Built in the centre of Copenhagen, and noted for its equestrian stairway, the Rundetaarn, was intended as an astronomical observatory. Part of a complex of buildings that once included a university library, it affords expansive views of the city in every direction, towering above what surrounds it. The metaphor of the towering figure, who sees what others might not, whose vantage point allows him to visualize how things fit together, and who has an earned-stature of respect and authority, fits another (...) Danish stalwart, Hans Vilhelm Hansen, whose contributions to the fields of informal logic and argument theory have earned the gratitude of his colleagues, and inspired this collection of essays, written to express the appreciation of its authors and of the many, many colleagues they represent. (shrink)

The well-justified claim on the cover of this beautifully produced volume is that it is a “uniquely authoritative history of [Western] philosophy for the general reader.... Personalities and ideas are brought to life.... The contributors... bring to their chapters not only deep understanding, but also enthusiasm and zest for their subject.” The combination of pace, intelligence, and intelligibility that pervades most of the book is exemplary. It is a thoroughly engaging read, not least because of the contributors’ readiness to say (...) frankly when the characters in the story commit themselves to what is unclear, absurd, or downright false. If there is an underlying theme, it is that we must rid ourselves of the notion that there is any clear linear progress in philosophy: “classics in philosophy are not antiquated by succeeding research in the way that the works of even the greatest scientists become dated in time”. If there is progress at all, it comes in the shape of the recognition of earlier philosophers’ mistakes and the salvaging of “partial insights.” But “ ‘we must assume that even the best efforts of our own time will come to seem blind eventually’ ”. The latter page, the last of the text and of the afterword, is by happily symbolic error headed “Ancient Philosophy”; to adapt the title of one of the early illustrations of the book, readers by this point may appropriately wonder where they are coming from, and where they are going..). (shrink)

The SSIS SEL Brief Scales are multi-informant measures that were developed to efficiently assess the SEL competencies of school-age youth in the United States. Recently, the SSIS SELb was translated into multiple languages for use in a multi-site study across six European countries. The purpose of the current study was to examine concurrent and predictive evidence for the SEL Composite scores from the translated versions of the SSIS SELb Scales. Results indicated that SSIS SELb Composite scores demonstrated expected positive concurrent (...) and predictive relationships with scores from the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale and negative relationships with scores from the problem behavior scales of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Although there were a few exceptions, these patterns generally were consistent across informants and samples providing initial validity evidence for the Composite score from the translated versions of the SSIS SELb Scales. Limitations and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

Despite much research on the relationship between awareness and dementia little can be concluded concerning their relationship and the role of other factors. It is likely that studies capture different phenomena of awareness. This study aimed at identifying and delineating such variation by analysing data from three questionnaires obtained during the longitudinal study of awareness in 101 people with early-stage dementia. The data concerned awareness in relation to memory, activities of daily living and socio-emotional function. Significant differences in patterns of (...) discrepancies were obtained. This suggests that the awareness phenomena involved were structurally different; and that, in turn, this may reflect variation in the intrinsic linking between awareness and its ‘object’ . The identification of such differences is necessary so that appropriate methodologies can be applied to the study of awareness in different contexts. (shrink)

This clear and engaging introduction is the first book to assess the ideas of Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Ghanaian-British philosopher who is a leading public intellectual today. The book focuses on the theme of 'identity' and is structured around five main topics, corresponding to the subjects of his major works: race, culture, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and moral revolutions. This handy guide: teaches students about the sources, opportunities, and dilemmas of personal and social identity - whether on the basis of race, (...) gender, sexuality, or class, among others - in the purview of Appiah. locates Appiah within a broader tradition of intellectual engagement with these issues - involving such thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, John Stuart Mill, and Martha Nussbaum - and thus how Appiah is both an inheritor and innovator of preceding ideas. seeks to inspire students on how to approach and negotiate identity politics in the present. This book ultimately imparts a more diverse and wider-reaching geographic sense of philosophy through the lens of Appiah and his intellectual contributions, as well as emphasize the continuing social relevance of philosophy and critical theory more generally to everyday life today. (shrink)

