The authors' aim is to provide a more complete picture of a non-anthropocentric relational ethics by addressing the failure to account for environmental justice. They argue that environmental ethics is always more than how discourses are layered over place, by situating moral agency through the body's affective repertoire of being-in-the-world. Empirical evidence for their argument is drawn from self-reflexive accounts of young Americans travelling to Ulu r u-Kata Tju t a National Park, Northern Territory, Australia as part of a study-group. (...) These reflexive travel narratives illustrate the dilemmas that even well-prepared visitors have in negotiating moral pathways invoked by the policy of reconciliation. (shrink)

As the last of the Jedi, Luke must now pass on what he has learned of the Force, presumably to restart the Jedi Order. In the imaginations of many, Luke simply must have continued his rise, becoming one of the most powerful living beings in the universe. Deleuze draws his notion of the forces of becoming partly from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who says that the world is “a monster of energy, without beginning, without end” that “only transforms itself” as (...) “a play of forces and waves of forces, a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, with an ebb and a flood of its forms.” Deleuze's interpretation is that all bodies, all physical things, are “nothing but forces” defined solely by their activities of affecting – and being affected by – other things with which they interact. (shrink)

The difference between cause and effect seems obvious and crucial in ordinary life, yet missing from modern physics. Almost a century ago, Bertrand Russell called the law of causality 'a relic of a bygone age'. In this important collection 13 leading scholars revisit Russell's revolutionary conclusion, discussing one of the most significant and puzzling issues in contemporary thought.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy argues that our failure to prevent the looming climate catastrophe results from a faulty metaphysics of time: because we believe the present can proceed down one of the many branches that extend into the future, some of which bypass the catastrophe, we do not think it is absolutely urgent to take drastic action now. His solution to this problem of demotivation is “enlightened doomsaying” in “projected time”, which means that we affirm the coming catastrophe as something real in (...) the future rather than being a mere possibility; thus, we regard it seriously enough that we are motivated to take the needed actions to prevent it. One potential obstacle to this proposal is that it requires the forming of consensus and coordination with the powerful players who benefit from our current path and whose apparently near-total grip on this catastrophic future may itself discourage action. We then consider an alternative model based on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the present–future relation. Although it has the branching structure that Dupuy is wary of, it may not suffer from the same problem of demotivation on account of the way it conceives the complex structure of the present event. For this reason, the Deleuzian model may be more suited to motivating action in a world where the future must be fought for rather than unanimously agreed upon. (shrink)

Public participation in scientific research has gained prominence in many scientific fields, but the theory of participatory research is still limited. In this paper, we suggest that the divergence of values and goals between academic researchers and public participants in research is key to analyzing the different forms this research takes. We examine two existing characterizations of participatory research: one in terms of public participants' role in the research, the other in terms of the virtues of the research. In our (...) view, each of these captures an important feature of participatory research but is, on its own, limited in what features it takes into account. We introduce an expanded conception of norms of collaboration that extends to both academic researchers and public participants. We suggest that satisfying these norms requires consideration of the two groups' possibly divergent values and goals, and that a broad characterization of participatory research that starts from participants' values and goals can motivate both public participants’ role in the research and the virtues of the research. The resulting framework clarifies the similarities and differences among participatory projects and can help guide the responsible design of such projects. (shrink)

To compare Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s phenomenal bodies, I first examine how for Merleau-Ponty phenomena appear on the basis of three levels of integration: 1) between the parts of the world, 2) between the parts of the body, and 3) between the body and its world. I contest that Deleuze’s attacks on phenomenology can be seen as constructive critiques rather than as being expressions of an anti-phenomenological position. By building from Deleuze’s definition of the phenomenon and from his more phenomenologically relevant (...) writings, we find that phenomena for him are given to the body under exactly the opposite conditions as for Merleau-Ponty, namely that 1) the world’s differences 2) appear to a disordered body that 3) comes into shocking affective contact with its surroundings. I argue that a Deleuzian theory of bodily-given phenomena is better suited than Merleau-Ponty’s model in the task of accounting for the intensity of phenomenal appearings. (shrink)

