On the relations of universals and particulars, by B. Russell.--Universals and resemblances, by H. H. Price.--On concept and object, by G. Frege.--Frege's hidden nominalism, by G. Bergmann.--Universals, by F. P. Ramsey.--Universals and metaphysical realism, by A. Donagan.--Universals and family resemblances, by R. Bambrough.--Particular and general, by P. F. Strawson.--The nature of universals and propositions, by G. F. Stout.--Are characteristics of particular things universal or particular? By G. E. Moore and G. F. Stout.--The relation of resemblance, by P. Butchvarov.--Qualities, by (...) N. Wolterstroff.--On what there is, by W. V. Quine.--Empiricism, semantics, and ontology, by R. Carnap.--The languages of realism and nominalism, by R. B. Brandt.--Grammar and existence: a preface to ontology, by W. Sellars.--A world of individuals, by N. Goodman.--Bibliographical notes (p. [307]-308). (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introducing persons and the psychology of personhood Jack Martin and Mark H. Bickhard; Part I. Philosophical, Conceptual Perspectives: 2. The person concept and the ontology of persons Michael A. Tissaw; 3. Achieving personhood: the perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology Charles Guignon; Part II. Historical Perspectives: 4. Historical psychology of persons: categories and practice Kurt Danziger; 5. Persons and historical ontology Jeff Sugarman; 6. Critical personalism: on its tenets, its historical obscurity, and its future prospects James (...) T. Lamiell; Part III. Social-Developmental Perspectives: 7. Conceiving of self and others as persons: evolution and development John Barresi, Chris Moore and Raymond Martin; 8. Position exchange theory and personhood: moving between positions and perspectives within physical, sociocultural and psychological space and time Jack Martin and Alex Gillespie; 9. The emergent ontology of persons Mark H. Bickhard; 10. Theorising personhood for the world in transition and change: reflections from a transformative activist stance on human development Anna Stetsenko; Part IV. Narrative Perspectives: 11. Identity and narrative as root metaphors of personhood Amia Lieblich and Ruthellen Josselson; 12. Storied persons: the double triad of narrative identity Mark Freeman. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand RussellPeter H. DentonNicholas Griffin, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvii + 550. Cloth, $75.00. Paper, $26.00.It is a daunting task to conceive of a single companion to Bertrand Russell, who in life as in thought was never content with a single anything. Nicholas Griffin has brought his customary expertise to the project, and in (...) snaring fourteen other contributors to this volume, has produced a welcome addition to an academic's library of Russell materials.The shape of the volume, its contents and its presentation, however, unfortunately reflect the lopsided nature of current Russell studies. One hopes for a companion volume that has the breadth of the earlier volume edited fifty years ago by Paul Schilpp, but in vain. This book is overwhelmingly about Russell before 1918, almost entirely about philosophy of mathematics, epistemology and logic, and several of the pieces easily could have been included in a festschrift for Frege instead.What is included is well done, but to call it "the most convenient and accessible guide to Russell available" is to speak in comparative terms. To be fair, it sets out to focus on a narrow definition of Russell's contributions to modern philosophy, and the contributors accomplish this task. Ian Grattan-Guinness writes on "Mathematics in and behind Russell's Logicism, and its Reception," a subject that continues into "Bertrand Russell's Logicism" by Martin Godwyn and Andrew D. Irvine. The roots of analytic philosophy are of primary concern in this volume, so Richard L. Cartwright explores "Russell and Moore, 1898-1905" and Michael Beaney relates "Russell and Frege." "The Theory of Descriptions" by Peter Hylton sets up two pieces on "Russell's Substitutional Theory" (Gregory Landini) and "The Theory of Types" (Alasdair Urquhart), while Paul Hager's "Russell's Method of Analysis" leads into "Russell's Neutral Monism" (R.E.Tully) and "The Metaphysics of Logical Atomism" (Bernard Linsky).The next portion of the book expands the intellectual focus somewhat, with "Russell's Structuralism and the Absolute Description of the World" by William Demopoulos—perhaps [End Page 349] the best in a series of good papers—and "From Knowledge by Acquaintance to Knowledge by Causation" by Thomas Baldwin. Approaching the end of the book, Anthony Grayling's essay on "Russell, Experience, and the Roots of Science" remains firmly planted in the pre-1918 milieu, though his tentative commentary on Human Knowledge at least glimmers the extension of Russell's intellectual life into the post-Great War period.Effectively the entire second half of Russell's life is left to the final contributor, Charles Pidgen, for commentary. Author of Russell on Ethics, much of Pigden's short essay here ("Bertrand Russell: Moral Philosopher or Unphilosophical Moralist?") somewhat plaintively directs the reader to his book for an elaboration of why Russell is worth reading after 1918, at least on the subject of ethics. Of the other authors, only Hager (317) observes the extent to which Russell's post-War work mistakenly has been ignored.The book concludes with a selective bibliography. The audience, for the most part, is a specialist one, with only some essays accessible to the general reader. On that score, Griffin's introduction and his own essay, "Russell's Philosophical Background," are easily the most readable. At the risk of quibbling, I was disturbed by the uneven production of the book, as each author set his own standard for footnotes, endnotes and bibliography (creating a jumble of styles). Even within individual contributions, there are a number of inconsistencies in notation as well as typographical errors.By the end, I was left hoping there might be a second companion volume for Bertrand Russell, one that reflects what he spent the last fifty years of his life thinking, writing, and doing. In the absence of such material (which is of far greater popular interest today just as it was in Russell's lifetime), this book by itself is more of a companion to current Russell studies than to Bertrand Russell himself.Peter H. DentonThe University of WinnipegCopyright © 2004 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