Christophe Bouton’s _Time and Freedom _addresses the problem of the relationship between time and freedom as a matter of practical philosophy, examining how the individual lives time and how her freedom is effective in time. Bouton first charts the history of modern philosophy’s reengagement with the Aristotelian debate about future contingents, beginning with Leibniz. While Kant, Husserl, and their followers would engage time through theories of knowledge, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard, and, Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas applied a phenomenological and existential methodology (...) to time, but faced a problem of the temporality of human freedom. Bouton’s is the first major work of its kind since Bergson’s _Time and Free Will _, and Bouton’s “mystery of the future,” in which the individual has freedom within the shifting bounds dictated by time, charts a new direction. (shrink)

Much has been written about recidivist punishments, particularly within the area of criminology. However there is a notorious lack of penal philosophical reflection on this issue. This book attempts to fill that gap by presenting the philosopher’s view on this matter as a way of furthering the debate on recidivist punishments.

Perlecan is a ubiquitous proteoglycan of basement membrane and vascularized tissues but is also present in articular cartilage, meniscus and intervertebral disc, which are devoid of basement membrane and predominantly avascular. It is a prominent pericellular proteoglycan in the transitory matrix of the cartilaginous rudiments that develop into components of diarthrodial joints and the axial skeleton, and it forms intricate perichondrial vessel networks that define the presumptive articulating surfaces of developing joints and line the cartilage canals in cartilaginous rudiments. Such (...) vessels have roles in the nutrition of the expanding cell numbers in the developing joint. Perlecan sequesters a number of growth factors pericellularly (FGFs, PDGF, VEGF and CTGF) and through these promotes cell signalling, cell proliferation and differentiation. Perlecan also interacts with a diverse range of extracellular matrix proteins, stabilising and organising the ECM, and promoting collagen fibrillogenesis. Perlecan is a prominent pericellular component of mesenchymal cells from their earliest developmental stages through to maturation, forming cell–cell and cell–ECM interconnections that are suggestive of a role in mechanosensory processes important to tissue homeostasis. BioEssays 30:457–469, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

There are wide individual differences in the ability to detect a stimulus contingency embedded in a complex paradigm. The present study used a cognitive masking paradigm to better understand individual differences related to contingency learning. Participants were assessed on measures of electrodermal arousal and on working memory capacity before engaging in the contingency learning task. Contingency awareness was assessed both by trial-by-trial verbal reports obtained during the task and by a short post-task recognition questionnaire. Participants who became aware had fewer (...) non-specific skin conductance responses and tended to score higher on a digit span assessment. Skin conductance level was not significantly lower in the aware group than in the unaware group. These findings are consistent with studies showing that lower arousal and greater cognitive processing capacity facilitate conscious perception of a greater breadth of information within a scene or a task. (shrink)

BackgroundThe ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines.MethodsIn a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March–June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication (...) in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.ResultsWe randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10−7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.ConclusionsThese results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting. (shrink)

What role should a citizen's religious convictions play in her political activities? Is she, for example, permitted to decide on the basis of her religious convictions to support laws that criminalize abortion or discourage homosexual relations? Christopher Eberle is deeply at odds with the dominant orthodoxy among political theorists about the relation of religion and politics. His argument is that a citizen may responsibly ground her political commitments on religious beliefs, even if her only reasons for her political commitments (...) are religious in nature. His ideal of citizenship allows citizens to engage in politics without privatizing their religious commitments, and yet does not license mindless and intransigent sectarianism. An inherently controversial book that offers a substantial challenge to political liberalism, it will be read by students and professionals in philosophy, political science, law and religious studies, and general readers seeking insight into the relationship between religious commitments and liberal politics. (shrink)

This paper examines the debate between permissive and impermissive forms of Bayesianism. It briefly discusses some considerations that might be offered by both sides of the debate, and then replies to some new arguments in favor of impermissivism offered by Roger White. First, it argues that White’s (Oxford studies in epistemology, vol 3. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 161–186, 2010) defense of Indifference Principles is unsuccessful. Second, it contends that White’s (Philos Perspect 19:445–459, 2005) arguments against permissive views do not (...) succeed. (shrink)

