Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Workshop in History and Philosophy of Biology, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, March 23-24 2001 Session 1: Eugenics Narrative and Reproductive Engineering.

Ecological feminism is a feminism which attempts to unite the demands of the women's movement with those of the ecological movement. Ecofeminists often appeal to "ecology" in support of their claims, particularly claims about the importance of feminism to environmentalism. What is missing from the literature is any sustained attempt to show respects in which ecological feminism and the science of ecology are engaged in complementary, mutually supportive projects. In this paper we attempt to do that by showing ten important (...) similarities which establish the need for and benefits of on-going dialogue between ecofeminists and ecosystem ecologists. (shrink)

When the Covid‐19 pandemic reached the United States in spring 2020, many states and hospitals announced crisis standards of care plans that used age as a categorical exclusion criterion. Such age choosing was quickly flagged as discriminatory, and so some states and hospitals shifted to embedding age as a tiebreaker deeper in their plans. Different rationales were given for using age as a tiebreaker: that younger patients were more likely to survive than older patients, that saving younger patients would save (...) more life years, and that younger patients deserved a chance to live through life's stages. We provide a critical analysis of these three rationales, noting the differences between them, and then questioning the ethical and legal justifications for such age choosing. (shrink)

Re-working the Gramscian idea of the ‘organic’ intellectual from the cultural-political sphere to Higher Education (HE), suggests the need to develop critical and questioning ‘counter hegemonic’ ideas and behaviour in community education students. Connecting this reworking to the Habermasian theory of communicative action, suggests that these students also need to learn how to be constructive in developing such knowledge. Working towards critical and constructive capacities is particularly relevant for students who learn through acting in practice settings where general principles and (...) purposes acquired in the academy need to be interpreted in response to the unique demands of specific situations. From a Gramscian perspective, enabling students to develop the qualities of organic intellectuals means that lecturers have a duty to teach critical knowledges which the student will be unfamiliar with and unlikely to possess. If teaching is not to become simply didactic, however, there is also a need to acknowledge Habermas’s contention that all knowledge is contingent. This does not mean that knowledge is merely relative, subjective, or essentially interest serving, as some postmodernists would have it. In Habermasian terms, knowledge is developed through a rigorous process of contesting validity claims according to procedures appropriate to discipline areas. In these procedures, contestation occurs to the point where there is general agreement about the best current understanding, until such time as this is overtaken by ideas with a better claim. The danger is that over commitment to contestation in the classroom undermines subject knowledge and ultimately the authority of the educator. Speaking Habermas to Gramsci, and vice versa, helps socially and politically committed educators to construct a space in which didactic and discursive moments purposefully alternate. (shrink)

This co-authored chapter offers a reconstruction of Bergson's conception of the relationship between the political and religion focusing on "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion". Bergson's claims and arguments are related to those of Nietzsche with a focus on the themes of critique, immanence and affirmation.

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 109-111.

At the center of the various transformations and advancements inmodern society is man. It is man by whom and for whom these transformations and advancements are made. But one negative factoraccompanying these transformations is the violence or the degradation of the human person and his dignity, more alarming is the violence committed by man against his fellow man. Today, there is so much violence in the world, everyday we hear about killings, kidnappings, rapes, abortion, terrorist attacks, hunger, wars and many (...) other acts of violence. It is ironic that, while the human person is the very victim of this violence, it is also the human person who is the perpetrator of such violence, man is simultaneously the victim and the culprit. Man indeed is a paradox, for while he is bestowed with dignity and good nature, he is also capable of doing evil and inflicting harm against others. This violent tendency happens because man fails to acknowledge the very dignity of his nature which is rooted in his fundamental relation with God and extended to his fellow human beings. Man is by nature good, but he is also capable of doing evil things. The Catholic Church through its teachings and writings have always emphasized the value of the person, while at the same time acknowledging the fact that he is as much capable of degrading himself. The Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, “Gaudium et Spes” acknowledges the many divergent and contradicting opinions of man about himself, one of which “exalts man as the absolute measure of all things and debases himself to the point of despair. The result is doubt and anxiety.”. (shrink)

The equivalence of leaf languages of tree adjoining grammars and monadic linear context-free grammars was shown about a decade ago. This paper presents a proof of the strong equivalence of these grammar formalisms. Non-strict tree adjoining grammars and monadic linear context-free grammars define the same class of tree languages. We also present a logical characterisation of this tree language class showing that a tree language is a member of this class iff it is the two-dimensional yield of an MSO-definable three-dimensional (...) tree language. (shrink)

A compilation of international humanist thought spans centuries and includes the writings of skeptics, novelists, philosophers, and religious critics.