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote two 'logic' books: Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation and The Logic of Sense. However, in neither of these books nor in any other works does Deleuze articulate in a formal way the features of the logic he employs. He certainly does not use classical logic. And the best options for the non-classical logic that he may be implementing are: fuzzy, intuitionist, and many-valued. These are applicable to his concepts of heterogeneous composition and becoming, affirmative (...) synthetic disjunction, and powers of the false. In The Logic of Gilles Deleuze. Volume 1: Basic Principles, Corry Shores examines the applicability of three non-classical logics to Deleuze's philosophy, by building from the philosophical and logical writings of Graham Priest, the world's leading proponent of dialetheism. Through so doing, Shores demonstrates how Deleuze's logic is best understood as a dialetheic, paraconsistent, many-valued logic. (shrink)

Deleuze never explicitly formulates his philosophy of logical truth‐values. It thus remains an open question as to the number and types he held there to be. Despite his explicit comments on these matters, additional textual evidence suggests that in his thinking on the event, he favored a third truth‐value, holding either the analetheic view that some truth‐bearers can be truth‐valueless or the dialetheic view that some truth‐bearers can be both true and false. I first argue that taking a logical approach (...) to Deleuze's thinking is feasible, despite his and others' claims that might suggest otherwise. Next, I examine his explicit statements to show that they cannot be taken at face value and that, rather, we need to transpose his claims into contemporary terminology in order to accurately assess them. I lastly turn to his Leibniz‐inspired philosophy of time to argue that the affirmations involved in this conception strongly suggest a dialetheic tendency in his thinking. (shrink)

We respond to a phenomenological challenge set forth in Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?,” namely, to seek a method for obtaining a phenomenological description of non-human animal experience faithful to an animal’s first-person subjective perspective. First, we examine “translational” strategies employing empathy and communication with animals. Then we turn to a “transpositional” strategy from Uexkull’s Umwelt theory in which we objectively determine the components of a non-human animal’s subjective world of experience and then map those (...) coordinates onto our own subjective world. While this method gives us partial access to the animal’s “perception-world” aspect of its Umwelt, it does not inform us about what it is like to live in the interactive, “effect-world” aspect. To better overcome this limitation, we add a “transformational” approach derived from Deleuze’s & Guattari’s notion of “becoming-animal,” in which we take on an animal’s manners and capacities for interacting with the other objects and creatures in its world. (shrink)

For Deleuze, the creation and conveyance of meaning requires not a strict fidelity to an original idea, message or image but rather its deformation. The forces causing such disfigurations operate in gesture, vocalisation and text, with one level sometimes disrupting the others. Among them, gesture plays an especially important role, given Deleuze’s attention to bodily experience. He locates it in theatre, painting and cinema, particularly in the works of Carmelo Bene, Francis Bacon and Jerry Lewis. In these cases, instead of (...) conveying a recognisable message, a deformative gesture sends a shock wave that scrambles normal meaning assignments and codings. Yet, although gesture is a main channel for these communication disruptive forces, their origin may lie elsewhere, namely, in a ‘pick-up’ of influences resulting from an inter-affective encounter between heterogeneous bodies. (shrink)

Recent decades have brought environmental justice studies to a much broader analysis and new areas of concern. We take this increased depth and breadth of environmental justice further by considering restorative justice, with a particular emphasis on reconciliation efforts between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens. Our focus is on the reconciliation efforts taken by the indigenous/non-indigenous jointmanagement structure of Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park. Usinga framework of restorative justice within a bivalent environmental justice approach, we consider the current management policies at the (...) Park, particularly as it pertains to the controversial climb of the rock, Uluṟu. Our exploration of restorative environmental justice depends upon narrative analysis of embodied ecotourism affects in order to determine the capacity and obstacles of reconciliation efforts in the current management policy. Interviews with tourists from the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area supply us with cases that provide affective experiences and a postcolonial narrative analysis of touring practices that we argue are imbued with nationalism and colonial naturalism that must be transformed in order to meet the requests of the Park’s traditional indigenous owners. We argue that restorative justice, within a bivalent environmental justice framework that already emphasizes other distributive and recognition measures, is vital for overcoming these obstacles for Australian environmental heritage. (shrink)

