The question raised in this book is why Spinoza s work which comes so close to the modern view of natural science is not prominent in the social sciences. The answer suggested is that this is due to the lingering influence of the Cartesian differentiation between the domain of science, dealing with material bodies in space and time, and the realm of thought to which the mind belongs. Spinoza s rejection of this mind/body dualism was based on his conviction that (...) the human mind was an essential part of the forces which maintain human existence. Since this view fits so well the evolutionary view of life, the book suggests that after Darwin, when this dualism became untenable, it was replaced by a nature versus culture dichotomy. The book examines whether the history of the philosophy of science supports this explanation. The author believes that answering this question is important because of the rising influence of cultural relativism which endangers the very survival of modern science and political stability.". (shrink)

Mathematicians typically invoke a wide range of reasons as to why their research is valuable. These reveal considerable differences between their personal images of mathematics. One of the most interesting of these concerns the relative importance accorded to conceptual reformulation and development compared with that accorded to the achievement of concrete results. Here I explore the conceptualists' claim that the scales are tilted too much in favour of the latter. I do so by taking as a case study the debate (...) surrounding the question as to whether groupoids are significantly more powerful than groups at capturing the symmetry of a mathematical situation. The introduction of groupoids provides a suitable case as they score highly according to criteria relating to theory-building rather than problem-solving.Several of the arguments for the adoption of the groupoid concept are outlined, including claims as to its capacity for reformulating existing theory, its ability to measure symmetry more systematically, and its ‘naturalness’. This last notion is given an extensive treatment. (shrink)

An Adequate theory of meaning and truth is semantically important. Such a theory necessarily includes in its analysis nonentities, items that do not exist. So what is semantically, and hence logically, important is bound to include nonentities. In virtue of the modifier ‘semantically“, the first premiss is analytic, and it is comparatively uncontroversial. By contrast the second premise of the syllogism, which we want to stick to, is decidedly controversial. So too is the thesis – which implies the inadequacy of (...) classical logical theories – that there are a great many natural language statements, statements an adequate theory should be able to treat of, which cannot be analysed logically, and semantically, without the equivalent of an appeal to nonentities. Defence of the thesis has been somewhat piecemeal, taking the form that all the theories so far offered which try to dispense with nonentities break down or run into insuperable difficulties, difficulties which are readily surmounted given appropriate talk about nonentities. In what follows we shall outline more general sorts of argument for the thesis, designed to show that no theory which dispenses with nonentities as objects of discourse can do justice to the data. (shrink)

The present work argues that value is a properly philosophical concept, the study and understanding of which therefore requires philosophical inquiry. It does so by bringing together two, quite different, philosophers: R. G. Collingwood and Dietrich von Hildebrand. From the former, this work takes its account of what differentiates philosophical concepts. From the latter, it takes the concept of importance as differentiated into intrinsic value, objective goodness, and subjective satisfaction. After explicating the distinctive features of philosophical concepts (the intensional overlap (...) of their classes and their situation on a “scale of forms”), it argues that, despite prima facie difficulties, von Hildebrand’s categories of importance can be arrayed as a scale of forms, in which the categories of importance are not only differences in kind, but also differences in degree. The overall result is one illustration of how philosophers can argue for philosophy’s special domain of competence. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary book that is thematically tied to Charles Darwin’s extensively detailed observations of all forms of animate life across the global world—humans included—shows how neuroscience and phenomenology are complementary and how the driving force of wonder—what Darwin called “an intellectual emotion”—propels them both.

