The group of mathematicians known as Bourbaki persuasively proclaimed the isolation of its field of research – pure mathematics – from society and science. It may therefore seem paradoxical that links with larger French cultural movements, especially structuralism and potential literature, are easy to establish. Rather than arguing that the latter were a consequence of the former, which they were not, I show that all of these cultural movements, including the Bourbakist endeavor, emerged together, each strengthening the public appeal of (...) the others through constant, albeit often superficial, interaction. This codependency is partly responsible for their success and moreover accounts for their simultaneous fall from favor, which, however, can clearly be seen as also stemming from different internal problems. To understand this dynamics, I argue that Bourbaki’s role can best be captured by using the notion of cultural connector, which I introduce here. (shrink)

In 1900, the physicist Henri Bénard exhibited the spontaneous formation of cells in a layer of liquid heated from below. Six or seven decades later, drastic reinterpretations of this experiment formed an important component of ‘chaos theory’. This paper therefore is an attempt at writing the history of this experiment, its long neglect and its rediscovery. It examines Bénard’s experiments from three different perspectives. First, his results are viewed in the light of the relation between experimental and mathematical approaches in (...) fluid mechanics, leading to a re-examination of the long-term reception of Bénard’s results among fluid dynamicists up to the chaos craze, whereby the traditional emphasis placed on mathematical physics is counterbalanced by greater attention to experimental approaches. Second, we focus on Bénard’s own way of using his results as analogies that could help grasp something about the reason why inorganic matter may structure itself in ways reminiscent of living forms. This is shown to resonate strongly with Prigogine’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. Third, Bénard’s adoption of the cinematograph as his preferred experimental instrument is interpreted as having reinforced his long-misunderstood belief that he had exhibited a form of self-organization essential to the understanding of life.Keywords: Bénard cells; Henri Poincaré; Chaos; Fluid mechanics; Cinematograph; Self-organization. (shrink)

“Today I made the ascent of the highest mountain in this region, which for good reasons is called Ventosum, guided only by the desire to see the extraordinary altitude of the place”. Petrarch's ascent of the Mont Ventoux in 1336, or rather his account of it, established the mountain as a distinctive place for experiencing and understanding nature and self. Since then, the mountain has been sought out in increasing numbers by those pursuing spiritual elevation, bodily exertion, and/or scientific investigation. (...) To this day, a pilgrimage church, several hotels, and an observatory are characteristically perched atop Mont Ventoux. And it is famous among cyclists as a legendarily difficultétapeof the Tour de France. (shrink)

This article maps out the lexical landscape of precision from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth century and investigate the various meanings of precision, both as a word and a concept, within the Paris Observatory and beyond. It argues that precision was first an attribute of instruments supposed to produce numerical measurements, like clocks and divided circles or sectors attached to optical devices. Less often, precision was applied to observers, the handling of instruments, and observational methods, including mathematical corrections (...) applied to raw data. When all these aspects were combined the numerical result finally was also deemed to be precise. Moving to the debate about the shape of the Earth that shook the Academy of Sciences in the 1730s, it follows the way in which wider audiences were conveyed the various meanings of precision. Between the Cartesian resistance to the emergence of a professional science of precision and the pedagogical approach followed by the Newtonians such as Maupertuis, it argues that Cassini III embraced the professionalism of modern science, but did not feel that methodological precision was out of the reach of an educated public. While Maupertuis has seemed content with a discussion focusing on the precision of instruments and results, Cassini III set himself the hefty task of producing an accessible account of precision as a method of inquiry. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the way in which French artillery engineers met the challenge of air drag in the nineteenth century. This problem was especially acute following the development of rifled barrels, when projectile initial velocities reached values much higher than the speed of sound in air. In these circumstances, the Newtonian approximation according to which the drag was a force proportional to the square of the velocity was not nearly good enough to account for experimental results. This prompted (...) a series of theoretical and experimental investigations aimed at determining the correct law of air resistance. Throughout the nineteenth century, contrary to what happened before or after, ballistician were—with very rare exceptions—alone in trying to tackle the problem of air resistance. This was a complex problem where theoretical considerations, experimental results, and computational algorithms intermingled with one another, as well as with the development of new materials and doctrine in artillery. By carefully studying the reasons why ballisticians finally opted for a complex empirical law at the end of the nineteenth century, we show that military procedures for evaluating materials became a yardstick for assessing the worth of mathematical theories as well. In conclusion, we try to assess why military specialists were not able to face the challenges posed by World War I and required the help of civilian scientists and mathematicians. (shrink)

