This chapter examines how the problem of the nature of body had become the central debate in the field of natural philosophy in England by the middle of the seventeenth century. It explains that the nature of the physical body is one of the major problems of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and that it began, at least in part, as a byproduct of a change in the philosophical vocabulary. The chapter also evaluates solutions proposed to address the problem concerning the nature (...) of body, including those derived from theory of matter and mixed mathematics. (shrink)

This volume explores the themes of vanishing matter, matter and the laws of nature, the qualities of matter, and the diversity of the debates about matter in the early modern period. Chapters are unified by a number of interlocking themes which together enable some of the broader contours of the philosophy of matter to be charted in new ways. Part I concerns Cartesian Matter; Part II covers Matter, Mechanism and Medicine; Part III covers Matter and the Laws of Motion; and (...) Part IV covers Leibniz and Hume. Bringing together some of the world’s leading scholars of early modern philosophy, as well as some exciting new researchers, _Vanishing Matter and the Laws of Motion _stakes out new territory that all serious scholars of early modern philosophy and science will want to traverse. (shrink)

Francis Bacon’s main contribution to the emergence of experimental philosophy was a new way of thinking about the serial character of experimental practices. His natural and experimental histories document his constant attempts to order experimental inquiries. They consist of large collections of lists and series of items, most of which are called “experiments.” For Bacon, “experiment” is a generic term; it is used for tests and trials, recipes, ideas of experimental investigations, theoretical observations and methodological suggestions. Experiments never stand alone (...) in a natural history; they come in series of numbered items, sometimes grouped under “heads” and “topics of inquiry.” In the Latin natural histories.. (shrink)

This Encyclopedia offers a fresh, integrated and creative perspective on the formation and foundations of philosophy and science in European modernity. Combining careful contextual reconstruction with arguments from traditional philosophy, the book examines methodological dimensions, breaks down traditional oppositions such as rationalism vs. empiricism, calls attention to gender issues, to ‘insiders and outsiders’, minor figures in philosophy, and underground movements, among many other topics. In addition, and in line with important recent transformations in the fields of history of science and (...) early modern philosophy, the volume recognizes the specificity and significance of early modern science and discusses important developments including issues of historiography (such as historical epistemology), the interplay between the material culture and modes of knowledge, expert knowledge and craft knowledge. This book stands at the crossroads of different disciplines and combines their approaches – particularly the history of science, the history of philosophy, contemporary philosophy of science, and intellectual and cultural history. It brings together over 100 philosophers, historians of science, historians of mathematics, and medicine offering a comprehensive view of early modern philosophy and the sciences. It combines and discusses recent results from two very active fields: early modern philosophy and the history of (early modern) science. (shrink)

This paper investigates the emergence, in the second part of the 17th century, of a new body of experimental knowledge dealing with the chemical transformations of water taking place in plants. We call this body of experimental knowledge a “chemical history of vegetation.” We show that this chemical natural history originated, in terms of recipes and methods of investigation, in the works of Francis Bacon and that it was constructed in accordance with Bacon's precepts for putting together natural and experimental (...) histories. Our paper covers a wide array of experimental investigations, carried out by people with different backgrounds, theoretical assumptions, and metaphysical allegiances (Thomas Browne, Robert Sharrock, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, John Beale, and John Evelyn). We claim that, despite their differences, these naturalists had a lot in common. First, they treated plants as laboratories of chemical investigation. Second, they used the experiments with plants to develop tools, hypotheses, and operational concepts, which travelled from one naturalist to the other, even when their respective explanatory vocabularies were widely different. Third, we show that some of them also manifested an interest in defining and clarifying the limits and structure of this new body of experimental knowledge, displaying, thus, a certain disciplinary unity. (shrink)

The relationship between Francis Bacon's Sylva sylvarum and Giovan Battista Della Porta's Magia naturalis has previously been discussed in terms of sources and borrowings in the literature. More recently, it has been suggested that one can read these two works as belonging to a common genre: as collections of recipes or books of secrets. Taking this as a framework, in this paper I address another type of similarity between these two works, one that can be detected by looking at the (...) methods of reading, research, and enacting and recording recipes one can find in Bacon and Della Porta. I show that essential to the two approaches was the complex interplay of practices associated with enacting recipes, and that these influenced the ways in which Della Porta and Bacon recorded their experiments. Creative manipulation of the recipes transformed them into something new. In the case of Della Porta's second edition of the Magia naturalis, this new format is something I call “technologies,” that is, ways of recording the enacting of recipes with the intention to ensure repeatability and predictability of results. In the case of Bacon, the enactment aims at something different: to display and “bring to light” the hidden motions and processes of nature. (shrink)