The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education maps the gradual decline of philosophy as a central, integrated part of educational studies. Chapters consider how this decline has impacted teacher education and practice, offering new directions for the reintegration of philosophical thinking in teacher preparation and development. Touching on key points in history, this valuable collection of chapters accurately appraises the global decline of philosophy of education in teacher education programs and seeks to understand the external and endemic causes of changed (...) attitudes towards a discipline which was once assigned such a central place in teacher education. Chapters illustrate how a grounding in the theoretical and ethical dimensions of teaching, learning, and education systems contribute in meaningful ways to being a good teacher, and trace the consequences of a decline in philosophy on individuals' professional development and on the evolution of the teaching profession more broadly. With this in mind, the text focusses on the future of teacher education and considers how we can ensure that philosophy of education feeds into the excellence of teaching today. This book will be of great interest to graduate, postgraduate students as well as research scholars in the field of educational philosophy and history of education. In addition, it will be useful for those involved in teacher education, and in particular, course, module and program development. (shrink)

In the future, when we compare the welfare of a being of one substrate (say, a human) with the welfare of another (say, an artificial intelligence system), we will be making an intersubstrate welfare comparison. In this paper, we argue that intersubstrate welfare comparisons are important, difficult, and potentially tractable. The world might soon contain a vast number of sentient or otherwise significant beings of different substrates, and moral agents will need to be able to compare their welfare levels. However, (...) this work will be difficult, because we lack the same kinds of commonalities across substrates that we have within them. Fortunately, we might be able to make at least some intersubstrate welfare comparisons responsibly in spite of these issues. We make the case for cautious optimism and call for more research. (shrink)

Import-Export says that a conditional 'If p, if q, r' is always equivalent to the conditional 'If p and q, r'. I argue that Import-Export does not sit well with a classical approach to conjunction: given some plausible and widely accepted principles about conditionals, Import-Export together with classical conjunction leads to absurd consequences. My main goal is to draw out these surprising connections. In concluding I argue that the right response is to reject Import-Export and adopt (...) instead a limited version which better fits natural language data; accounts for all the intuitions that motivate Import-Export in the first place; and fits better with a classical conjunction. (shrink)

The conclusions and recommendations resulting from a number of meetings held in Port Louis, Mauritius (1974); Colombo, Sri Lanka (December, 1978); and Perth, Australia (August, 1979) could serve as authority for the present work. Running through them was a continuity and logic that is stimulating for research, and from them emerged an appeal for the coordination of efforts. From all the evidence, the idea that inspired the meetings was that the countries of the Indian Ocean make up an entity. The (...) consideration of this entity, moreover, had been the guideline for the work of a number of international conferences, among which were the colloquies held in 1962, 1966 and 1972 by the International Commission of Maritime History of the Indian Ocean. The first studied the commercial societies and companies in the Orient and in the Ocean; the second, the joint role of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean in maritime relations; and the third, the movement of populations in the Indian Ocean. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

이 논문은 나딩스의 배려 윤리에서 배려 받는 자가 누구이며 배려 관계에서 어떤 역할 을 하는지의 물음에 집중한다. 통상적으로 배려는 여성적 인 개념으로서 여성적 관점의 윤리를 일컫는 것이라고 이해되고 있다. 그러나 논자는 나딩스가 배려 받는 자를 강조함으 로써 단지 여성적 입장을 대변하는 윤리가 아니라 타자 전체를 책임지는 관계로서 배려 윤 리의 새로운 지평이 열린다고 본다. 말하자면 캐롤 길리건이 여성의 다른 목소리 를 통해 배려 윤리를 이해했다면, 나딩스는 배려 받는 자의 중요성을 보여 줌으로써 타자와 그 타 자에 응답하는 자로서 주체라는 보다 분명한 (...) 타자와 주체 간의 관계를 보여 준다. 나딩스 의 배려 윤리에서 배려 받는 자의 역할의 중요성에 대한 논의는 더 나아가 또 다른 타자들 에 대한 책임의 확대 문제를 불러일으킨다. 따라서 논자는 이를 바탕으로 배려가 친밀한 관계로부터 낯선 타자에 이르기까지 어떻게 확장될 수 있는지를 보여주고 그것이 결국 주 체인 나의 책임을 강조하고 있음을 보여주고자 한다. 이런 논의를 위해 우선 논자는 메이어옵과 길리건 그리고 나딩스에 이르기까지 이들의 논의에서 배려가 단순히 여성적 관점만을 지칭하는 것이 아니라는 점을 보여줄 것이다. 이어서 나딩스의 배려 윤리에서 배려 받는 자가 배려 관계를 완수하는 지표로서 중요한 역 할을 담당하고 있음을 이해하면서 배려 받는 자의 의미를 이해하게 될 것이다. 마지막으로 친밀함이라는 관계 속에서 이루어지는 배려 관계가 낯선 자, 즉 제삼자에 이르기까지 원과 사슬이라는 관계를 통해 배려에 대한 책임이 확장될 수 있다는 것을 이해하게 될 것이다. 이런 논의 속에서 논자는 배려 받는 자를 위한 자로서, 즉 그런 배려 받는 자와 관계하는 혹은 부름에 답하는 유일한 자로서 주체의 정체성에 대해 다시 한 번 확인하게 될 것이다. (shrink)