Philosophy of science is expanding via the introduction of new digital data and tools for their analysis. The data comprise digitized published books and journal articles, as well as heretofore unpublished material such as images, archival text, notebooks, meeting notes, and programs. The growth in available data is matched by the extensive development of automated analysis tools. The variety of data sources and tools can be overwhelming. In this article, we survey the state of digital work in the philosophy of (...) science, showing what kinds of questions can be answered and how one can go about answering them. (shrink)

These essays were delivered at the Fourth East-West Philosophers conference at the University of Hawaii in 1964. Because the audience was of various traditions, most of the papers contain instruction in rudiments as well as points of more technical interest. The oriental speakers especially take pains not to spring their special terminology on the western listener. The book systematically and thoroughly works through the themes of the individual in Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and western metaphysics, methodology, religion, and ethics. Social, political, (...) and legal thought and practice are also covered. Some of the papers are followed by transcripts of questions and answers. These are often very helpful and revealing as they focus the issues and require the speaker to be specific in summarizing his points. Altogether there are thirty-three contributors, only a minority of whom are westerners. These include: Charles Moore, Wm. E. Hocking, H. E. McCarthy, John Smith, W. H. Werkmeister, E. W. Strong, R. Polin, and R. McKeon. Again and again both East and West stressed the interconnection and interdependence of the individual and the universal, the individual and the community. There is an appendix containing the conference's public lectures, which were given by S. M. McMurrin, C. Regamey, and D. T. Suzuki. The book and the conference end with Moore citing highlights and provocative points from virtually all the lectures. This provides a useful summary and synthesis of what would otherwise be an overwhelming deluge of intellection. There are notes on contributors and an index.--S. O. H. (shrink)

The idea of ‘reversion’ or ‘atavism’ has a peculiar history. For many authors in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries – including Darwin, Galton, Pearson, Weismann, and Spencer, among others – reversion was one of the central phenomena which a theory of heredity ought to explain. By only a few decades later, however, Fisher and others could look back upon reversion as a historical curiosity, a non-problem, or even an impediment to clear theorizing. I explore various reasons that reversion might have (...) appeared to be a central problem for this first group of figures, focusing on their commitment to a variety of conceptual features of evolutionary theory; discuss why reversion might have then ceased to be an interesting phenomenon; and, finally, close with some more general thoughts about the death of scientific problems. (shrink)