Enhancement technologies may someday grant us capacities far beyond what we now consider humanly possible. Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg suggest that we might survive the deaths of our physical bodies by living as computer emulations.­­ In 2008, they issued a report, or “roadmap,” from a conference where experts in all relevant fields collaborated to determine the path to “whole brain emulation.” Advancing this technology could also aid philosophical research. Their “roadmap” defends certain philosophical assumptions required for this technology’s success, (...) so by determining the reasons why it succeeds or fails, we can obtain empirical data for philosophical debates regarding our mind and selfhood. The scope ranges widely, so I merely survey some possibilities, namely, I argue that this technology could help us determine (1) if the mind is an emergent phenomenon, (2) if analog technology is necessary for brain emulation, and (3) if neural randomness is so wild that a complete emulation is impossible. (shrink)

Generational identity plays a large role in how teachers view educational change and school reform. Teachers of the Boomer generation, an era characterized by optimism and innovation, tend to be more resistant to change than those of Generation X, for whom standardization represents the norm, not a shift. This volume reviews five decades of research on educational change and teachers’ varying responses to it from a generational perspective, providing school leaders with insight on how best to relate to these groups (...) to achieve a common goal. Through ongoing professional development oriented by multigenerational grouping, teachers and school leaders can define success and create a multigenerational understanding of what good teaching and leadership look like. (shrink)

The continental philosophy of non-classical logics is a relatively new field that seeks to determine whether any aspects of certain continental philosophers’ thinking can be characterized in terms of non-classical logics. Some of the main figures that have been examined so far are Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and François Laruelle. Although many of these studies are grounded in the writings of Graham Priest, who wrote some of the seminal texts in the field, Jc Beall’s work also features prominently (...) in a number of cases. After surveying this field and highlighting Beall’s influence within it, I claim that it can be substantially expanded by making further uses of Beall’s writings, especially ones that introduce non-classical logics in ways that are especially suitable for this particular field of study and also that discuss such topics as negation, subclassical logics, logical pluralism, and glutty futures. (shrink)

A process philosophical interpretation of Deleuze's theories of time encounters problems when formulating an account of Deleuze's portrayal of temporality in The Time-Image, where time is understood as having the structure of instantaneity and simultaneity. I remedy this shortcoming of process philosophical readings by formulating a phenomenological interpretation of Deleuze's second synthesis of time. By employing Deleuze's logic of affirmative synthetic disjunction in combination with his differential calculus interpretation of Spinoza's and Bergson's duration, this phenomenological interpretation portrays time as given (...) to our awareness in immediacy rather than through a continuous process of unfolding. The viability of this alternate approach calls into question the claims that Deleuze is strictly a process philosopher and anti-phenomenologist. (shrink)

By means of Vivian Sobchack’s semiotic film phenomenology, we may examine our immediate perceptual acts in film experience in order to determine the ways that the primordial language of embodied existence found at this primary level grounds the secondary level of the more explicit interpretations we give to the film’s elements. Although Gilles Deleuze is openly defiant toward the phenomenological tradition, his studies of film experience can serve this purpose as well, because he is interested in the direct and pre-verbal (...) significance of cinematic images. To bring his observations more fruitfully into film phenomenological studies, I will examine his notion of the discordantly operating body and offer a phenomenological interpretation for his notion of cinematic signs. I then apply this Deleuzian semiotic film phenomenology to his analysis of deep focus cinematography in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. When watching one particular scene, different layers of our film experience, namely, those of visual and of temporal depth, collide in such a way that they provide the phenomenal basis for us to produce a temporal interpretation of the spatial relations held between the displayed images. (shrink)