백여 년 동안 교통과 정보 등 관련 있는 과학기술의 급격한 발전으로 인하여 사람들의 활동반경이 확대되었을 뿐만 아니라, 어느새 공간적 거리도 압축되었기 때문에 각종 문제에 대한 사유 역시 자연적으로 과거 국경의 울타리의 한계를 뛰어넘었다. 따라서 지구 전체의 일이 되어버린 ‘동고동락’에 대한 세상 사람들의 의식은 저절로 소위 ‘세계화’라는 개념으로 형성되었다. ‘세계화’ 추세 역시 저항 할 수 없는 현상이 되었다. 인류가 ‘세계화’의 시대로 나아갈 즈음, 과학기술의 발달이 가져오는 부작용이 매우 복잡해졌다. 그 중 가치관의 혼란 조성 및 도덕적 기준의 하락, 사람과 사람사이의 온정이 점점 (...) 엷어지는 문제는 의심 할 바 없이 인류로 하여금 가장 걱정이 되게 하는 것들이다. 현재 이런 그릇된 경향을 바로 잡으려면 오직 인류사회 전체가 ‘인본’적 사유로의 회귀를 호소하여 ‘인문정신’을 중시하고 사람과 사람 사이에 응당 있어야 할 ‘예의’ 구현을 실현해야지만, 사람과 사람사이의 교제에 서로 서로 존경하고 합당한 절도 있는 언행을 할 수 있게 하여, 지구촌에 살고 있는 모든 사람들로 하여금 과학기술의 발전이 가져오는 간편함과 편안함을 누리게 하는 동시에 인성의 존엄함을 유지 할 수 있고 또한 사람과 사람 사이의 따뜻한 정을 유지하게 할 수 있을 것이다. (shrink)

My dissertation is a systematic defense of the claim that what it is to be rational is to correctly respond to the reasons you possess. The dissertation is split into two parts, each consisting of three chapters. In Part I--Coherence, Possession, and Correctly Responding--I argue that my view has important advantages over popular views in metaethics that tie rationality to coherence (ch. 2), defend a novel view of what it is to possess a reason (ch. 3), and defend a novel (...) view about what it is to act and hold attitudes for normative reasons (ch. 4). In Part II--Foundationalism, Deception, and The Importance of Being Rational--I argue that foundationalists about epistemic rationality should think that the foundational beliefs are held for sufficient reasons (ch. 5), argue that my view solves the New Evil Demon problem for externalism (and solves a related and underapprieciated problem) (ch. 6), and argue that my view can vindicate the thought that we ought to be rational (ch. 7). (shrink)

This book develops a systematic philosophical theory of social action and group phenomena, in the process presenting detailed analyses of such central social notions as 'we-attitude' (especially 'we-intention' and mutual belief, social norm, joint action, and - most important - group goal, group belief, and group action). Though this is a philosophical work, it presents a unified conceptual framework that may be useful to social scientists, especially social psychologists, as well as philosophers. The book puts forward and defends a number (...) of systematic philosophical theses, resulting in not only a theory of social action but, more broadly, a philosophical theory of society, or at least those aspects of society with which social psychology is supposed to deal (individuals in groups, groups, joint action, and the like). (shrink)