Mysticism and the mystical experience seemingly play little or no part in our Western tradition. Certainly there is no mystical tradition in the West such as Zen Buddhism, nor is there any great understanding of or influence from the writings of Heraclitus, Spinoza, or the mystical passages in the early work of Wittgenstein. Mysticism has been generally misunderstood in the West, and it has even evoked the attacks of philosophers and theologians. 1 Mysticism to many conjures up images of monks (...) meditating in caves; it is generally pictured as esoteric, otherworldly, irrational, and at best irrelevant to the daily lives of human beings. If what we say below is correct, it will be seen that mysticism is none of these but is rather a singular human experience that lies at the foundations of civilization. (shrink)

Through criticism and analysis of ancient traditions, Kahn reconstructs the pattern of Anaximander’s thought using historical methods akin to the reconstructive techniques of comparative linguists.

The Rise of Chance in Evolutionary Theory: A Pompous Parade of Arithmetic explores a pivotal conceptual moment in the history of evolutionary theory: the development of its extensive reliance on a wide array of concepts of chance. It tells the history of a methodological and conceptual development that reshaped our approach to natural selection over a century, ranging from Darwin’s earliest notebooks in the 1830s to the early years of the Modern Synthesis in the 1930s. Far from being a “pompous (...) parade of arithmetic,” as one early critic argued, evolution transformed during this period to make these conceptual and technical tools indispensable. This book charts the role of chance in evolutionary theory from its beginnings to the earliest days of modern evolutionary theory, making it an ideal resource for evolutionary biologists, historians, philosophers, and researchers in science studies or biological statistics. (shrink)

-/- For all that digital methods—including network visualization, text analysis, and others—have begun to show extensive promise in philosophical contexts, a tension remains between two uses of those tools that have often been taken to be incompatible, or at least to engage in a kind of trade-off: the discovery of new hypotheses and the testing of already-formulated positions. This paper presents this basic distinction, then explores ways to resolve this tension with the help of two interdisciplinary case studies, taken from (...) preregistration in contemporary science and the debate over whig history in the history of science. These case studies, the paper argues, refocus our attention from a mutually exclusive testing/discovery binary to the relationship between our background data or philosophical views and the empirical generalizations that we might draw from the data. Finally, it develops a set of three challenges for philosophers and corresponding avenues for future work that will, it is hoped, allow us to better justify our use of these methods. (shrink)

Behind the superficial obscurity of what fragments we have of Heraclitus' thought, Professor Kahn claims that it is possible to detect a systematic view of human existence, a theory of language which sees ambiguity as a device for the expression of multiple meaning, and a vision of human life and death within the larger order of nature. The fragments are presented here in a readable order; translation and commentary aim to make accessible the power and originality of a systematic thinker (...) and the first great master of artistic prose. The commentary locates Heraclitus within the tradition of early Greek thought, but stresses the importance of his ideas for contemporary theories of language, literature and philosophy. (shrink)

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) Charles Darwin is primarily known as the architect of the theory of evolution by natural selection. With the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, he advanced a view of the development of life on earth that profoundly shaped nearly all biological and much philosophical thought which followed. A number….

This book proposes a new paradigm for the interpretation of Plato's early and middle dialogues. Rejecting the usual assumption of a distinct 'Socratic' period in the development of Plato's thought, this view regards the earlier works as deliberate preparation for the exposition of Plato's mature philosophy. Differences between the dialogues do not represent different stages in Plato's own thinking but rather different aspects and moments in the presentation of a new and unfamiliar view of reality. Once the fictional character of (...) the Socratic genre is recognised, there is no reason to regard Plato's early dialogues as representing the philosophy of the historical Socrates. The result is a unified interpretation of all of the dialogues down to the Republic and the Phaedrus. (shrink)