ArgumentOne of the first high-altitude observatories was a hotel. Established in 1823, the chalet on Mount Faulhorn became a highpoint of nineteenth-century science. In this paper, I take this mountain as my entry point into the examination of the special attraction that mountains exerted on scientists. I argue that Mount Faulhorn stood for three different conceptions of the usefulness of the mountain in science: (1) in observation networks, stations were usually chosen for pragmatic rather than scientific reasons, but mountains representedsingularspots (...) in such networks, which deserved special attention; (2) the mountain also was amicrocosmwhere altitude differences were thought to capture essential features of latitude differences; (3) the mountain was sometimes no more than amacro-toolfor the pursuit of science, just a middle ground between the heaven and the earth. (shrink)

ArgumentFrom 1893 to 1909 when it definitely sunk into the glacier, the Mont-Blanc Observatory (MBO) struggled to find its scientific purpose. In this article, we use recent literature on the social characterization of place to analyze this struggle. Our first goal is to investigate where the observatory may fit in the laboratory-field dyad. We investigate various kinds of conceptual “borderlands” between these places and look at the networking activities between particular knowledge production sites. We argue that part observatory, part laboratory, (...) and part field station, the place of the MBO was “heterotopic” space in Foucault's sense. We then examine the social underpinnings that led to the foundation of this observatory in the context of French Third Republic at the turn of the century. Following some of the ways the MBO was connected to other scientific sites and surveying some of its visitors' scientific practices, we finally hint at the fact that some of these practices played a part in the emergence of a regime of science production that endured into the twentieth century (astrophysical aeronautical practices, spatial stations, polar exploration, etc.). (shrink)

"The world is a finite body, and therefore has finite power." John Philoponus is remembered for using this Aristotelian premise to break ranks with Aristotle and argue that the world is not everlasting. This investigation reconsiders Philoponus’s arguments from finite power, and then explores the aftermath of this line of thinking in the works of three lesser-known Arabic intellectuals active in the generation before Avicenna (d. 1037): Abū l-Ḫayr Ibn Suwār (d. after 1017), Abū al-Ḥasan al-ʿĀmirī (d. 992), and Abū (...) Sahl al-Masīḥī (d. after 1025). Each engaged with this dictum in unique and novel ways, and in so doing anticipated a number of central features of Avicenna’s writings. The history of this argument is of crucial importance for understanding the evolution of natural philosophy and metaphysics in this formative period, away from tedious and simplistic arguments about creation and towards a more robust modal ontology based on intrinsic and extrinsic necessity. (shrink)

L'auteur questionne dans cet essai une certaine éthique de la fragilité et de l'échec, initiée avec la quête antique, déjà précaire, de ce que Foucault appelait le "souci de soi", et encore manifeste à travers les tourments ...

David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is the definitive statement of the greatest philosopher in the English language. His arguments in support of reasoning from experience, and against the "sophistry and illusion"of religiously inspired philosophical fantasies, caused controversy in the eighteenth century and are strikingly relevant today, when faith and science continue to clash. The Enquiry considers the origin and processes of human thought, reaching the stark conclusion that we can have no ultimate understanding of the physical world, or (...) indeed our own minds. In either sphere we must depend on instinctive learning from experience, recognizing our animal nature and the limits of reason. Hume's calm and open-minded skepticism thus aims to provide a new basis for science, liberating us from the "superstition" of false metaphysics and religion. His Enquiry remains one of the best introductions to the study of philosophy, and his edition places it in its historical and philosophical context. (shrink)