The Philosophy of Time Society grew out of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on the Philosophy of Time offered by George Schlesinger in 1991. The members of that seminar wanted to promote interest in the philosophy of time and Jon N. Turgerson offered to become the first Director of the society with the initial costs underwritten by the Drake University Center for the Humanities. Thus, the Philosophy of Time Society (PTS) was formed in 1993. Its goal is (...) to promote the study of the philosophy of time from a broad analytic perspective, and to provide a forum as an affiliated group with the American Philosophical Association, to discuss the issues in and related to the philosophy of time. The society held its first meeting during the Eastern Division of the AP A in Atlanta, George, in December 1993. In 1997 I began my tenure as Executive Director of PTS and with my term ending in 2000, I decided to put together a volume of selected papers read at PTS meetings over the years. The result is the present volume. It contains some of the latest developments in the field, including discussions of recent books by Michael Tooley, Time, Tense, and Causation, and D. H. Mellor, Real Time II, and much more. The main issue in the philosophy of time is and remains the status of temporal becoming and the passage of time. (shrink)

Corporate misconduct receives significant attention in the business ethics literature. This paper studies how corporate misconduct is impacted by import penetration from China, which is largely exogenous to the U.S. product market. Using this natural experiment, we find that heightened Chinese import penetration curbs corporate misconduct of U.S. firms. The effect is more pronounced for firms with weaker corporate governance and firms more vulnerable to product market competition. The findings provide implications for firms facing increased import penetration. (...) Firms may consider improving corporate governance and exploring avenues for differentiation as potential strategies to cope with the competition. In addition, we address the exogeneity concern derived from the influence of Chinese value penetration. Furthermore, we find that competition-related policies such as tariff reduction and U.S. granting China Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status also lower corporate misconduct. Our work adds to the debates on competition and corporate misconduct in a cross-country competitive landscape. (shrink)

Dealing with conflicts seems to be a great challenge in society today. But not only in society. Higher education displays an air of resoluteness with certainty and security that disguises the conflicts and the fear of conflicts in a substantial number of subjects. If not in a state of denial, higher education avoids taking up conflicts over issues, for learning. The detailed investigation of Tagore’s pedagogical writings, with a focus on the importance of conflicts in education, reveals a genuine embrace (...) of conflicts for education. Conflicts are natural and necessary for the development and change of both the individual and society and the start of a ‘creative imagination’ to solve the problems we face in life. Contradictions in conflicts are not incompatible incongruities that are irreconcilable and mutually exclusive, but to the contrary, in need of each other. Contradictions do not represent different worlds but are substantial parts of one world: together they form a unity. Conflicting forces are necessary to create harmony. Creativity, imagination, love, art, and critical encounters are key elements in Tagore’s practical education aimed at finding similarities among people instead of emphasizing differences. Relations between people over the Identity of people. In other words, we need conflicts to become creative and imaginative human beings. The paper continues discussing conceptual and practical issues that seem necessary to get the teaching of conflicts in education off the ground. On the conceptual level, in particular our dealing with uncertainty and fear, the valuation of conflict and the need for uncertainty-researching education. On a practical level, I propose a certain teaching model, a supportive curriculum, a way of choosing genuine conflicts for education and finally, I argue for specific support and education of teachers, acknowledging the vital role teachers play in delivering the education that we need. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that that the primary goal of statues honouring public figures is to create and shape a collective identity. The way that these statues further the goal of identity is not by holding up the subjects of the statues as admirable but rather by asserting that the subjects were in some way objectively important and central to some group surrounding the statue. I will look at the defences for keeping statues of and awards named after John (...) A. Macdonald and show that the primary concern is not with defending the character of Macdonald but rather that removing him is ‘erasing history’. These defences are not about defending Macdonald as a person but rather defending a conception of the Canadian identity that requires Macdonald play a central role. Against these defences of Macdonald, I show that the ‘objective history’ case for him and other such similar figures fails. In the particular case of Macdonald, it fails because he was actually not that important for Canadian history. In the general case of negative public figures, I provide a short defence of how group identities are not static and not unchangeably rooted in a single historically based articulation. (shrink)