Representation theorems are often taken to provide the foundations for decision theory. First, they are taken to characterize degrees of belief and utilities. Second, they are taken to justify two fundamental rules of rationality: that we should have probabilistic degrees of belief and that we should act as expected utility maximizers. We argue that representation theorems cannot serve either of these foundational purposes, and that recent attempts to defend the foundational importance of representation theorems are unsuccessful. As a result, we (...) should reject these claims, and lay the foundations of decision theory on firmer ground. (shrink)

The words 'rebellion' and 'revolution' have gained renewed prominence in the vocabulary of world politics and so has the question of justifiable armed 'resistance'. In this book Christopher J. Finlay extends just war theory to provide a rigorous and systematic account of the right to resist oppression and of the forms of armed force it can justify. He specifies the circumstances in which rebels have the right to claim recognition as legitimate actors in revolutionary wars against domestic tyranny and (...) injustice, and wars of liberation against wrongful foreign occupation and colonialism. Arguing that violence is permissible only in a narrow range of cases, Finlay shows that the rules of engagement vary during and between different conflicts and explores the potential for irregular tactics to become justifiable, such as non-uniformed guerrillas and civilian disguise, the assassination of political leaders and regime officials, and the waging of terrorist war against civilian targets. (shrink)

This paper examines three accounts of the sleeping beauty case: an account proposed by Adam Elga, an account proposed by David Lewis, and a third account defended in this paper. It provides two reasons for preferring the third account. First, this account does a good job of capturing the temporal continuity of our beliefs, while the accounts favored by Elga and Lewis do not. Second, Elga’s and Lewis’ treatments of the sleeping beauty case lead to highly counterintuitive consequences. The proposed (...) account also leads to counterintuitive consequences, but they’re not as bad as those of Elga’s account, and no worse than those of Lewis’ account. (shrink)

Though the realm of biology has long been under the philosophical rule of the mechanistic magisterium, recent years have seen a surprisingly steady rise in the usurping prowess of process ontology. According to its proponents, theoretical advances in the contemporary science of evo-devo have afforded that ontology a particularly powerful claim to the throne: in that increasingly empirically confirmed discipline, emergently autonomous, higher-order entities are the reigning explanantia. If we are to accept the election of evo-devo as our best conceptualisation (...) of the biological realm with metaphysical rigour, must we depose our mechanistic ontology for failing to properly “carve at the joints” of organisms? In this paper, I challenge the legitimacy of that claim: not only can the theoretical benefits offered by a process ontology be had without it, they cannot be sufficiently grounded without the metaphysical underpinning of the very mechanisms which processes purport to replace. The biological realm, I argue, remains one best understood as under the governance of mechanistic principles. (shrink)

The advent of contemporary evolutionary theory ushered in the eventual decline of Aristotelian Essentialism (Æ) – for it is widely assumed that essence does not, and cannot have any proper place in the age of evolution. This paper argues that this assumption is a mistake: if Æ can be suitably evolved, it need not face extinction. In it, I claim that if that theory’s fundamental ontology consists of dispositional properties, and if its characteristic metaphysical machinery is interpreted within the framework (...) of contemporary evolutionary developmental biology, an evolved essentialism is available. The reformulated theory of Æ offered in this paper not only fails to fall prey to the typical collection of criticisms, but is also independently both theoretically and empirically plausible. The paper contends that, properly understood, essence belongs in the age of evolution. (shrink)

