -- He who make the rules, controls the games : the political philosophy of capitalist sports in black and white -- African American sports films. (shrink)

Human intentional action, including the design and use of artifacts, involves the prior mental representation of the goal (end) and the means to achieve that goal. This representation is part of the efficient cause of the action, and thus can be used to explain both the action and the achievement of the end. This is intentional teleological explanation. More generally, teleological explanation that depends on the real existence of a representation of the goal (and the means to achieve it) can (...) be called representational teleological explanation. Such explanations in biology can involve both external representations (e.g., ideas in the mind of God) and internal representations (souls, vital powers, entelechies, developmental programs, etc.). However, another type of explanation of intentional action (or any other process) is possible. Given that an action achieving a result occurs, the action can be explained as fulfilling the necessary conditions (means) for that result (end), and, reciprocally, the result explained by the occurrence of those necessary conditions. This is conditional teleological explanation. For organisms, natural selection is often understood metaphorically as the designer, intentionally constructing them for certain ends. Unfortunately, this metaphor is often taken rather too literally, because it has been difficult to conceive of another way to relate natural selection to the process of evolution. I argue that combining a conditional teleological explanation of organisms and of evolution provides such an alternative. This conditional teleology can be grounded in existence or survival. Given that an organism exists, we can explain its existence by the occurrence of the necessary conditions for that existence. This principle of the 'conditions for existence' was introduced by Georges Cuvier in 1800, and provides a valid, conditional teleological method for explaining organismal structure and behavior. From an evolutionary perspective, the conditions for existence are the range of boundary conditions within which the evolutionary process must occur. Moreover, evolutionary change itself can be subjected to conditional teleological explanation, because natural selection theory is primarily a theory about the relation between the conditions for the existence of organisms and the conditions for the existence of traits in populations. I show that failure to distinguish representational from conditional teleological explanation has confused previous attempts to clarify the relation of teleology to biology. (shrink)

A veritable tidal shift in Herder scholarship has taken place over the last quarter century, primarily but not exclusively in German. This review essay seeks to evoke the richness and vitality of this revival with the hope of persuading American academics that some ill-founded opinions still circulating concerning Herder's "irrationalism" and chauvinistic, even racist nationalism, and his philosophical naivety and literary effrontery, might at last be put to rest. The recent revival has brough sharply to the fore two crucial aspects (...) of Herder. First, there is the contribution of Herder's thought to the emergent cultural and social sciences. Second, for Herder the "science of man" was also a natural science: the division between the humanities and the natural sciences that has been such a hallmark of the age from Kant until very recently did not exist for Herder. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRheinberger's brief history brings into sharp profile the importance of history of science for a philosophical understanding of historical practice. Rheinberger presents thought about the nature of science by leading scientists and their interpreters over the course of the twentieth century as emphasizing increasingly the local and developmental character of their learning practices, thus making the conception of knowledge dependent upon historical experience, “historicizing epistemology.” Linking his account of thought about science to his own work on “experimental systems,” I draw (...) extensive parallels with other work in the local history of science and consider the epistemological implications both for the relation between history and philosophy of science and between history and theory more broadly. In doing so, I suggest that the long‐standing gap between the natural sciences and history as a “human science” has been significantly bridged by the insistence upon the local, mediated, indeed “historicized epistemology” of actual science. (shrink)

Reconstructions of Kant are prominent in the contemporary debate over naturalism. Given that this naturalism rejects a priori principles, Kant's anti-naturalism can best be discerned in the “critical turn” as a response to David Hume. Hume did not awaken Kant to criticize but to defend rational metaphysics. But when Kant went transcendental did he not, in fact, go transcendent? The controversy in the 1990s over John McDowell's Mind and World explored just this suspicion: the questions of the normative force (...) of reason and of the ontological “space of reasons” vis- -vis the world. “Bald naturalism” appears to “extrude” rationality both ontologically and epistemologically from the natural world. Kant sought to discriminate a transcendental middle ground, safe from either extrusion. But was Kant's notion of the autonomy and spontaneity of reason as metaphysically innocent as McDowell's critics would have it? Situating Hume and naturalism in the eighteenth-century German context can help us understand the “critical turn” more accurately. While Hume recognized procedural proprieties for reflection, he did not believe in their a priori necessity. Initially, Kant shared that view. What assimilating Leibniz and Locke in the late 1760s garnered for Kant—the simultaneous spontaneity and self-transparency of reason—seemed to provide a means for overcoming Hume's skepticism and establishing a new foundation for metaphysics. Accordingly, all of the efforts of modern Kantianism notwithstanding, there is more than a whiff of the transcendent in Kant's transcendentalism. (shrink)