This 1988 volume is a collection of thirteen seminal essays on ethics, free will, and the philosophy of mind. The essays deal with such central topics as freedom of the will, moral responsibility, the concept of a person, the structure of the will, the nature of action, the constitution of the self, and the theory of personal ideals. By focusing on the distinctive nature of human freedom, Professor Frankfurt is able to explore fundamental problems of what it is to be (...) a person and of what one should care about in life. (shrink)

Errol Lord offers a new account of the nature of rationality: what it is for one to be rational is to correctly respond to the normative reasons one possesses. Lord defends novel views about what it is to possess reasons and what it is to correctly respond to reasons, and dispels doubts about whether we ought to be rational.

Addiction involves a chronic deficit in self-governance that treatment aims to restore. We draw on our interviews with addicted people to argue that addiction is, in part, a problem of self-narrative change. Over time, agents come to strongly identify with the aspects of their self-narratives that are consistently verified by others. When addiction self-narratives become established, they shape the addicted person’s experience, plans, and expectations so that pathways to recovery appear implausible and feel alien. Therefore, the agent may prefer to (...) enact her disvalued self-narrative because at least it represents who she takes herself to be. To recover, the agent needs to conduct narrative work, adjusting her existing self-narrative so that it better supports recovery-directed narrative projections. Reducing cravings, managing withdrawals, increasing self-control, and developing goals are all important for recovery but those approaches will often be in vain if the influence of self-narrative is ignored. If our analysis is correct, addiction treatment will typically be more effective if it incorporates support for self-narrative change. (shrink)

I critically examine the semantic view of theories to reveal the following results. First, models in science are not the same as models in mathematics, as holders of the semantic view claim. Second, when several examples of the semantic approach are examined in detail no common thread is found between them, except their close attention to the details of model building in each particular science. These results lead me to propose a deflationary semantic view, which is simply that model construction (...) is an important component of theorizing in science. This deflationary view is consistent with a naturalized approach to the philosophy of science. (shrink)

We report the results of one visual‐world eye‐tracking experiment and two referent selection tasks in which we investigated the effects of information structure in the form of prosody and word order manipulation on the processing of subject pronouns er and der in German. Factors such as subjecthood, focus, and topicality, as well as order of mention have been linked to an increased probability of certain referents being selected as the pronoun's antecedent and described as increasing this referent's prominence, salience, or (...) accessibility. The goal of this study was to find out whether pronoun processing is primarily guided by linguistic factors (e.g., grammatical role) or nonlinguistic factors (e.g., first‐mention), and whether pronoun interpretation can be described in terms of referents' “prominence” / “accessibility” / “salience.” The results showed an overall subject preference for er, whereas der was affected by the object role and focus marking. While focus increases the attentional load and enhances memory representation for the focused referent making the focused referent more available, ultimately it did not affect the final interpretation of er, suggesting that “prominence” or the related concepts do not explain referent selection preferences. Overall, the results suggest a primacy of linguistic factors in determining pronoun resolution. (shrink)

The novel notion of importing logics is introduced, subsuming as special cases several kinds of asymmetric combination mechanisms, like temporalization [8, 9], modalization [7] and exogenous enrichment [13, 5, 12, 4, 1]. The graph-theoretic approach proposed in [15] is used, but formulas are identified with irreducible paths in the signature multi-graph instead of equivalence classes of such paths, facilitating proofs involving inductions on formulas. Importing is proved to be strongly conservative. Conservative results follow as corollaries for temporalization, modalization and exogenous (...) enrichment. (shrink)