For many Americans, the election of Barack Obama as the country's first black president signaled that we had become a post-racial nation - some even suggested that race was no longer worth discussing. Of course, the evidence tells a very different story. And while social scientists are fully engaged in examining the facts of race, normative political thought has failed to grapple with race as an interesting moral case or as a focus in the expansive theory of social justice. Political (...) thought's under participation in the debate over the status of blacks in American society raises serious concerns since the main academic task of political theory is to adjudicate discrepancies between the demands of ideal justice and social realities. Christopher J. Lebron contends that it is the duty of political thought to address the moral problems that attend racial inequality and to make those problems salient to a democratic polity. Thus, in The Color of Our Shame, he asks two major questions. First, given the success of the Civil Rights Act and the sharp decline in overt racist norms, how can we explain the persistence of systemic racial inequality? Second, once we have settled on an explanation, what might political philosophy have to offer in terms of a solution? In order to answer these questions Lebron suggests that we reconceive of racial inequality as a condition that marks the normative status of black citizens in the eyes of the nation. He argues that our collective response to racial inequality ought to be shame. While we reject race as a reason for marginalizing blacks on the basis of liberal democratic ideals, we fail to live up to those ideals - a situation that Lebron sees as a failure of national character. Drawing on a wide array of resources including liberal theory, virtue ethics, history, and popular culture, Lebron proposes a move toward a "perfectionist politics" that would compel a higher level of racially relevant moral excellence from individuals and institutions and enable America to meet the democratic ideals that it has set for itself. (shrink)

Conditionalization is a widely endorsed rule for updating one’s beliefs. But a sea of complaints have been raised about it, including worries regarding how the rule handles error correction, changing desiderata of theory choice, evidence loss, self-locating beliefs, learning about new theories, and confirmation. In light of such worries, a number of authors have suggested replacing Conditionalization with a different rule — one that appeals to what I’ll call “ur-priors”. But different authors have understood the rule in different ways, and (...) these different understandings solve different problems. In this paper, I aim to map out the terrain regarding these issues. I survey the different problems that might motivate the adoption of such a rule, flesh out the different understandings of the rule that have been proposed, and assess their pros and cons. I conclude by suggesting that one particular batch of proposals, proposals that appeal to what I’ll call “loaded evidential standards”, are especially promising. (shrink)

This article challenges the view that rhetoric, dialectic and logic are three perspectives on argument, relating respectively to its process, its procedure, and its product. It also questions the view that rhetorical arguments represent a distinctive type. It suggests that, as related to argument, rhetoric is the theory of arguments in speeches, dialectics the theory of arguments in conversations, and logic the theory of good reasoning in each.

In this article, we review approaches to modeling a connection between spatial and mathematical thinking across development. We critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of factor analyses, meta-analyses, and experimental literatures. We examine those studies that set out to describe the nature and number of spatial and mathematical skills and specific connections between these abilities, especially those that included children as participants. We also find evidence of strong spatial-mathematical connections and transfer from spatial interventions to mathematical understanding. Finally, we map (...) out the kinds of studies that could enhance our understanding of the mechanisms by which spatial and mathematical processing are connected and the principles by which mathematical outcomes could be enhanced through spatial training in educational settings. (shrink)

Deference principles are principles that describe when, and to what extent, it’s rational to defer to others. Recently, some authors have used such principles to argue for Evidential Uniqueness, the claim that for every batch of evidence, there’s a unique doxastic state that it’s permissible for subjects with that total evidence to have. This paper has two aims. The first aim is to assess these deference-based arguments for Evidential Uniqueness. I’ll show that these arguments only work given a particular kind (...) of deference principle, and I’ll argue that there are reasons to reject these kinds of principles. The second aim of this paper is to spell out what a plausible generalized deference principle looks like. I’ll start by offering a principled rationale for taking deference to constrain rational belief. Then I’ll flesh out the kind of deference principle suggested by this rationale. Finally, I’ll show that this principle is both more plausible and more general than the principles used in the deference-based arguments for Evidential Uniqueness. (shrink)

Although they are continually compositionally reconstituted and reconfigured, organisms nonetheless persist as ontologically unified beings over time – but in virtue of what? A common answer is: in virtue of their continued possession of the capacity for morphological invariance which persists through, and in spite of, their mereological alteration. While we acknowledge that organisms‟ capacity for the “stability of form” – homeostasis - is an important aspect of their diachronic unity, we argue that this capacity is derived from, and grounded (...) in a more primitive one – namely, the homeodynamic capacity for the “specified variation of form”. In introducing a novel type of causal power – a „structural power‟ – we claim that it is the persistence of their dynamic potential to produce a specified series of structurally adaptive morphologies which grounds organisms‟ privileged status as metaphysically “one over many” over time. (shrink)

