Summary This paper examines the entomological investigations carried out by the French naturalist Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau during a series of insect epidemics that ravaged France in the second half of the eighteenth century.1 This article began as a paper for Pamela H. Smith's ?Knowledge in Transit? graduate seminar. I would like to thank the participants of that seminar for comments and feedback. I would also like to thank Pamela Smith, Carl Wennerlind, Anya Zilberstein, Christopher L. Brown, Charly Coleman, Matthew (...) Jones, Peter Walker and Melissa Morris for their suggestions and comments on this paper. Finally, thanks to Vanessa Copeland for invaluable assistance in the archives in Paris. The author acknowledges support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University. It shows how a particularly fierce invasion of caterpillars in the Angoumois region in the 1760s sparked theoretical debates about the nature of animal generation between academic naturalists, farmers, provincial officials and amateur naturalists. As part of a wider effort to reform agricultural production in France, Duhamel du Monceau sought to eliminate vernacular understandings of insect generation and to reform local pest control techniques. In his attempt to develop a body of pest-control knowledge grounded in the systematic observation of insect generation, however, Duhamel du Monceau relied heavily on the efforts of amateur naturalists. The paper shows how he mobilized a nation-wide network of entomological observers, and collected specimens and observational reports from farmers, improving landlords and local officials throughout France. Some informants did not only act as ?mere? observers, but formulated their own causal claims about insect generation that sometimes contradicted those of their metropolitan counterpart. Finally, it demonstrates that a ?patriotic? discourse that joined agricultural improvement and civic virtue provided a powerful impetus for the formation of collaborative relationships between academic naturalists, state officials and enlightened agricultural improvers. (shrink)

A phenomenological account of spatial perception in relation to the lived body. -/- The Sense of Space brings together space and body to show that space is a plastic environment, charged with meaning, that reflects the distinctive character of human embodiment in the full range of its moving, perceptual, emotional, expressive, developmental, and social capacities. Drawing on the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Bergson, as well as contemporary psychology to develop a renewed account of the moving, perceiving body, the book suggests (...) that our sense of space ultimately reflects our ethical relations to other people and to the places we inhabit. (shrink)

Panpsychism has often been motivated on the grounds that any attempt to account for experience and consciousness in organisms in purely physical, nonexperiential terms faces severe difficulties. The “combination problem” charges that attributing phenomenal properties to the basic constituents of organisms, as panpsychism proposes, likewise fails to provide a satisfactory basis for experience in humans and other organisms. This paper evaluates a recent attempt to understand, and solve, the combination problem. This approach, due to Sam Coleman, is premised on a (...) distinction between mere aggregates and genuine unities, and the purported inability of subjects to constitute a unity. In response, I first argue that it may not be incumbent upon the panpsychist to explain how microphenomenal properties could constitute a unity in the way that Coleman supposes. I then argue that even if such a burden does fall on the panpsychist, it is far from clear that a plurality subjects cannot constitute such a unity. Finally, I argue that if one adopts a functionalist account of macrosubjects, as Coleman does, there is little reason to think that a plurality of subjects could not constitute a macrosubject. In these ways, I argue that the force of the combination problem does not turn on whether microphenomenal properties require minds or subjects that have them. (shrink)

Herein I address and extend the sparse literature on deception in sports, specifically, Kathleen Pearson’s Deception, Sportsmanship, and Ethics and Mark J. Hamilton’s There’s No Lying in Baseball. On a Kantian foundation, I argue that attempts to deceive officials, such as framing pitches in baseball, are morally unacceptable because they necessarily regard others as incompetent and as a mere means to one’s own self-interested ends. More dramatically I argue, contrary to Pearson and Hamilton, that some forms of competitor-to-competitor deception are (...) similarly unacceptable. Specifically, I offer a ‘principle of caustic deceit’ according to which any strategic deception that divorces a game from its constitutive skills is morally untoward and ought to be met with negative social pressure at least, and/or legislated out of existence. The problem with these forms of strategic deception is that they treat one’s opponents, again in the Kantian sense, as a mere means to one’s own self-interested ends. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

What are preferences and are they reasons for action? Is it rational to cooperate with others even if that entails acting against one's preferences? The dominant position in philosophy on the topic of practical rationality is that one acts so as to maximize the satisfaction of one's preferences. This view is most closely associated with the work of David Gauthier, and in this collection of essays some of the most innovative philosophers working in this field explore the controversies surrounding Gauthier's (...) position. Several essays argue against influential conceptions of preference, while others suggest that received conceptions of rational action misidentify the normative significance of rules and practices. This collection will be of particular interest to philosophers of social theory and to reflective social scientists in such fields as economics, political science and psychology. (shrink)

The problem of necessity remains one of the central issues in modern philosophy. The authors of this volume, originally published in 1985, developed a new approach to the problem, which focusses on the logical grammar of necessary propositions. This volume gathers their seminal essays on the problem of necessity, together with new material at the original time publication.

Scholars have proposed that incarceration rates might be reduced by a requirement that judges justify incarceration decisions with respect to their operational costs (e.g., prison capacity). In an Internet-based vignette experiment (N = 214), we tested this prediction by examining whether criminal punishment judgments (prison vs. probation) among university undergraduates would be influenced by a prompt to provide a justification for one's judgment, and by a brief message describing prison capacity costs. We found that (1) the justification prompt alone was (...) sufficient to reduce incarceration rates, (2) the prison capacity message also independently reduced incarceration rates, and (3) incarceration rates were most strongly reduced (by about 25%) when decision makers were asked to justify their sentences with respect to the expected capacity costs. These effects survived a test of robustness and occurred regardless of whether participants reported that prison costs should influence judgments of incarceration. At the individual crime level, the least serious crimes were most amenable to reconsideration for probation. These findings are important for policymakers attempting to manage high incarceration rates. (shrink)

A major intellectual shift between Copernicus and the mid-17th century was the rejection of Aristotelian assertions concerning the relationship of mathematics to physical nature. Aristotle asserted that “The minute accuracy of mathematics is not to be demanded in all cases, but only in the case of things which have no matter. Therefore its method is not that of natural science; for presumably all nature has matter.” Thus, he pulled out the rug from under the feet of the aspiration to a (...) mathematically based natural sciences, asserting that: “And at the same time not even this is true, that mensuration deals with perceptible and perishable magnitudes; for then it would have perished, when they perished. And astronomy also cannot be dealing with perceptible magnitudes nor with this heaven above us. For neither are perceptible lines such lines as the geometer speaks of, nor are the movement and complex orbits in the heaven like those which astronomy treats, nor have geometrical points the same nature as the actual stars.”. (shrink)

This article explores the temporal organization and manipulation of time in the production and presentation of news reports. Time is often cited as one of the most central organizing concepts of news production; indeed one of the major features of news reporting is the breaking of stories and the reporting of events `as they happen'. However, whilst much emphasis is placed upon time within media production, much of this pertains to the reporting of past and present events rather than the (...) reporting of the future. This article explores the future within news reporting through an examination of sequential events leading up to a main scheduled newsworthy event: the execution of Timothy McVeigh. It analyses how the production of `news' utilizes the future by relying upon prediction and speculation about what will happen and examines: how news can be seen to depend to a large degree on uncertainty for its value; the use of time frames within media reporting; and the way time is manipulated in the service of the recency and immediacy of news reporting. (shrink)