Recent arguments concerning the nature of causation in evolutionary theory, now often known as the debate between the 'causalist' and 'statisticalist' positions, have involved answers to a variety of independent questions – definitions of key evolutionary concepts like natural selection, fitness, and genetic drift; causation in multi-level systems; or the nature of evolutionary explanations, among others. This Element offers a way to disentangle one set of these questions surrounding the causal structure of natural selection. Doing so allows us to clearly (...) reconstruct the approach that some of these major competing interpretations of evolutionary theory have to this causal structure, highlighting particular features of philosophical interest within each. Further, those features concern problems not exclusive to the philosophy of biology. Connections between them and, in two case studies, contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of physics demonstrate the potential value of broader collaboration in the understanding of evolution. (shrink)

One potentially extremely fruitful use of the tools of corpus analysis in the philosophy of science is to help us understand disputed terrains within the sciences that we study. For philosophers of biology, for instance, few controversies are as heated as those over the concepts we use in taxonomy to classify the living world, with the definition of ‘species’ perhaps most fundamental among them. As many understandings of biodiversity, in turn, involve counting the number of species present in a given (...) area, these taxonomic concepts thus become crucially implicated in our efforts in conservation biology and our response to climate change. In this chapter, we present a corpus of taxonomic journal papers, and illustrate how it might be used to make progress in the history and philosophy of taxonomy. What parts of the biological world do taxonomists most often study? Are these areas of focus related to other methodological commitments, or perhaps to their underlying conceptual disagreement? Are species that are more important to conservation, or economic concerns, or more important to local cultures, more or less likely to be the target of biological study? Corpus-based methods, we argue, are uniquely powerful for approaching questions such as these, and we hope that the case we present can serve as a fruitful example for others considering their implementation. (shrink)

My aim here is to make sense of Plato's account of desire in the middle dialogues. To do that I need to unify or reconcile what are at first sight two quite different accounts: the doctrine of eros in the Symposium and the tripartite theory of motivation in the Republic. It may be that the two theories are after all irreconcilable, that Plato simply changed his mind on the nature of human desire after writing the Symposium and before composing the (...) Republic. But that conclusion can be justified only if attempts to reconcile the two theories end in failure. The attempt must be made first. (shrink)

The poem of Parmenides is the earliest philosophic text which is preserved with sufficient completeness and continuity to permit us to follow a sustained line of argument. It is surely one of the most interesting arguments in the history of philosophy, and we are lucky to have this early text, perhaps a whole century older than the first dialogues of Plato. But the price we must pay for our good fortune is to face up to a vipers' nest of problems, (...) concerning details of the text and the archaic language but also concerning major questions of philosophic interpretation. These problems are so fundamental that, unless we solve them correctly, we cannot even be clear as to what Parmenides is arguing for, or why. And they are so knotted that we can scarcely unravel a single problem without finding the whole nest on our hands. (shrink)

Plato's late dialogues have often been neglected because they lack the literary charm of his earlier masterpieces. Charles Kahn proposes a unified view of these diverse and difficult works, from the Parmenides and Theaetetus to the Sophist and Timaeus, showing how they gradually develop the framework for Plato's late metaphysics and cosmology. The Parmenides, with its attack on the theory of Forms and its baffling series of antinomies, has generally been treated apart from the rest of Plato's late work. (...) Kahn shows that this perplexing dialogue is the curtain-raiser on Plato's last metaphysical enterprise: the step-by-step construction of a wider theory of Being that provides the background for the creation story of the Timaeus. This rich study, the natural successor to Kahn's earlier Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, will interest a wide range of readers in ancient philosophy and science. (shrink)

Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment offers authoritative, jargon-free essays and critical commentaries on accelerating technological progress and the notion of technological singularity. It focuses on conjectures about the intelligence explosion, transhumanism, and whole brain emulation. Recent years have seen a plethora of forecasts about the profound, disruptive impact that is likely to result from further progress in these areas. Many commentators however doubt the scientific rigor of these forecasts, rejecting them as speculative and unfounded. We therefore invited prominent (...) computer scientists, physicists, philosophers, biologists, economists and other thinkers to assess the singularity hypotheses. Their contributions go beyond speculation, providing deep insights into the main issues and a balanced picture of the debate. (shrink)