A leading political theorist’s groundbreaking defense of ideal conceptions of justice in political philosophy Throughout the history of political philosophy and politics, there has been continual debate about the roles of idealism versus realism. For contemporary political philosophy, this debate manifests in notions of ideal theory versus nonideal theory. Nonideal thinkers shift their focus from theorizing about full social justice, asking instead which feasible institutional and political changes would make a society more just. Ideal thinkers, on the other hand, question (...) whether full justice is a standard that any society is likely ever to satisfy. And, if social justice is unrealistic, are attempts to understand it without value or importance, and merely utopian? Utopophobia argues against thinking that justice must be realistic, or that understanding justice is only valuable if it can be realized. David Estlund does not offer a particular theory of justice, nor does he assert that justice is indeed unrealizable—only that it could be, and this possibility upsets common ways of proceeding in political thought. Estlund engages critically with important strands in traditional and contemporary political philosophy that assume a sound theory of justice has the overriding, defining task of contributing practical guidance toward greater social justice. Along the way, he counters several tempting perspectives, including the view that inquiry in political philosophy could have significant value only as a guide to practical political action, and that understanding true justice would necessarily have practical value, at least as an ideal arrangement to be approximated. Demonstrating that unrealistic standards of justice can be both sound and valuable to understand, Utopophobia stands as a trenchant defense of ideal theory in political philosophy. (shrink)

The zetetic turn in epistemology raises three questions about epistemic and zetetic norms. First, there is the relationship question: what is the relationship between epistemic and zetetic norms? Are some epistemic norms zetetic norms, or are epistemic and zetetic norms distinct? Second, there is the tension question: are traditional epistemic norms in tension with plausible zetetic norms? Third, there is the reaction question: how should theorists react to a tension between epistemic and zetetic norms? Drawing on an analogy to practical (...) philosophy, I develop a focal point view to resolve these motivating questions. On the focal point view, traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms answer different types of normative questions. There is nevertheless a familiar type of evaluative tension between traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms, but this tension is an unavoidable feature of the normative landscape and not a sign that traditional epistemic norms need revision. But if traditional epistemic norms are not zetetic norms, then in what sense is zetetic epistemology a project for epistemologists? I conclude by articulating a sense in which some nontraditional epistemic norms are zetetic norms, and in which zetetic epistemology is an important part of the study of theoretical rationality. (shrink)

One of the enduring concerns of moral philosophy is deciding who or what is deserving of ethical consideration. Much recent attention has been devoted to the "animal question" -- consideration of the moral status of nonhuman animals. In this book, David Gunkel takes up the "machine question": whether and to what extent intelligent and autonomous machines of our own making can be considered to have legitimate moral responsibilities and any legitimate claim to moral consideration. The machine question poses a (...) fundamental challenge to moral thinking, questioning the traditional philosophical conceptualization of technology as a tool or instrument to be used by human agents. Gunkel begins by addressing the question of machine moral agency: whether a machine might be considered a legitimate moral agent that could be held responsible for decisions and actions. He then approaches the machine question from the other side, considering whether a machine might be a moral patient due legitimate moral consideration. Finally, Gunkel considers some recent innovations in moral philosophy and critical theory that complicate the machine question, deconstructing the binary agent--patient opposition itself. Technological advances may prompt us to wonder if the science fiction of computers and robots whose actions affect their human companions could become science fact. Gunkel's argument promises to influence future considerations of ethics, ourselves, and the other entities who inhabit this world. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can (...) just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Time-Reversal Invariance 2. Thermodynamics 3. Statistical Mechanics 4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis 5. The Scope of Thermodynamics 6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 7. Quantum Mechanics Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines Index Reviews of this book: The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation. --Jean Bricmont, Science Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn. --Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to. --Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan. (shrink)

By means of an example, shows the possibility of beliefs that are separately rational whilst together inconsistent.

How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

L'ouverture à une tradition réflexive, à une esthétique qui se découvre comme un lieu de l'inachevé, de compréhension, d'interrogation plurielle, critique et fondatrice d'une société éthique qui réconcilie l'homme avec l'humain ; l'homme et son époque, revendique un sens prononcé du devoir de culture ; une école à une démarche qui tranche avec les médiocrités de nos existences de survie, de la soumission à la logique de l'identité et de l'indifférence. Par la maîtrise intelligible du champ épistémologique, cet ouvrage prend (...) position dans un débat contradictoire avec les critères hégémoniques du sens a priori ; les dogmatismes des normes d'évaluation et d'appréciation esthétique. Il ouvre les yeux de l'intelligence africaine et ceux d'autres horizons culturels négligés que l'égoïsme des puissances veut toujours voir fermer ; élabore des réflexions théoriques à la constitution d'une esthétique ouverte aux exigences de l'ère du temps ; sonde les limites et l'inefficacité des systèmes pour se frayer des passages, se redonner du sens, et répondre présent au mouvement des enjeux esthétiques du nouveau monde des altérités. (shrink)