Enactivism and ecological psychology converge on the relevance of the environment in understanding perception and action. On both views, perceiving organisms are not merely passive receivers of environmental stimuli, but rather form a dynamic relationship with their environments in such a way that shapes how they interact with the world. In this paper, I suggest that while enactivism and ecological psychology enjoy a shared specification of the environment as the cognitive domain, on both accounts, the structure of the environment, itself, (...) is unspecified beyond that of contingent relations with the species-typical sensorimotor capacities of perceiving organisms. This lack of specification creates a considerable gap in theory regarding the organization of organisms as coupled with their environments. I argue that this gap can be filled by drawing from resources in developmental systems theory, namely, specifying the environmental state-space as a developmental niche that shapes and is shaped by individual organisms over developmental and, on a population scale, evolutionary time. Defining the environment as an organism’s developmental niche makes it clearer how and why certain contingencies have arisen, in turn, strengthening a joint appeal to both enactivism and ecological psychology as theories asserting complementarity between organisms and their environments. (shrink)

The world is a complex place, and this complexity is an obstacle to our attempts to explain, predict, and control it. In Power and Influence, Richard Corry investigates the assumptions that are built into the reductive method of explanation—the method whereby we deal with complexity by studying the components of a complex system in relative isolation and use the information so gained to explain or predict the behaviour of the complex whole. He investigates the metaphysical presuppositions built into the reductive (...) method, seeking to ascertain what the world must be like in order that the method could work. Corry argues that the method assumes the existence of causal powers that manifest causal influence—a relatively unrecognised ontological category, of which forces are a paradigm example. The success of the reductive method, therefore, is an argument for the existence of such causal influences. The book goes on to show that adding causal influence to our ontology gives us the resources to solve some traditional problems in the metaphysics of causal powers, laws of nature, causation, emergence, and possibly even normative ethics. What results, then, is not just an understanding of the reductive method, but an integrated metaphysical worldview that is grounded in an ontology of power and influence. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between the Islamic religion and the level of socially responsible business conduct (SRBC) of Islamic entrepreneurs. The authors find that the common ideas of SRBC correspond with the view of business in Islam, although there are also some notable differences. They also find that Muslim entrepreneurs attach a higher weight to specific elements of SRBC than do non‐Muslims. However, they also find that Muslims are less involved with applying SRBC in practice than non‐Muslim managers.

This paper explores the relationship between the Islamic religion and the level of socially responsible business conduct (SRBC) of Islamic entrepreneurs. The authors find that the common ideas of SRBC correspond with the view of business in Islam, although there are also some notable differences. They also find that Muslim entrepreneurs attach a higher weight to specific elements of SRBC than do non‐Muslims. However, they also find that Muslims are less involved with applying SRBC in practice than non‐Muslim managers.

In the present article two possible meanings of the term mathematical structure are discussed: a formal and a nonformal one. It is claimed that contemporary mathematics is structural only in the nonformal sense of the term. Bourbaki's definition of structure is presented as one among several attempts to elucidate the meaning of that nonformal idea by developing a formal theory which allegedly accounts for it. It is shown that Bourbaki's concept of structure was, from a mathematical point of view, a (...) superfluous undertaking. This is done by analyzing the role played by the concept, in the first place, within Bourbaki's own mathematical output. Likewise, the interaction between Bourbaki's work and the first stages of category theory is analyzed, on the basis of both published texts and personal documents. (shrink)

Recent decades have brought environmental justice studies to a much broader analysis and new areas of concern. We take this increased depth and breadth of environmental justice further by considering restorative justice, with a particular emphasis on reconciliation efforts between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens. Our focus is on the reconciliation efforts taken by the indigenous/non-indigenous jointmanagement structure of Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park. Usinga framework of restorative justice within a bivalent environmental justice approach, we consider the current management policies at the (...) Park, particularly as it pertains to the controversial climb of the rock, Uluṟu. Our exploration of restorative environmental justice depends upon narrative analysis of embodied ecotourism affects in order to determine the capacity and obstacles of reconciliation efforts in the current management policy. Interviews with tourists from the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area supply us with cases that provide affective experiences and a postcolonial narrative analysis of touring practices that we argue are imbued with nationalism and colonial naturalism that must be transformed in order to meet the requests of the Park’s traditional indigenous owners. We argue that restorative justice, within a bivalent environmental justice framework that already emphasizes other distributive and recognition measures, is vital for overcoming these obstacles for Australian environmental heritage. (shrink)