The instrumental character of Francis Bacon’s natural and experimental histories was often noted, but never fully investigated. In this paper I aim to reconstruct the theoretical and methodological background which supports this feature. I claim that we can read large parts of the second book of Bacon’s Novum organum as a guide to laboratory practices; and that it was read in this manner by some of Bacon’s seventeenth century followers. Key to this guide is Bacon’s theory of prerogative instances which, (...) in turn, provides the grounding for a whole theory of instruments of detection and instruments of measurement. I show, in particular, how Bacon suggested that such instruments can be used for ‘charting’ virtues and powers; a process in which instruments of detection can be transformed into instruments of measurement. I also show that Bacon’s views on instruments entail an elaborated conception of measurement which departs from the ethos of artisanal perfection. Instead of pursuing the ‘best results’, Bacon’s instrumental natural and experimental histories aim to offer a large enough corpus of correlations, estimates and calculations which, taken together, can represent more or less accurately changes and variations of natural virtues and powers. (shrink)

This special issue brings to the attention of the scholarly community some of the common features and some of the subtle, but important, differences between Francis Bacon's and Giovan Battista Della Porta's ways of dealing with the reading, selecting, enacting, and recording of recipes. Focusing on questions of genre, intellectual and material context, strategies of research, and strategies of performing recipes, the four papers of this special issue address two major issues. First, they shed new light on the relationship between (...) Della Porta's Magia naturalis and Francis Bacon's Sylva sylvarum. Second, they show that in the recording of their experimental practices, Bacon and Della Porta depart from the traditional “recipe format” and discover new avenues of experimental research. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to offer a preliminary survey of one of the most widely discussed problems in Bacon’s studies: the problem of the interplay between the speculative (i.e., metaphysical) and operative (i.e., methodological) layers of Bacon’s works. I propose to classify the various answers in three categories. In the first category I place attempts claiming that Bacon’s inquiries display his appetitive metaphysics. In the second category are those seeing Bacon’s more “scientific” works as disclosing some of the (...) inner metaphysical layers and presuppositions. The third category see Bacon’s experimental inquiries as attempts to “fix” metaphysics, by redefining concepts of metaphysical origins. In discussing these three categories of interpretative stances I show that we can gain further insights if we take into account recent and less recent trends in philosophy of science, and especially if we think in terms of background theory and bottom-up strategies of concept formation. I offer examples of such procedures in Bacon’s natural and experimental histories and show what we can gain if we apply the same interpretative strategy of focusing on concept-formation to the reading of the Novum organum. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the primary issue in Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, Part II, articles 1-40, is the problem of individuating bodies. We demonstrate that Descartes departs from the traditional quest for a principle of individuation, moving to a different strategy with the more modest aim of constructing bodies adequate to the needs of his cosmology. In doing this he meets with a series of difficulties, and this is precisely the challenge that Newton took up. We show that (...) Descartes’ questions and his strategy influenced not only Newton’s account of physical bodies, but also the structure of his mechanics. (shrink)

The early modern era produced the Scientific Revolution, which originated our present understanding of the natural world. Concurrently, philosophers established the conceptual foundations of modernity. This rich and comprehensive volume surveys and illuminates the numerous and complicated interconnections between philosophical and scientific thought as both were radically transformed from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The chapters explore reciprocal influences between philosophy and physics, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and other disciplines, and show how thinkers responded to an immense range of (...) intellectual, material, and institutional influences. The volume offers a unique perspicuity, viewing the entire landscape of early modern philosophy and science, and also marks an epoch in contemporary scholarship, surveying recent contributions and suggesting future investigations for the next generation of scholars and students. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive and unitary study of the philosophy of Francis Bacon, with special emphasis on the medical, ethical and political aspects of his thought. It presents an original interpretation focused on the material conditions of nature and human life. In particular, coverage in the book is organized around the unifying theme of Bacon’s notion of appetite, which is considered in its natural, ethical, medical and political meanings. The book redefines the notions of experience and experiment in Bacon’s (...) philosophy of nature, shows the important presence of Stoic themes in his work as well as provides an original discussion of the relationships between natural magic, prudence and political realism in his philosophy. Bringing together scholarly expertise from the history of philosophy, the history of science and the history of literature, this book presents readers with a rich and diverse contextualization of Bacon’s philosophy. (shrink)