The most arresting aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment is its conception of commercial society as a distinct and distinctive social formation. Christopher Berry explains why Enlightenment thinkers considered commercial society to be wealthier and freer than earlier forms, and charts the contemporary debates and tensions between Enlightenment thinkers that this idea raised. The book analyses the full range of literature on the subject, from key works like Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations', David Hume's 'Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects' (...) and Adam Ferguson's 'Essay on the History of Civil Society' to lesser-known works such as Robert Wallace's 'Dissertation on Numbers of Mankind'. (shrink)

The words 'rebellion' and 'revolution' have gained renewed prominence in the vocabulary of world politics and so has the question of justifiable armed 'resistance'. In this book Christopher J. Finlay extends just war theory to provide a rigorous and systematic account of the right to resist oppression and of the forms of armed force it can justify. He specifies the circumstances in which rebels have the right to claim recognition as legitimate actors in revolutionary wars against domestic tyranny and (...) injustice, and wars of liberation against wrongful foreign occupation and colonialism. Arguing that violence is permissible only in a narrow range of cases, Finlay shows that the rules of engagement vary during and between different conflicts and explores the potential for irregular tactics to become justifiable, such as non-uniformed guerrillas and civilian disguise, the assassination of political leaders and regime officials, and the waging of terrorist war against civilian targets. (shrink)

We describe an infinitary logic for metric structures which is analogous to Lω1,ω. We show that this logic is capable of expressing several concepts from analysis that cannot be expressed in finitary continuous logic. Using topological methods, we prove an omitting types theorem for countable fragments of our infinitary logic. We use omitting types to prove a two-cardinal theorem, which yields a strengthening of a result of Ben Yaacov and Iovino concerning separable quotients of Banach spaces.

This paper examines two mistakes regarding David Lewis’ Principal Principle that have appeared in the recent literature. These particular mistakes are worth looking at for several reasons: The thoughts that lead to these mistakes are natural ones, the principles that result from these mistakes are untenable, and these mistakes have led to significant misconceptions regarding the role of admissibility and time. After correcting these mistakes, the paper discusses the correct roles of time and admissibility. With these results in hand, the (...) paper concludes by showing that one way of formulating the chance–credence relation has a distinct advantage over its rivals. (shrink)

In Reasons and Persons, Parfit (1984) posed a challenge: provide a satisfying normative account that solves the Non-Identity Problem, avoids the Repugnant and Absurd Conclusions, and solves the Mere-Addition Paradox. In response, some have suggested that we look toward person-affecting views of morality for a solution. But the person-affecting views that have been offered so far have been unable to satisfy Parfit's four requirements, and these views have been subject to a number of independent complaints. This paper describes a person-affecting (...) account which meets Parfit's challenge. The account satisfies Parfit's four requirements, and avoids many of the criticisms that have been raised against person-affecting views. (shrink)

Although contemporary metaphysics has recently undergone a neo-Aristotelian revival wherein dispositions, or capacities are now commonplace in empirically grounded ontologies, being routinely utilised in theories of causality and modality, a central Aristotelian concept has yet to be given serious attention – the doctrine of hylomorphism. The reason for this is clear: while the Aristotelian ontological distinction between actuality and potentiality has proven to be a fruitful conceptual framework with which to model the operation of the natural world, the distinction between (...) form and matter has yet to similarly earn its keep. In this chapter, I offer a first step toward showing that the hylomorphic framework is up to that task. To do so, I return to the birthplace of that doctrine - the biological realm. Utilising recent advances in developmental biology, I argue that the hylomorphic framework is an empirically adequate and conceptually rich explanatory schema with which to model the nature of organisms. (shrink)

By utilizing the topological concept of pseudocompactness, we simplify and improve a proof of Caicedo, Dueñez, and Iovino concerning Terence Tao's metastability. We also pinpoint the exact relationship between the Omitting Types Theorem and the Baire Category Theorem by developing a machine that turns topological spaces into abstract logics.