For over 20 years, Jaegwon Kim’s Causal Exclusion Argument has stood as the major hurdle for non-reductive physicalism. If successful, Kim’s argument would show that the high-level properties posited by non-reductive physicalists must either be identical with lower-level physical properties, or else must be causally inert. The most prominent objection to the Causal Exclusion Argument—the so-called Overdetermination Objection—points out that there are some notions of causation that are left untouched by the argument. If causation is simply counterfactual dependence, for example, (...) then the Causal Exclusion Argument fails. Thus, much of the existing debate turns on the issue of which account of causation is appropriate. In this paper, however, I take a bolder approach and argue that Kim’s preferred version of the Causal Exclusion Argument fails no matter what account one gives of causation. Any notion of causation that is strong enough to support the premises of the argument is too strong to play the role required in the logic of the argument. I also consider a second version of the Causal Exclusion Argument, and suggest that although it may avoid the problems of the first version, it begs the question against a particular form of non-reductive physicalism, namely emergentism. (shrink)

A dispositional property is a tendency, or potency, to manifest some characteristic behaviour in some appropriate context. The mainstream view in the twentieth century was that such properties are to be explained in terms of more fundamental non-dispositional properties, together with the laws of nature. In the last few decades, however, a rival view has become popular, according to which some properties are essentially dispositional in nature, and the laws of nature are to be explained in terms of these fundamental (...) dispositions. The supposed ability of fundamental dispositions to ground natural laws is one of the most attractive features of the dispositional essentialist position. In this paper, however, I cast doubt on the ability of dispositional essences to ground the laws of nature. In particular I argue that the dispositional essentialist position is not able to coherently respond—sympathetically or otherwise—to Cartwright's challenge that there are no true general laws of nature. (shrink)

Leo Corry tells the story behind the idea of number, from the early days of the Pythagoreans, up until the turn of the twentieth century. He presents an overview of how numbers were handled and conceived in classical Greek mathematics, in the mathematics of Islam, in European mathematics of the middle ages and the Renaissance, during the scientific revolution, all the way through to the mathematics of the 18th to the early 20th century.

The ArgumentRecent studies in the philosophy of mathematics have increasingly stressed the social and historical dimensions of mathematical practice. Although this new emphasis has fathered interesting new perspectives, it has also blurred the distinction between mathematics and other scientific fields. This distinction can be clarified by examining the special interaction of thebodyandimagesof mathematics.Mathematics has an objective, ever-expanding hard core, the growth of which is conditioned by socially and historically determined images of mathematics. Mathematics also has reflexive capacities unlike those of (...) any other exact science. In no other exact science can the standard methodological framework usedwithinthe discipline also be used to study the nature of the discipline itself.Although it has always been present in mathematical research, reflexive thinking has become increasingly central to mathematics over the past century. Many of the images of the discipline have been dictated by the increase in reflexive thinking which has also determined a great portion of the contemporary philosophy and historiography of mathematics. (shrink)

This paper takes up Huw Price׳s challenge to develop a retrocausal toy model of the Bell-EPR experiment. I develop three such models which show that a consistent, local, hidden-variables interpretation of the EPR experiment is indeed possible, and which give a feel for the kind of retrocausation involved. The first of the models also makes clear a problematic feature of retrocausation: it seems that we cannot interpret the hidden elements of reality in a retrocausal model as possessing determinate dispositions to (...) affect the outcome of experiments. This is a feature which Price has embraced, but Gordon Belot has argued that this feature renders retrocausal interpretations “unsuitable for formal development”, and the lack of such determinate dispositions threatens to undermine the motivation for hidden-variables interpretations in the first place. But Price and Belot are both too quick in their assessment. I show that determinate dispositions are indeed consistent with retrocausation. What is more, I show that the ontological economy allowed by retrocausation holds out the promise of a classical understanding of spin and polarization. (shrink)