Trois poèmes en résonance avec ce mot « autislangue », une « langue que nous parlons, nous qui pouvons parler sans sons », et que lae militanz pour la neurodiversité Jim Sinclair a nommé dans le 1 er numéro de Our Voice: The Newsletter of Autism Network International.

Philosophers of science have developed an account of causal-mechanical explanation that captures regularity, but this account neglects variation. In this article I amend the philosophy of mechanisms to capture variation. The task is to explicate the relationship between regular causal mechanisms responsible for individual development and causes of variation responsible for variation in populations. As it turns out, disputes over this relationship have rested at the heart of the nature–nurture debate. Thus, an explication of the relationship between regular causal mechanisms (...) and causes of variation and between individual development and variation offers both the necessary amendment to the philosophy of mechanisms and the resources to mediate the dispute. (shrink)

In a widely acclaimed study from 2002, researchers found a case of gene-environment interaction for a gene controlling neuroenzymatic activity (low vs. high), exposure to childhood maltreatment, and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). Cases of gene-environment interaction are generally characterized as evincing a genetic predisposition; for example, individuals with low neuroenzymatic activity are generally characterized as having a genetic predisposition to ASPD. I first argue that the concept of a genetic predisposition fundamentally misconstrues these cases of gene-environment interaction. This misconstrual will (...) be diagnosed, and then a new concept—interactive predisposition—will be introduced. I then show how this conceptual shift reconfigures old questions and raises new questions for genetic screening. Attempts to screen embryos or fetuses for the gene associated with low neuroenzymatic activity with an eye towards selecting against the low-activity variant fall prey to the myth of pre-environmental prediction; attempts to screen newborns for the gene associated with low neuroenzymatic activity with an eye towards early intervention will have to face the interventionist’s dilemma. (shrink)

Galasso (2024) helpfully puts her finger on what is perhaps the most troubling feature of precision medicine research today: Champions of the science are targeting communities of color and other ma...

Stuart Glennan, and the team of Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden, and Carl Craver have recently provided two accounts of the concept of a mechanism. The main difference between these two versions rests on how the behavior of the parts of the mechanism is conceptualized. Glennan considers mechanisms to be an interaction of parts, where the interaction between parts can be characterized by direct, invariant, change-relating generalizations. Machamer, Darden, and Craver criticize traditional conceptualizations of mechanisms which are based solely on parts (...) interacting and introduce a new conceptactivity. This essay is an attempt at carving out a relationship between these two philosophical interpretations of a mechanism. I will claim that, rather than being in conflict, Glennan's concept of interaction and Machamer, Darden, and Craver's notion of activity actually complement one another, each emphasizing a missing element of the other. (shrink)

This essay examines the origin of genotype-environment interaction, or G×E. "Origin" and not "the origin" because the thesis is that there were actually two distinct concepts of G×E at this beginning: a biometric concept, or \[G \times E_B\], and a developmental concept, or \[G \times E_D \]. R. A. Fisher, one of the founders of population genetics and the creator of the statistical analysis of variance, introduced the biometric concept as he attempted to resolve one of the main problems in (...) the biometric tradition of biology - partitioning the relative contributions of nature and nurture responsible for variation in a population. Lancelot Hogben, an experimental embryologist and also a statistician, introduced the developmental concept as he attempted to resolve one of the main problems in the developmental tradition of biology - determining the role that developmental relationships between genotype and environment played in the generation of variation. To argue for this thesis, I outline Fisher and Hogben's separate routes to their respective concepts of G × E; then these separate interpretations of G × E are drawn on to explicate a debate between Fisher and Hogben over the importance of G × E, the first installment of a persistent controversy. Finally, Fisher's \[G \times E_B\] and Hogben's \[G \times E_D \] are traced beyond their own work into mid-2Oth century population and developmental genetics, and then into the infamous IQ Controversy of the 1970s. (shrink)