While experience often affords important knowledge and insight that is difficult to garner through observation or testimony alone, it also has the potential to generate conflicts of interest and unrepresentative perspectives. We call this tension the paradox of experience. In this paper, we first outline appeals to experience made in debates about access to unproven medical products and disability bioethics, as examples of how experience claims arise in bioethics and some of the challenges raised by these claims. We then motivate (...) the idea that experience can be an asset by appealing to themes in feminist and moral epistemology, distinguishing between epistemic and justice-based appeals. Next, we explain the concern that experience may be a liability by appealing to empirical work on cognitive biases and theoretical work about the problem of partial representation. We conclude with preliminary recommendations for addressing the paradox and offer several questions for future discussion. (shrink)

Christians working cross-culturally to bring about change in other societies desire to conduct their interventions ethically. What seems ethical and endorsed by God from the donor's point of view, however, may not be perceived as ethical in terms of the cultural values of the receptors. The nature of this problem is discussed and guidelines suggested to assist us in recognizing and overcoming the problem. The primary guideline in the application of the Golden Rule in terms of the culturally conditioned perception (...) of the receptors. (shrink)

The propensity interpretation of fitness (PIF) is commonly taken to be subject to a set of simple counterexamples. We argue that three of the most important of these are not counterexamples to the PIF itself, but only to the traditional mathematical model of this propensity: fitness as expected number of offspring. They fail to demonstrate that a new mathematical model of the PIF could not succeed where this older model fails. We then propose a new formalization of the PIF that (...) avoids these (and other) counterexamples. By producing a counterexample-free model of the PIF, we call into question one of the primary motivations for adopting the statisticalist interpretation of fitness. In addition, this new model has the benefit of being more closely allied with contemporary mathematical biology than the traditional model of the PIF. (shrink)

There are two motivations commonly ascribed to historical actors for taking up statistics: to reduce complicated data to a mean value (e.g., Quetelet), and to take account of diversity (e.g., Galton). Different motivations will, it is assumed, lead to different methodological decisions in the practice of the statistical sciences. Karl Pearson and W. F. R. Weldon are generally seen as following directly in Galton’s footsteps. I argue for two related theses in light of this standard interpretation, based on a reading (...) of several sources in which Weldon, independently of Pearson, reflects on his own motivations. First, while Pearson does approach statistics from this "Galtonian" perspective, he is, consistent with his positivist philosophy of science, utilizing statistics to simplify the highly variable data of biology. Weldon, on the other hand, is brought to statistics by a rich empiricism and a desire to preserve the diversity of biological data. Secondly, we have here a counterexample to the claim that divergence in motivation will lead to a corresponding separation in methodology. Pearson and Weldon, despite embracing biometry for different reasons, settled on precisely the same set of statistical tools for the investigation of evolution. (shrink)

There are a bewildering variety of claims connecting Darwin to nineteenth-century philosophy of science—including to Herschel, Whewell, Lyell, German Romanticism, Comte, and others. I argue here that Herschel’s influence on Darwin is undeniable. The form of this influence, however, is often misunderstood. Darwin was not merely taking the concept of “analogy” from Herschel, nor was he combining such an analogy with a consilience as argued for by Whewell. On the contrary, Darwin’s Origin is written in precisely the manner that one (...) would expect were Darwin attempting to model his work on the precepts found in Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on Natural Science. While Hodge has worked out a careful interpretation of both Darwin and Herschel, drawing similar conclusions, his interpretation misreads Herschel’s use of the vera causa principle and the verification of hypotheses. The new reading that I present here resolves this trouble, combining Hodge’s careful treatment of the structure of the Origin with a more cautious understanding of Herschel’s philosophy of science. This interpretation lets us understand why Darwin laid out the Origin in the way that he did and also why Herschel so strongly disagreed, including in Herschel’s heretofore unanalyzed marginalia in his copy of Darwin’s book. (shrink)