Research in communication studies has suggested that Al-Jazeera produces different versions of news stories for different audiences. Yet, examining the linguistic means used to create these versions has remained under-researched. Drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (1992) and Halliday’s Transitivity Model (1985), this study aims at exploring how Al-Jazeera Arabic (AJA) and Al-Jazeera English (AJE) discursively represented the participants involved in the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian conflict in headlines. The analysis of transitivity patterns in AJA and AJE headlines reveals both similar and different (...) representations of the conflict. Although they avoided negative labeling of the Russian government, both channels ascribed conflict escalation to it, highlighting civilians suffering and protesting. Nevertheless, while AJE emphasized the Ukrainian government vulnerability, AJA presented the conflict as a confrontation between two symmetrical forces. Similarities are attributed to organizational and social institutional forces, while differences result from different editorial policies and audience preferences. As discursive and social practices, the headlines contribute to shaping audience perceptions of the conflict, with AJA challenging the prevailing western narrative of the conflict while AJE reinforcing it. (shrink)

Dana S. Belu combines Heidegger's phenomenology of technology with feminist phenomenology in order to make sense of the increased technicization of women's reproductive bodies during conception, pregnancy, and birth.

Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) was a leading figure in the Neo- Kantian philosophical movement that dominated European thought before 1918. He was also an inaugural figure in modern Jewish philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book explores Cohen's striking claim that ethics is rooted in law - a claim developed both in his philosophical ethics and his philosophy of Judaism, in particular in his writings on "love-of-neighbor," up to and including his well-known Religion of Reason. Dana Hollander proposes (...) that neither Cohen's systematic philosophy nor his "Jewish" philosophy should be seen as the dominant framework for his oeuvre as a whole, but that his understanding of key philosophical questions take shape in the passages between both corpuses, a trait that could be seen as paradigmatic for modern Jewish philosophy. Ethics Out of Law taps into one of the prime topics of current interest in the field of Jewish philosophy: the nature of Jewish political existence and the changing configurations of "law" that this entails. (shrink)

An Introduction to Proof via Inquiry-Based Learning is a textbook for the transition to proof course for mathematics majors. Designed to promote active learning through inquiry, the book features a highly structured set of leading questions and explorations. The reader is expected to construct their own understanding by engaging with the material. The content ranges over topics traditionally included in transitions courses: logic, set theory including cardinality, the topology of the real line, a bit of number theory, and more. The (...) exposition guides and mentors the reader through an adventure in mathematical discovery, requiring them to solve problems, conjecture, experiment, explore, create, and communicate. Ultimately, this is really a book about productive struggle and learning how to learn. This is a print version of the popular open-access online text by Dana C. Ernst. (shrink)

Background: Current practice frequently fails to provide care consistent with the preferences of decisionally-incapacitated patients. It also imposes significant emotional burden on their surrogates. Algorithmic-based patient preference predictors (PPPs) have been proposed as a possible way to address these two concerns. While previous research found that patients strongly support the use of PPPs, the views of surrogates are unknown. The present study thus assessed the views of experienced surrogates regarding the possible use of PPPs as a means to help make (...) treatment decisions for decisionally-incapacitated patients. -/- Methods: This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews to determine the views of experienced surrogates [n=26] who were identified from two academic medical centers and two community hospitals. The primary outcomes were respondents’ overall level of support for the idea of using PPPs and the themes related to their views on how a PPP should be used, if at all, in practice. -/- Results: Overall, 21 participants supported the idea of using PPPs. The remaining five indicated that they would not use a PPP because they made decisions based on the patient’s best interests, not based on substituted judgment. Major themes which emerged were that surrogates, not the patient’s preferences, should determine how treatment decisions are made, and concern that PPPs might be used to deny expensive care or be biased against minority groups. -/- Conclusions: Surrogates, like patients, strongly support the idea of using PPPs to help make treatment decisions for decisionally-incapacitated patients. These findings provide support for developing a PPP and assessing it in practice. At the same time, patients and surrogates disagree over whose preferences should determine how treatment decisions are made, including whether to use a PPP. These findings reveal a fundamental disagreement regarding the guiding principles for surrogate decision-making. Future research is needed to assess this disagreement and consider ways to address it. (shrink)

The cerebral cortex is a rich and diverse structure that is the basis of intelligent behavior. One of the deepest mysteries of the function of cortex is that neural processing times are only about one hundred times as fast as the fastest response times for complex behavior. At the very least, this would seem to indicate that the cortex does massive amounts of parallel computation.This paper explores the hypothesis that an important part of the cortex can be modeled as a (...) connectionist computer that is especially suited for parallel problem solving. The connectionist computer uses a special representation, termed value unit encoding, that represents small subsets of parameters in a way that allows parallel access to many different parameter values. This computer can be thought of as computing hierarchies of sensorimotor invariants. The neural substrate can be interpreted as a commitment to data structures and algorithms that compute invariants fast enough to explain the behavioral response times. A detailed consideration of this model has several implications for the underlying anatomy and physiology. (shrink)