James Tabery Helen Longino’s Studying Human Behavior is an overdue effort at a nonpartisan evaluation of the many scientific disciplines that study the nature and nurture of human behavior, arguing for the acceptance of the strengths and weaknesses of all approaches. After years of conflict, Longino makes the pluralist case for peaceful coexistence. Her analysis of the approaches raises the following question: how are we to understand the pluralistic relationship among the peacefully coexisting approaches? Longino is ironically rather unpluralistic (...) about her pluralism, forcing a choice between integrative pluralism and her preferred ineliminative pluralism. I hope to show that the analysis of approaches she offers actually accommodates a pluralism that is both integrative and ineliminative.Approaches to studying human behaviorPhilosophy of biology took shape as a discipline in the 1970s. This disciplinary formation over. (shrink)

The demanding frontier life of My Ántonia or Little House on the Prairie may be long gone, but the idyllic small town still exists as a cherished icon of American community life. Yet sprawl and urban density, rather than small towns and farms, are the predominant features of our modern society, agribusiness and other commercial forces have rapidly taken over family farms and ranches, and even the open spaces we think of as natural retreats only retain the barest façade of (...) their former frontier austerity. The fading communities, social upheaval, and enduring heritage of the Northern Plains are the subject of Jim Dow’s Marking the Land, a stirring photographic tribute to the complex and unyielding landscape of North Dakota. Jim Dow began making pilgrimages to this remote territory in 1981 and, with a commission from the North Dakota Museum of Art, he took photographs of the passing human presence on the land. The simple, stolid pieces of architecture carved out against the Dakota skies—whether the local schoolhouse, car wash, prison, homes, hunting lodge, or churches—evoke in their spare lines and weather-battered frames the stoic and toughened spirit of the people within their walls. Folk art is also an integral part of the landscape in Dow’s visual study, and he examines the subtle evolution of local craftsmanship from homemade sculptures, murals, and carvings to carefully crafted pieces aimed at tourists. Anchoring all of these explorations is the raw and striking landscape of the North Dakota plains. Marking the Land is a moving reflection by a leading American photographer on the state of the Northern Plains today, forcing us all to rethink our conceptions of America’s forgotten frontier. (shrink)

This is a response to the letter to the editor “Prioritizing the Prevention of Early Deaths during Covid‐19,” by Govind Persad.

This article discusses the work of George Udny Yule in relation to the evolutionary synthesis and the biometric-Mendelian debate. It has generally been claimed that (i.) in 1902, Yule put forth the first account showing that the competing biometric and Mendelian programs could be synthesized. Furthermore, (ii.) the scientific figures who should have been most interested in this thesis (the biometricians W. F. Raphael Weldon and Karl Pearson, and the Mendelian William Bateson) were too blinded by personal animosity towards each (...) other to appreciate Yule's proposal. This essay provides a detailed account of (i.), maintaining that Yule's 1902 proposal is better understood as a reduction, not a synthesis of the two programs. The results of this analysis are then used to evaluate (ii.), where I will instead argue that Bateson and the biometricians had good reasons to avoid endorsing Yule's account. (shrink)

Many cases of gene‐environment interaction, or , are misconstrued as evincing a genetic predisposition. I diagnose this misconstrual and then introduce a new concept— interactive predisposition —to correct for the mistake. I conclude by examining how recent debates over screening for individual predispositions are related to older debates about group differences between populations , drawing on the lessons of the latter to inform the former. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, (...) UT 84112; e‐mail: tabery@philosophy.utah.edu. (shrink)

From the very beginning, studies of the nature and nurture of intelligence have been closely associated with an interest in intervening, and those interventions have been surrounded by controversy. The nature of those controversies has not always been the same, however. Since the mid‐nineteenth century, when Francis Galton imagined a science that would assess the extent to which a trait like “genius” was due to nature or due to nurture, science and technology have changed dramatically, and so have the interventions (...) that have been envisioned in light of those developments. A scientist today can search for particular stretches of DNA and assess whether differences in those stretches are associated with differences in a human trait of interest; a genetic counselor today can genetically test an individual (be it an embryo, fetus, newborn, child, or adult) and provide information about what that genetic result means, allowing for interventions that can range from terminating a pregnancy to prescribing chemotherapy. So when one asks a question like, “Why is studying the genetics of intelligence controversial?,” it is important to realize up front that the answer will be, “It can be controversial for a variety of different reasons, and those reasons have evolved over time.” The purpose of this essay is to provide a survey of the controversies that surround genetic studies of intelligence. With the survey in place, I will then draw out several lessons both for scientists who study the genetics of intelligence as well as for science studies scholars (bioethicists, philosophers, historians, sociologists) who reflect and comment on the controversies surrounding that research. (shrink)