One of the most powerful tools in science is the analytic method, whereby we seek to understand complex systems by studying simpler sub-systems from which the complex is composed. If this method is to be successful, something about the sub-systems must remain invariant as we move from the relatively isolated conditions in which we study them, to the complex conditions in which we want to put our knowledge to use. This paper asks what this invariant could be. The paper shows (...) that the kinds of thing that a Humean might point to – behaviour, laws, and dispositions – cannot play the role required of the invariant in question. Nor, indeed, can non-Humean causal powers of the kind advocated by contemporary metaphysicians such as Ellis and Lierse. The paper suggests that the analytic method presupposes a kind of entity that does not appear in standard ontologies – a metaphysically substantial notion of causal influence. This notion of causal influence is one that Cartwright has also seen the need for, though she does not seem to take the notion as seriously as she should. (shrink)

This paper proposes a revision of our understanding of causation that is designed to address what Hartry Field has suggested is the central problem in the metaphysics of causation today: reconciling Bertrand Russell’s arguments that the concept of causation can play no role in the advanced sciences with Nancy Cartwright’s arguments that causal concepts are essential to a scientific understanding of the world. The paper shows that Russell’s main argument is, ironically, very similar to an argument that Cartwright has put (...) forward against the truth of universal laws of nature. The paper uses this insight to develop an account of causation that does justice to traditional views yet avoids the arguments of Russell. (shrink)

New nursing researchers are faced with a smorgasbord of competing methodologies. Sometimes, they are encouraged to adopt the research paradigms beloved of their senior colleagues. This is a problem if those paradigms are no longer of contemporary methodological relevance. The aim of this paper was to provide clarity about current research paradigms. It seeks to interrogate the continuing viability of positivism as a guiding paradigm for nursing research. It does this by critically analysing the methodological literature. Five major paradigms are (...) addressed: the positivist; the interpretivist/constructivist; the transformative; the realist; and the postpositivist. Acceptance of interpretivist, transformative or realist approaches necessarily entails wholesale rejection of positivism, while acceptance of postpositivism involves its partial rejection. Postpositivism has superseded positivism as the guiding paradigm of the scientific method. The incorporation in randomized controlled trials of postpositivist assumptions indicates that even on the methodological territory that it once claimed as its own, positivism has been rendered redundant as an appropriate paradigm for contemporary nursing research. (shrink)

This article explores the changing relationships between geometric and arithmetic ideas in medieval Europe mathematics, as reflected via the propositions of Book II of Euclid’s Elements. Of particular interest is the way in which some medieval treatises organically incorporated into the body of arithmetic results that were formulated in Book II and originally conceived in a purely geometric context. Eventually, in the Campanus version of the Elements these results were reincorporated into the arithmetic books of the Euclidean treatise. Thus, while (...) most of the Latin versions of the Elements had duly preserved the purely geometric spirit of Euclid’s original, the specific text that played the most prominent role in the initial passage of the Elements from manuscript to print—i.e., Campanus’ version—followed a different approach. On the one hand, Book II itself continued to appear there as a purely geometric text. On the other hand, the first ten results of Book II could now be seen also as possiblytranslatable into arithmetic, and in many cases even as inseparably associated with their arithmetic representation. (shrink)

Kenneth Silver has recently argued that backwards causation is common in the context of social institutions. I consider this claim in detail and conclude that backwards causation is not the most plausible interpretation of what is going on in the cases Silver considers. Nonetheless, I show that these cases can teach us some interesting lessons about institutional facts. In particular, I argue that in order to avoid contradiction due to conflicting declarations in these cases, we must conclude that the properties (...) involved in institutional facts are relational properties. (shrink)