This book proposes a new paradigm for the interpretation of Plato's early and middle dialogues. Rejecting the usual assumption of a distinct 'Socratic' period in the development of Plato's thought, this view regards the earlier works as deliberate preparation for the exposition of Plato's mature philosophy. Differences between the dialogues do not represent different stages in Plato's own thinking but rather different aspects and moments in the presentation of a new and unfamiliar view of reality. Once the fictional character of (...) the Socratic genre is recognised, there is no reason to regard Plato's early dialogues as representing the philosophy of the historical Socrates. The result is a unified interpretation of all of the dialogues down to the Republic and the Phaedrus. (shrink)

In the atavistic model of cancer progression, tumor cell dedifferentiation is interpreted as a reversion to phylogenetically earlier capabilities. The more recently evolved capabilities are compromised first during cancer progression. This suggests a therapeutic strategy for targeting cancer: design challenges to cancer that can only be met by the recently evolved capabilities no longer functional in cancer cells. We describe several examples of this target‐the‐weakness strategy. Our most detailed example involves the immune system. The absence of adaptive immunity in immunosuppressed (...) tumor environments is an irreversible weakness of cancer that can be exploited by creating a challenge that only the presence of adaptive immunity can meet. This leaves tumor cells more vulnerable than healthy tissue to pathogenic attack. Such a target‐the‐weakness therapeutic strategy has broad applications, and contrasts with current therapies that target the main strength of cancer: cell proliferation. (shrink)

We argue that the economy of nature constitutes an invocation of structure in the biological sciences, one largely missed by philosophers of biology despite the turn in recent years toward structural explanations throughout the philosophy of science. We trace a portion of the history of this concept, beginning with the theologically and economically grounded work of Linnaeus, moving through Darwin’s adaptation of the economy of nature and its reconstitution in genetic terms during the first decades of the Modern Synthesis. What (...) this historical case study reveals, we argue, is a window into the shifting landscape of the explanatory and ontic uses of structural concepts. In Linnaeus, the economy of nature has both ontic and explanatory import; in Darwin the ontic and explanatory aspects start to come apart ; and finally, in the Modern Synthesis, the economy of nature is replaced by the conceptual toolkit of population genetics, the structural elements of which are nearly entirely explanatory. Having traced a historical trajectory of structural concepts that moves from an ontic formulation to an increasingly explanatory one, we conclude by outlining some insights for structural realism. (shrink)

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno famously argued that ‘myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.’ Although much scholarship has analyzed and built upon Horkheimer and Adorno’s insight, it has often conflated myth with another concept: epic. By closely reading Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, this article disentangles the two concepts and elucidates key features of myth. Sacrifice, it argues, stood at the centre of myth, connecting and organizing its other dimensions. Next, the article reconstructs the lineage (...) of Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of myth and sacrifice in the fields of anthropology, ethnology, and sociology. Specifically, Horkheimer and Adorno drew on analyses of sacrificial rites in these disciplines to argue that sacrifices constituted a transaction between worshipers and gods and, therefore, established control, disempowerment, and fraud. Finally, the article takes up Horkheimer and Adorno’s task of tracing the conduits between myth and enlightenment by identifying parallel features of sacrifice and modern wage labor. To conclude, the article indicates the significance of mythical sacrifice by connecting its analysis of wage labour to contemporary theorizing about the ‘theological dimensions of capitalism.’ Together, these arguments show the centrality of Dialectic to theories of myth as conceptual tools and critical resources. (shrink)

(Editorial introduction to a special issue of Synthese.).

A fascinating portrait of the Pythagorean tradition, including a substantial account of the Neo-Pythagorean revival, and ending with Johannes Kepler on the threshold of modernism.