I provide a history of research on G×E in this article, showing that there have actually been two distinct concepts of G×E since the very origins of this research. R. A. Fisher introduced what I call the biometric concept of G×E, or G×EB, while Lancelot Hogben introduced what I call the developmental concept of G×E, or G×ED. Much of the subsequent history of research on G×E has largely consisted in the separate legacies of these separate concepts, along with the (sometimes (...) acrimonious) disputes that have arisen time and again when employers of each have argued over the appropriate way to conceptualize the phenomenon. With this history in place, I then consider more recent attempts to distinguish between different concepts of G×E, paying particular attention to the commonly made distinction between “statistical interaction” and “interactionism,” and also Michael Rutter’s distinction between “statistical interaction” and “the biological concept of interaction.” I argue that the history of the separate legacies of G×EB and G×ED better supports Rutter’s analysis of the situation, and that this analysis best paves the way for an integrative relationship between the various scientists investigating the place of G×E in the etiology of complex traits. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

A startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers, the book chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.

The prospect of a severe influenza pandemic poses a daunting public health threat to hospitals and the public they serve. The event of a severe influenza pandemic will put hospitals under extreme stress; only so many beds, ventilators, nurses, and physicians will be available, and so it is likely that more patients will require medical attention than can be completely treated. Triage is the process of sorting patients in a time of crisis to determine who receives what level of medical (...) attention. How will hospitals sort patients to determine priority for treatment? What criteria will be used? Who will develop these criteria? This article formulates an answer to these questions by constructing a conceptual framework for anticipating and responding to the ethical issues raised by triage in the event of a severe influenza pandemic. (shrink)

Recent research has begun treating the perennial philosophical question, “what makes a person the same over time?” as an empirical question. A long tradition in philosophy holds that psychological continuity and connectedness of memories are at the heart of personal identity. More recent experimental work, following Strohminger & Nichols (2014), has suggested that persistence of moral character, more than memories, is perceived as essential for personal identity. While there is a growing body of evidence supporting these findings, a critique by (...) Starmans & Bloom (2018) suggests that this research program conflates personal identity with mere similarity. To address this criticism, we explore how loss of someone’s morality or memories influence perceptions of identity change, and perceptions of moral duties towards the target of the change. We present participants with a classic ‘body switch’ thought experiment and after assessing perceptions of identity persistence, we present a moral dilemma, asking participants to imagine that one of the patients must die (Study 1) or be left alone in a care home for the rest of their life (Study 2). Our results highlight the importance of the continuity of moral character, suggesting lay intuitions are tracking (something like) personal identity, not just mere similarity. (shrink)

Traditional, quantitative behavioral geneticists and developmental psychobiologists such as Gilbert Gottlieb have long debated what it would take to create a truly developmental behavioral genetics. These disputes have proven so intractable that disputants have repeatedly suggested that the problem rests on their opponents' conceptual confusion; whilst others have argued that the intractability results from the non-scientific, political motivations of their opponents. The authors provide a different explanation of the intractability of these debates. They show that the disputants have competing interpretations (...) of the concepts of reaction norm, genotype-environment interaction, and gene. The common thread that underlies each of these disagreements, the authors argue, is the relevance of potential variation that is not manifest in any actual population to the understanding of development. (shrink)

"We become what we love," states Jim Garrison in Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching. This provocative book represents a major new interpretation of Dewey's education philosophy. It is also an examination of what motivates us to teach and to learn, and begins with the idea of education of eros (i.e., passionate desire)-"the supreme aim of education" as the author puts it-and how that desire results in a practical philosophy that guides us in recognizing what (...) is essentially good or valuable. Garrison weaves these threads of ancient wisdom into a critical analysis of John Dewey's writings that reveal an implicit theory of eros in reasoning, and the central importance of educating eros to seek "the Good." Chapters: Plato's Symposium: Eros, the Beautiful, and the Good • Care, Sympathy, and Community in Classroom Teaching: Feminist Reflections on the Expansive Self • Play-Doh, Poetry, and "Ethereal Things" • The Aesthetic Context of Inquiry and the Teachable Moment • The Education of Eros: Critical and Creative Value Appraisal • Teaching and the Logic of Moral Perception This book can be used in graduate courses in foundations, teacher education, philosophy of education, qualitative research, arts and education, language and literacy, and women and education. Jim Garrison is Professor of Philosophy of Education at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. He is pastpresident of the John Dewey Society and a winner of the Society's Outstanding Achievement Award. (shrink)