I attempt to get as clear as possible on the chain of reasoning by which irreversible macrodynamics is derivable from time-reversible microphysics, and in particular to clarify just what kinds of assumptions about the initial state of the universe, and about the nature of the microdynamics, are needed in these derivations. I conclude that while a “Past Hypothesis” about the early Universe does seem necessary to carry out such derivations, that Hypothesis is not correctly understood as a constraint on the (...) early Universe’s entropy. (shrink)

Understanding Animal Welfare, 2nd Edition is revised and expanded to incorporate new research and developments in animal welfare. Updated with greater accessibility in mind, the reader is guided through animal welfare in its cultural and historical context, methods of study, and applications in practice and policy. Drawing examples from farm, companion, laboratory and zoo animals, the text provides an up-to-date overview of research and its applications, while also tracing how concepts and methods have evolved over time. Originally intended for scientists (...) and professionals, Understanding Animal Welfare has also found a home in undergraduate classrooms. It is now the essential text for students, practitioners, veterinarians, and researchers in animal welfare and related fields. (shrink)

We start by presenting three different views that jointly imply that every person has many conscious beings in their immediate vicinity, and that the number greatly varies from person to person. We then present and assess an argument to the conclusion that how confident someone should be in these views should sensitively depend on how massive they happen to be. According to the argument, sometimes irreducibly de se observations can be powerful evidence for or against believing in metaphysical theories.

Unprecedented advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and demographic forecasting raise new questions that strain the categories and assumptions of traditional ethical theories. Heyd's approach resolves many paradoxes in intergenerational justice, while offering a major test case for the profound problems of the limits of ethics and the nature of value. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and (...) impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992. (shrink)

Worries about mental causation are prominent in contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how a mental substance (thought to be immaterial) could interact with a material substance, a body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate immaterial minds, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has shifted to mental properties. How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily behavior? How could something mental qua mental cause (...) what it does? After looking at the traditional Problem of Interaction, we survey various versions of the property-based problem and look at proposed solutions to them. (shrink)

Film is an art form with a language and an aesthetic all its own. Since 1979, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art has been the best-selling and widely respected introduction to the analysis of cinema. Taking a skills-centered approach supported by a wide range of examples from various periods and countries, the authors strive to help students develop a core set of analytical skills that will deepen their understanding of any film, in any genre. Frame enlargements throughout the (...) text enable students to view images taken directly from completed films, while an optional, text-specific tutorial CD-ROM helps clarify and reinforce specific concepts addressed in the text with the use of film clips. Building on these strengths, the ninth edition adds coverage of new technologies, updated examples, and references to the authors' acclaimed weblog to provide unparalleled currency and connect students with the world of cinema today. (shrink)

Our aim in this entry is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal identity. We begin by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity, including their shortcomings. We then turn to recent psychological work on personal identity and the self, investigations that often illuminate our person-related normative concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications of this psychological work for some contemporary philosophical theories and suggesting fruitful areas for future work on personal identity.

Perceptualists say that having a pain in a body part consists in perceiving the part as instantiating some property. I argue that perceptualism makes better sense of the connections between pain location and the experiences undergone by people in pain than three alternative accounts that dispense with perception. Turning to fellow perceptualists, I also reject ways in which David Armstrong and Michael Tye understand and motivate perceptualism, and I propose an alternative interpretation, one that vitiates a pair of objections—due (...) to John Hyman—concerning the meaning of ‘Amy has a pain in her foot’ and the idea of bodily sensitivity. Perceptualism, I conclude, remains our best account of the location of pains. (shrink)

Dark matter is a fundamental component of the standard cosmological model, but in spite of four decades of increasingly sensitive searches, no-one has yet detected a single dark-matter particle in the laboratory. An alternative cosmological paradigm exists: MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics). Observations explained in the standard model by postulating dark matter are explained in MOND by proposing a modification of Newton's laws of motion. Both MOND and the standard model have had successes and failures – but only MOND has repeatedly (...) predicted observational facts in advance of their discovery. In this volume, David Merritt outlines why such predictions are considered by many philosophers of science to be the 'gold standard' when it comes to judging a theory's validity. In a world where the standard model receives most attention, the author applies criteria from the philosophy of science to assess, in a systematic way, the viability of this alternative cosmological paradigm. (shrink)