We provide a general framework for studying the expansion of strongly minimal sets by adding additional relations in the style of Hrushovski. We introduce a notion of separation of quantifiers which is a condition on the class of expansions of finitely generated models for the expanded theory to have a countable ω-saturated model. We apply these results to construct for each sufficiently fast growing finite-to-one function μ from 'primitive extensions' to the natural numbers a theory T μ of an expansion (...) of an algebraically closed field which has Morley rank 2. Finally, we show that if μ is not finite-to-one the theory may not be ω-stable. (shrink)

Contemporary national codes of ethics hinge more on fantasy than fact: the idea that journalists control what becomes news. While journalists' influence over news has grown during much of the 20th century to the point where courts have begun to define them as professionals, it has never surpassed the influence of owners. New evidence indicates authority has eroded as media firms seek to maximize return to investors. As journalists' autonomy recedes, national ethics codes become less relevant to practitioners and more (...) publicly deceptive. The codes also are unethical themselves as journalists become decision takers rather than decision makers. Moral responsibility and real world authority diverge. It2 time to end the charade by creating new codes that include the decision makers outside the news room. (shrink)

The two theories that revolutionized physics in the twentieth century, relativity and quantum mechanics, are full of predictions that defy common sense. Recently, we used three such paradoxical ideas to prove “The Free Will Theorem” (strengthened here), which is the culmination of a series of theorems about quantum mechanics that began in the 1960s. It asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity. More precisely, if (...) the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle’s response (to be pedantic—the universe’s response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe. Our argument combines the well-known consequence of relativity theory, that the time order of space-like separated events is not absolute, with the EPR paradox discovered by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen in 1935, and the Kochen-Specker Paradox of 1967 (See [2].) We follow Bohm in using a spin version of EPR and Peres in using his set of 33 directions, rather than the original configuration used by Kochen and Specker. More contentiously, the argument also involves the notion of free will, but we postpone further discussion of this to the last section of the article. Note that our proof does not mention “probabilities” or the “states” that determine them, which is.. (shrink)

The conflict between Kant and the medical faculty was far more complex and substantial than is indicated in the section of his famous Conflict of the Faculties addressing this matter. In this essay I will consider not only what Kant, as a philoso­pher, thought of medicine as a faculty, but what medicine as a faculty thought of Kant as a philosopher.

The conflict between Kant and the medical faculty was far more complex and substantial than is indicated in the section of his famous Conflict of the Faculties addressing this matter. In this essay I will consider not only what Kant, as a philoso­pher, thought of medicine as a faculty, but what medicine as a faculty thought of Kant as a philosopher.

Has the emergence of post-positivism in philosophy of science changed the terms of the “is/ought” dichotomy? If it has demonstrated convincingly that there are no “facts” apart from the theoretical frames and evaluative standards constructing them, can such a cordon sanitaire really be upheld between “facts” and values? The point I wish to stress is that philosophy of science has had a central role in constituting and imposing the fact/value dichotomy and a revolution in the philosophy of science should not (...) leave the dichotomy unaffected. The connection between post-positivism and naturalism will be my guiding thread in considering this “last dogma of positivism.” First this essay will specify the sense of naturalism that it will take to be essential to the post-positivist philosophy of science: the deflation of the notion of the “purity” of scientific knowledge. Then it will turn to the question of the implications that follow for the “autonomy” of ethics, including the danger posed by a new form of scientistic reductionism. (shrink)