I want to argue for the importance of the notion human being in ethics. Part I of the paper presents two different sorts of argument against treating that notion as important in ethics. A. Here is an example of the first sort of argument. What makes us human beings is that we have certain properties, but these properties, making us members of a certain biological species, have no moral relevance. If, on the other hand, we define being human in terms (...) which are not tied to biological classification, if we treat as the properties which make us human the capacities for reasoning or for self-consciousness, then indeed those capacities may be morally relevant, but if they are morally significant at all, they are significant whether they are the properties of a being who is a member of our species or not. And so it would be better to use a word like ‘person’ to mean a being that has these properties , to bring out the fact that not all human beings have them and that non-human beings conceivably might have them. (shrink)

Contrary to common misconceptions, today's logic is not devoid of existential import: the universalized conditional ∀ x [S→ P] implies its corresponding existentialized conjunction ∃ x [S & P], not in all cases, but in some. We characterize the proexamples by proving the Existential-Import Equivalence: The antecedent S of the universalized conditional alone determines whether the universalized conditional has existential import, i.e. whether it implies its corresponding existentialized conjunction.A predicate is an open formula having only x free. (...) An existential-import predicate Q is one whose existentialization, ∃ x Q, is logically true; otherwise, Q is existential-import-free or simply import-free.How abundant or widespread is existential import? How abundant or widespread are existential-import predicates in themselves or in comparison to import-free predicates? We show that existential-import predicates are quite abundant, and no less so than import-free predicates. Existential.. (shrink)

Today, nurses are required to have knowledge and awareness concerning professional values as standards to provide safe and high-quality ethical care. Nurses’ perspective on professional values affects decision-making and patient care. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the importance of professional values from clinical nurses’ perspective. The present cross-sectional study was conducted in 2016 in four educational hospitals of Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Iran. Data were collected via the Persian version of Nursing Professional Values Scale-Revised by Weis and (...) Schank. Sampling was conducted through the use of stratified random sampling method and 250 clinical nurses participated in the study. Results indicated that the total score of the nurses’ professional values was high.. From nurses’ perspective items such as “Maintaining confidentiality of patients” and “Safeguarding patients’ right to privacy” had more importance; however, “Recognizing role of professional nursing associations in shaping healthcare policy” and “Participating in nursing research and/or implementing research findings appropriate to practice had less importance. A statistically significant relationship was observed between NPVS-R mean scores and nurses’ age, work experience as well as participation in professional ethical training. Although the total score related to the clinical nurses’ perspective on professional values was high, the importance of certain values was at a lower level. Owing to the emerging ethical challenges, it is indispensable to design educational programs in order to improve nurses’ awareness and understanding of the comprehensive importance of professional values. Furthermore, it is recommended that mixed methods studies should be conducted in order to design an instrument to evaluate the use of values in nursing practice. (shrink)

Morality bears on what we should forget. Some aspects of our identity are meant to be forgotten and there is a distinctive harm that accompanies the permanence of some content about us, content that prompts a duty to forget. To make the case that forgetting is an integral part of our moral duties to others, the paper proceeds as follows. In §1, I make the case that forgetting is morally evaluable and I survey three kinds of forgetting: no-trace forgetting, archival (...) forgetting, and siloing. In §2, I turn to how we practice these forms of forgetting in our everyday lives and the goods these practices facilitate by drawing on examples ranging from the expunging of juvenile arrest records to the right to privacy. In §3, I turn to how my account can help us both recognize and address a heretofore neglected source of harm caused by technology and big data. In §4, I end by addressing the concern that we lack control over forgetting and thus can't be required to forget. I argue this challenge can be answered, but there’s a harder challenge that can’t. Forgetting is under threat. To address this challenge and preserve forgetting, we must change the world. (shrink)