Epistemic Evaluation aims to explore and apply a particular methodology in epistemology. The methodology is to consider the point or purpose of our epistemic evaluations, and to pursue epistemological theory in light of such matters. Call this purposeful epistemology. The idea is that considerations about the point and purpose of epistemic evaluation might fruitfully constrain epistemological theory and yield insights for epistemological reflection. Several contributions to this volume explicitly address this general methodology, or some version of it. Others focus on (...) advancing some application of the methodology rather than on theorizing about it. The papers go on to explore the idea that purposes allow one to understand the conceptual demands on knowing, examine how purposeful epistemology might shed light on the debate between internalist and externalist epistemologies, and further develop the idea of purposeful epistemology. (shrink)

Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is the most famous philosopher you've likely never heard of. In 1984, Parfit published what was, and is still, hailed by many philosophers as a work of genius - one of the most cited works of philosophy since World War II, Reasons and Persons. At its core, he argued that we should be concerned less with our own interests and more with the common good. His book brims with brilliant argumentative detail and stunningly inventive thought experiments that (...) challenged contemporary views about what it means to be a person, why one should forego concern for oneself as an identity that persists over time, what it means to act on the basis of reasons, and what we owe to future generations. Parfit also - unfashionably at the time - believed in a kind of grand unified theory of morality, what he called theory x, a non-religious ethical theory wherein all the major moral theories were converging from different sides on the same mountaintop. Parfit has had an enormous influence not only on philosophy, but also beyond, particularly amongst those in the fields of climate ethics, poverty relief, and charitable giving. In this book, the first-full scale biography of Parfit, Dave Edmonds tells the story of the thinker that many philosophers consider the most important moral philosopher of the last century. Edmonds' rendering of the man in full skilfully illuminates the person behind the acclaimed philosopher. Despite Parfit's extraordinary mind, outward appearances suggest his was also an extraordinarily uneventful life - one largely spent in cloistered institutions from Eton to Oxford and one seemingly monomaniacally devoted to ideas. Edmonds' aim is to show how this son and grandson of missionaries went from a genial and outgoing history student to a captivating, yet monkish philosopher singularly devoted to saving morality. In doing so, Edmonds makes Parfit's profound, but often impenetrable, ideas accessible to a broad audience and gives life and body to the thoughts of a seemingly pure thinker that captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers. (shrink)

Food is a challenging subject. There is little consensus about how and what we should produce and consume. It is not even clear what food is or whether people have similar experiences of it. On one hand, food is recognized as a basic need, if not a basic right. On the other hand, it is hard to generalize about it given the wide range of practices and cuisines, and the even wider range of tastes. This book is an introduction to (...) the philosophical dimensions of food. David M. Kaplan examines the nature and meaning of food, how we experience it, the social role it plays, its moral and political dimensions, and how we judge it to be delicious or awful. He shows how the different branches of philosophy contribute to a broader understanding of food: what food is (metaphysics), how we experience food (epistemology), what taste in food is (aesthetics), how we should make and eat food (ethics), how governments should regulate food (political philosophy), and why food matters to us (existentialism). Kaplan embarks on a series of philosophical investigations, considering topics such as culinary identity and authenticity, tasting and food criticism, appetite and disgust, meat eating and techno-foods, and consumerism and conformity. He emphasizes how different narratives help us navigate the complex world of food -- yet we all have responsibilities to ourselves, to others, and to animals. An original treatment of a timely subject, Food Philosophy is suitable for undergraduates while making a significant contribution to scholarly debates. (shrink)

Since the 1990s the so-called transparency of experience has played a crucial role in core debates in philosophy of mind. However, recent developments in the literature have made transparency itself quite opaque. The very idea of transparent experience has become quite fuzzy, due to the articulation of many different notions of transparency and transparency theses. Absent a unified logical space where these notions and theses can be mapped and confronted, we are left with an overall impression of conceptual chaos. This (...) is a problem, given the constant and ubiquitous references to transparency in the literature and its prominent position in the contemporary philosophy of mind. My goal in this paper is to restore clarity through proper analysis of the mutual relations between the different transparency theses. This allows me to uncover a unitary multidimensional logical space where existing (as well as possible) views can be properly singled out and located. (shrink)

We become ill in ways our parents and grandparents did not, with diseases unheard of and treatments undreamed of generations ago. This text tells the story of the modern experience of illness, linking ideas of illness, health, and postmodernism.