The Rei(g)n of Rule is a study of rules and their role in language. Rules have dominated the philosophical arena as a fundamental philosophical concept. Little progress, however, has been made in reaching an accepted definition of rules. This fact is not coincidental. The concept of rule is expected to perform various, at times conflicting, tasks. Analyzing key debates and rule related discussions in the philosophy of language I show that typically rules are perceived and defined either as norms or (...) as conventions. As norms, rules perform the evaluative task of distinguishing between correct and incorrect actions. As conventions, rules describe how certain actions are actually undertaken. As normative and conventional requirements do not necessarily coincide, the concept of rule cannot simultaneously accommodate both. The impossibility to consistently define rule has gone unnoticed by philosophers, and it is in this sense that rule has also blocked philosophical attempts to explain language in terms of rules.". (shrink)

Much attention has been focused in recent years on the ethical acceptability of physicians receiving gifts from drug companies. Professional guidelines recognize industry gifts as a conflict of interest and establish thresholds prohibiting the exchange of large gifts while expressly allowing for the exchange of small gifts such as pens, note pads, and coffee. Considerable evidence from the social sciences suggests that gifts of negligible value can influence the behavior of the recipient in ways the recipient does not always realize. (...) Policies and guidelines that rely on arbitrary value limits for gift-giving or receipt should be reevaluated. (shrink)

Alex John London’s new book, For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics highlights the fact that establishing just social arrangements is not only a matter of incentivizing popular will to act for the common good; it also requires filling in informational gaps about which policies, arrangements, and interventions will advance the basic interests of members in an equitable, effective and efficient manner. Promoting justice requires, in part, acquiring the knowledge for how to do so. In developing this point, (...) London carefully traces these missteps in the main philosophical debates and then resuscitates the importance of questions of justice at the heart of research ethics. In doing so, it provides a transformative corrective for the field. This review critically examines one of the central pillars of London’s egalitarian research imperative approach: the way in which the social value of research is closely linked with minimizing uncertainty among reasonable experts. (shrink)

Freight transportation plays a critical role in improving company performance in the modern manufacturing industry. To reduce costs, companies must take advantage of the use of large vehicles. It caused fewer deliveries, but inventory costs and degradation quality are high. One of the joint economic lot size problems in supply chain is Integrated Single-Vendor Single-Buyer Inventory Problem. This study developed the I-SVSB-IP model that considers raw materials’ exponential quality degradation and transportation costs. The objective function of this research was to (...) maximize the Joint Total Profit. Three decision variables used were inventory cycle time, raw material ordering frequency, and frequency of delivery of finished products to buyers. This study proposed a sophisticated Chimp Optimization Algorithm procedure to solve the I-SVSB-IP problem. A case study on the food industry in Indonesia was presented to optimize the I-SVSB-IP. The results showed that the ChOA procedure had produced an optimal solution compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm. This study also demonstrated a sensitivity analysis of decision and transportation variables to cost, revenue, and JTP. The results show that increasing transport frequency of ordering raw materials and finished products to buyers enhances the total cost and reduces joint total profit. In addition, increasing the rate of quality degradation of raw materials reduces JTP. (shrink)

Nelkin presents a simple and natural account of freedom and moral responsibility which responds to the great variety of challenges to the idea that we are free and responsible, before ultimately reaffirming our conception of ourselves as agents. Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility begins with a defense of the rational abilities view, according to which one is responsible for an action if and only if one acts with the ability to recognize and act for good reasons. The view is (...) compatibilist -- that is, on the view defended, responsibility is compatible with determinism -- and one of its striking features is a certain asymmetry: it requires the ability to do otherwise for responsibility when actions are praiseworthy, but not when they are blameworthy. In defending and elaborating the view, Nelkin questions long-held assumptions such as those concerning the relation between fairness and blame and the nature of so-called reactive attitudes such as resentment and forgiveness. Her argument not only fits with a metaphysical picture of causation -- agent-causation -- often assumed to be available only to incompatibilist accounts, but receives positive support from the intuitively appealing Ought Implies Can Principle, and establishes a new interpretation of freedom and moral responsibility that dovetails with a compelling account of our inescapable commitments as rational agents. (shrink)