Words change meaning over time. Some meaning shift is accompanied by a corresponding change in subject matter; some meaning shift is not. In this paper I argue that an account of linguistic meaning can accommodate the first kind of case, but that a theory of concepts is required to accommodate the second. Where there is stability of subject matter through linguistic change, it is concepts that provide the stability. The stability provided by concepts allows for genuine disagreement and ameliorative change (...) in the context of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Business ethics attracts increasing attention from business practitioners and academic researchers. Concerns over fraudulent behavior keep attentionfocused on ethics in businesses. The accounting profession pays particularattention to matters of ethical judgment. The profession has adopted a strictcode of conduct and many states require the passage of an ethics exam to gaincertification. The more that is understood about the relationship of gender and ethics, the better chance of education and training programs will bedesigned to improve ethical awareness and sensitivity. Prior studies (...) have found that personal characteristics are an important aspect of cultural norms.This study analyzes the responses of students from eight different countries toquestions on their probable actions to an ethical dilemma. (shrink)

Kin relations have a strong theoretical and empirical basis for explaining cooperative behavior. Nevertheless, there is growing recognition that context—the cooperative environment of an individual—also shapes the willingness of individuals to cooperate. For nomadic pastoralists in Norway, cooperation among both kin and non-kin is an essential predictor for success. The northern parts of the country are characterized by a history of herder-herder competition exacerbating between-herder conflict, lack of trust, and subsequent coordination problems. In contrast, because of a history of herder-farmer (...) competition, southern Norway is characterized by high levels of between-herder coordination and trust. This comparative study investigates the relative importance of “cooperative context” and kinship in structuring cooperative behavior using an experimental gift game. The main findings from this study were that in the South, a high level of cooperation around an individual pushes gifts to be distributed evenly among other herders. Nevertheless, kinship matters, since close kin give and receive larger gifts. In contrast, kinship seems to be the main factor affecting gift distribution in the North. Herders in the North are also concerned with distributing gifts equally, albeit limiting them to close kin: the level of intragroup cooperation drives gifts to be distributed evenly among other closely related herders. The observed regional contrasts in cooperative decisions fit with the different historical levels of conflict and trust in the two regions: whereas herders in the South are affected by both cooperative context and kinship, kinship seems to be the main determinant of cooperation in the North. (shrink)

Symbiosis plays a fundamental role in contemporary biology, as well as in recent thinking in philosophy of biology. The discovery of the importance and universality of symbiotic associations has brought new light to old debates in the field, including issues about the concept of biological individuality. An important aspect of these debates has been the formulation of the hologenome concept of evolution, the notion that holobionts are units of natural selection in evolution. This review examines the philosophical assumptions that underlie (...) recent proposal of the hologenome concept of evolution, and traces those debates back in time to their historical origins, to the moment when the connection between the topics of symbiosis and biological individuality first caught the attention of biologists. The review is divided in two parts. The first part explores the historical origins of the connection between the notion of symbiosis and the concept of biological individuality, and emphasizes the role of A. de Bary, R. Pound, A. Schneider and C. Merezhkowsky in framing the debate. The second part examines the hologenome concept of evolution and explores four parallelisms between contemporary debates and the debates presented in the first part of the essay, arguing that the different debates raised by the hologenome concept were already present in the literature. I suggest that the novelty of the hologenome concept of evolution lies in the wider appreciation of the importance of symbiosis for maintaining life on Earth as we know it. Finally, I conclude by suggesting the importance of exploring the connections among contemporary biology, philosophy of biology and history of biology in order to gain a better understanding of contemporary biology. (shrink)

The original interest of this article lies in existential import. It provides a broader view on the problem by reference to modern, symbolic logic (ch.1). Gradually, however, our interest will change into the amalgamated expressions often used in logic; that is, why are such expressions as “x is a round triangle” applied in logic? We critically discuss this question from an extensional viewpoint, namely model theoretic semantics (ch.2). We also touch on Church’s λ-calculus in the appendix (app.2).