The present article discusses the computational tools (both conceptual and material) used in various attempts to deal with individual cases of FLT, as well as the changing historical contexts in which these tools were developed and used, and affected research. It also explores the changing conceptions about the role of computations within the overall disciplinary picture of number theory, how they influenced research on the theorem, and the kinds of general insights thus achieved. After an overview of Kummer’s contributions and (...) its immediate influence, I present work that favored intensive computations of particular cases of FLT as a legitimate, fruitful, and worth-pursuing number-theoretical endeavor, and that were part of a coherent and active, but essentially low-profile tradition within nineteenth century number theory. This work was related to table making activity that was encouraged by institutions and individuals whose motivations came mainly from applied mathematics, astronomy, and engineering, and seldom from number theory proper. A main section of the article is devoted to the fruitful collaboration between Harry S. Vandiver and Emma and Dick Lehmer. I show how their early work led to the hesitant introduction of electronic computers for research related with FLT. Their joint work became a milestone for computer-assisted activity in number theory at large. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe belief in the existence of eternal mathematical truth has been part of this science throughout history. Bourbaki, however, introduced an interesting, and rather innovative twist to it, beginning in the mid-1930s. This group of mathematicians advanced the view that mathematics is a science dealing with structures, and that it attains its results through a systematic application of the modern axiomatic method. Like many other mathematicians, past and contemporary, Bourbaki understood the historical development of mathematics as a series of (...) necessary stages inexorably leading to its current state — meaning by this, the specific perspective that Bourbaki had adopted and were promoting. But unlike anyone else, Bourbaki actively put forward the view that their conception of mathematics was not only illuminating and useful for dealing with the current concerns of mathematics, but that this was in fact the ultimate stage in the evolution of mathematics, bound to remain unchanged by any future development of this science. In this way, they were extending in an unprecedented way the domain of validity of the belief in the eternal character of mathematical truths, from the body to the images of mathematical knowledge.Bourbaki were fond of presenting their insistence on the centrality of the modern axiomatic method as a way to ensure the eternal character of mathematical truth as an offshoot of Hilbert's mathematical heritage. A detailed examination of Hilbert's actual conception of the axiomatic method, however, brings to the fore interesting differences between it and Bourbaki's conception, thus underscoring the historically conditioned character of certain, fundamental mathematical beliefs. (shrink)

This paper proposes a revision of our understanding of causation that is designed to address what Hartry Field has suggested is the central problem in the metaphysics of causation today: reconciling Bertrand Russell’s arguments that the concept of causation can play no role in the advanced sciences with Nancy Cartwright’s arguments that causal concepts are essential to a scientific understanding of the world. The paper shows that Russell’s main argument is, ironically, very similar to an argument that Cartwright has put (...) forward against the truth of universal laws of nature. The paper uses this insight to develop an account of causation that does justice to traditional views yet avoids the arguments of Russell. (shrink)

Organisms live not as discrete entities on which an independent environment acts, but as members of a reproductive lineage in an ongoing series of interactions between that lineage and a dynamic ecological niche. These interactions continuously shape both systems in a reciprocal manner, resulting in the emergence of reliably co-occurring configurations within and between both systems. The enactive approach to cognition describes this relationship as the structural coupling between an organism and its environment; similarly, Developmental Systems Theory emphasizes the reciprocal (...) nature of structurally coupled systems in its analysis of organisms as developmental processes embedded within a developmental system. Through an enactive-developmental systems framing, this paper identifies the organizational features of cognizing systems in order to motivate a picture of how organism and environment co-determine and co-construct one another. I argue that organisms can be characterized as self-organizing, operationally closed, plastic systems ecologically embedded within a developmental system. In virtue of this organizational makeup, organisms actively engage in the modulation and assessment of their coupling with their environment: cognitive strategies that entail contextualized responses to variations across the web of interactions that comprises the developmental system. (shrink)