To describe phenomena that occur at different time scales, computational models of the brain must incorporate different levels of abstraction. At time scales of approximately 1/3 of a second, orienting movements of the body play a crucial role in cognition and form a useful computational level embodiment level,” the constraints of the physical system determine the nature of cognitive operations. The key synergy is that at time scales of about 1/3 of a second, the natural sequentiality of body movements can (...) be matched to the natural computational economies of sequential decision systems through a system of implicit reference called deictic in which pointing movements are used to bind objects in the world to cognitive programs. This target article focuses on how deictic bindings make it possible to perform natural tasks. Deictic computation provides a mechanism for representing the essential features that link external sensory data with internal cognitive programs and motor actions. One of the central features of cognition, working memory, can be related to moment-by-moment dispositions of body features such as eye movements and hand movements. (shrink)

It is argued that once biological systems reach a certain level of complexity, mechanistic explanations provide an inadequate account of many relevant phenomena. In this article, I evaluate such claims with respect to a representative programme in systems biological research: the study of regulatory networks within single-celled organisms. I argue that these networks are amenable to mechanistic philosophy without need to appeal to some alternate form of explanation. In particular, I claim that we can understand the mathematical modelling techniques of (...) systems biologists as part of a broader practice of constructing and evaluating mechanism schemas. This argument is elaborated by considering the case of bacterial chemotactic networks, where some research has been interpreted as explaining phenomena by means of abstract design principles. (shrink)

Animate vision systems have gaze control mechanisms that can actively position the camera coordinate system in response to physical stimuli. Compared to passive systems, animate systems show that visual computation can be vastly less expensive when considered in the larger context of behavior. The most important visual behavior is the ability to control the direction of gaze. This allows the use of very low resolution imaging that has a high virtual resolution. Using such a system in a controlled way provides (...) additional constraints that dramatically simplify the computations of early vision. Another important behavior is the way the environment “behaves‘. Animate systems under real-time constraints can further reduce their computational burden by using environmental cues that are perspicuous in the local context. A third source of economy is introduced when behaviors are learned. Because errors are rarely fatal, systems using learning algorithms can amortize computational cost over extended periods. Further economies can be achieved when the learning system uses indexical reference, which is a form of dynamic variable binding. Animate vision is a natural way of implementing this dynamic binding. (shrink)

In everyday life, we assume that there are degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Yet the debate about the nature of moral responsibility often focuses on the “yes or no” question of whether indeterminism is required for moral responsibility, while questions about what accounts for more or less blameworthiness or praiseworthiness are underexplored. In this paper, I defend the idea that degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness can depend in part on degrees of difficulty and degrees of sacrifice required for performing the (...) action in question. Then I turn to the question of how existing accounts of the nature of moral responsibility might be seen to accommodate these facts. In each case of prominent compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts that I consider, I argue that supplementation with added dimensions is required in order to account for facts about degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. For example, I argue that the reasons-responsiveness view of Fischer and Ravizza requires supplementation that takes us beyond even fine-grained measures of degrees of reasons-responsiveness in order to capture facts about degrees of difficulty to extend the reasons-responsiveness view by appealing to such measures). I conclude by showing that once we recognize the need for these additional parameters, we will be in a position to explain away at least some of the appeal of incompatibilist accounts of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Considerable attention has been paid recently to the gendering of organizations and occupations. Unfortunately, the gendered-organizations approach remains theoretically and empirically underdeveloped, as there have as yet been few clear answers to the question central to the perspective: What does it really mean to say that an organization itself, or a policy, practice, or slot in the hierarchy, is “gendered”? Reviewing literature in the gendered-organizations tradition, the author discusses three of the most common ways the perspective has been applied and (...) argues that all of these definitions pose potential problems for the project of meaningful social and organizational change. The article concludes with some suggestions about how a more useful conception of the gendered organization might be built. (shrink)

Robert Fogelin claims that interlocutors must share a framework of background beliefs and commitments in order to fruitfully pursue argument. I refute Fogelin’s claim by investigating more thoroughly the shared background required for productive argument. I find that this background consists not in any common beliefs regarding the topic at hand, but rather in certain shared pro-cedural commitments and competencies. I suggest that Fogelin and his supporters mistakenly view shared beliefs as part of the required background for productive argument because (...) these procedural com-mitments become more difficult to uphold when people’s beliefs diverge widely regarding the topic at hand. (shrink)

Jim buys a ticket in a million-ticket lottery. He knows it is a fair lottery, but, given the odds, he believes he will lose. When the winning ticket is chosen, it is not his. Did he know his ticket would lose? It seems that he did not. After all, if he knew his ticket would lose, why would he have bought it? Further, if he knew his ticket would lose, then, given that his ticket is no different in its chances (...) of winning from any other ticket, it seems that by parity of reasoning he should also know that every other ticket would lose. But of course he doesn’t know that; in fact, he knows that not every ticket will lose. (shrink)