At the heart of the Bayesianism is a rule, Conditionalization, which tells us how to update our beliefs. Typical formulations of this rule are underspecified. This paper considers how, exactly, this rule should be formulated. It focuses on three issues: when a subject’s evidence is received, whether the rule prescribes sequential or interval updates, and whether the rule is narrow or wide scope. After examining these issues, it argues that there are two distinct and equally viable versions of Conditionalization to (...) choose from. And which version we choose has interesting ramifications, bearing on issues such as whether Conditionalization can handle continuous evidence, and whether Jeffrey Conditionalization is really a generalization of Conditionalization. (shrink)

In “Bayesianism, Infinite Decisions, and Binding”, Arntzenius et al. (Mind 113:251–283, 2004 ) present cases in which agents who cannot bind themselves are driven by standard decision theory to choose sequences of actions with disastrous consequences. They defend standard decision theory by arguing that if a decision rule leads agents to disaster only when they cannot bind themselves, this should not be taken to be a mark against the decision rule. I show that this claim has surprising implications for a (...) number of other debates in decision theory. I then assess the plausibility of this claim, and suggest that it should be rejected. (shrink)

Standard decision theory has trouble handling cases involving acts without finite expected values. This paper has two aims. First, building on earlier work by Colyvan (2008), Easwaran (2014), and Lauwers and Vallentyne (2016), it develops a proposal for dealing with such cases, Difference Minimizing Theory. Difference Minimizing Theory provides satisfactory verdicts in a broader range of cases than its predecessors. And it vindicates two highly plausible principles of standard decision theory, Stochastic Equivalence and Stochastic Dominance. The second aim is to (...) assess some recent arguments against Stochastic Equivalence and Stochastic Dominance. If successful, these arguments refute Difference Minimizing Theory. This paper contends that these arguments are not successful. (shrink)

A number of cases involving self-locating beliefs have been discussed in the Bayesian literature. I suggest that many of these cases, such as the sleeping beauty case, are entangled with issues that are independent of self-locating beliefs per se. In light of this, I propose a division of labor: we should address each of these issues separately before we try to provide a comprehensive account of belief updating. By way of example, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism in order (...) to accommodate these issues. Then, putting these other issues aside, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism in order to accommodate self-locating beliefs. Finally, I propose a constraint on updating rules, the "Learning Principle", which rules out certain kinds of troubling belief changes, and I use this principle to assess some of the available options. (shrink)

Some of the most interesting recent work in formal epistemology has focused on developing accuracy-based approaches to justifying Bayesian norms. These approaches are interesting not only because they offer new ways to justify these norms, but because they potentially offer a way to justify all of these norms by appeal to a single, attractive epistemic goal: having accurate beliefs. Recently, Easwaran & Fitelson (2012) have raised worries regarding whether such “all-accuracy” or “purely alethic” approaches can accommodate and justify evidential Bayesian (...) norms. In response, proponents of purely alethic approaches, such as Pettigrew (2013b) and Joyce (2016), have argued that scoring rule arguments provide us with compatible and purely alethic justifications for the traditional Bayesian norms, including evidential norms. In this paper I raise several challenges to this claim. First, I argue that many of the justifications these scoring rule arguments provide are not compatible. Second, I raise worries for the claim that these scoring rule arguments provide purely alethic justifications. Third, I turn to assess the more general question of whether purely alethic justifications for evidential norms are even possible, and argue that, without making some contentious assumptions, they are not. Fourth, I raise some further worries for the possibility of providing purely alethic justifications for content-sensitive evidential norms, like the Principal Principle. (shrink)

This book offers a novel defence of a highly contested philosophical position: biological natural kind essentialism. This theory is routinely and explicitly rejected for its purported inability to be explicated in the context of contemporary biological science, and its supposed incompatibility with the process and progress of evolution by natural selection. Christopher J. Austin challenges these objections, and in conjunction with contemporary scientific advancements within the field of evolutionary-developmental biology, the book utilises a contemporary neo-Aristotelian metaphysics of "dispositional properties", (...) or causal powers, to provide a theory of essentialism centred on the developmental architecture of organisms and its role in the evolutionary process. By defending a novel theory of Aristotelian biological natural kind essentialism, Essence in the Age of Evolution represents the fresh and exciting union of cutting-edge philosophical insight and scientific knowledge. (shrink)