Do fetuses have a right to life in virtue of the fact that they are potential adult human beings? I take the claim that the fetus is a potential adult human being to come to this: if the fetus grows normally there will be an adult human animal that was once the fetus. Does this fact ground a claim to our care and protection? A great deal hangs on the answer to this question. The actual mental and physical capacities of (...) a human fetus are inferior to those of adult creatures generally thought to lack a serious right to life, and the mere fact that a fetus belongs to our species in particular seems morally irrelevant. Consequently, a strong fetal claim to protection rises or falls with the appeal to the fetus's potentiality, for nothing else can justify it. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers of science have found a renewed interest in mechanisms. The motivation is the thought that the elucidation of a mechanism generates a causal explanation for the phenomenon under investigation. For example, a question such as, How do rats form spatial memories of their environments?, is answered by elucidating the regular causal mechanisms responsible for the individual development of spatial memory in rats. But consider a slightly different question: How do some rats come to have better spatial (...) memory than other rats? This is a question about the causes of variation responsible for variation in spatial memory. The first question demands an answer about regularity; the second question demands an answer about variation. The account of causal-mechanical explanation on offer by philosophers of science captures regularity, but it neglects variation. In this essay, I attempt to modify the mechanical program so as to incorporate both regularity and variation. The task is to explicate the relationship between the regular causal mechanisms responsible for individual development and the causes of variation responsible for variation in populations. As it turns out, this is precisely the relationship that has divided the biometric research tradition and the developmental research tradition in the long-standing debates over genotype-environment interaction, or G×E. Ultimately, the product will be an account of causal-mechanical explanation that captures both regularity and variation, and which may be utilized to resolve an aspect of the debates over G×E. (shrink)

An overview of the Lancelot Thomas Hogben Papers at the University of Birmingham.

In China fand seit dem 17. Jahrhundert abseits des konfuzianischen Mainstreams eine verstarkte Hinwendung zur konkreten Wirklichkeit und eine Dekonstruktion der dominierenden konfuzianischen Denksysteme auf verschiedene Weise Ausdruck. Das Denken des Qing-zeitlichen Konfuzianers Yan Yuan ist exemplarisch fur diesen geistigen Neuorientierungsprozess.Im Mittelpunkt seiner Philosophie steht ein Modell individueller und gesamtgesellschaftlicher Kultivierung, das sich durch Korperzentriertheit und Praxisorientiertheit auszeichnet und gegen die Leibfeindlichkeit und metaphysische Abgehobenheit Song- und Ming-zeitlichen Philosophierens gerichtet ist. Der Autor bezieht in dieser Studie Yan Yuans anthropologische, kosmologische, (...) handlungstheoretische und kulturphilosophische Positionen systematisch aufeinander, ordnet sie geistesgeschichtlich ein und berucksichtigt dabei die Geschichte ihrer Rezeption. Die sehr unterschiedlichen Reaktionen auf Yan Yuans Werk - schwankend zwischen vehementer Ablehnung und uberschwenglicher Begeisterung - spiegeln verschiedene Perspektiven der Auseinandersetzung Chinas mit der eigenen geistigen Tradition in den letzten drei Jahrhunderten wider. Lieferbar unter www.e-cademic.de. (shrink)

Frege claims that the laws of logic are characterized by their “generality,” but it is hard to see how this could identify a special feature of those laws. I argue that we must understand this talk of generality in normative terms, but that what Frege says provides a normative demarcation of the logical laws only once we connect it with his thinking about truth and science. He means to be identifying the laws of logic as those that appear in every (...) one of the scientific systems whose construction is the ultimate aim of science, and in which all truths have a place. Though an account of logic in terms of scientific systems might seem hopelessly antiquated, I argue that it is not: a basically Fregean account of the nature of logic still looks quite promising. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga has proposed a fascinating epistemology, one which he considers to be completely naturalized. Critical to his epistemology is the notion of a 'design plan' which circumscribes the function of organs or systems. Ernest Sosa has objected to Plantinga by using Donald Davidson's Swampman thought experiment, according to which a bolt of lightning randomly assembles a physical duplicate of a person, including one's neurological structure. The Swampman would have no design plan and as such would constitute a counterexample to (...) Plantinga's epistemology. Plantinga responded to Sosa that the Swampman may not be metaphysically possible so he is not disturbed by it conflicting with his epistemology and, at any rate, we would still ascribe functions (and thus design plants) the Swampman's organs and systems. In this essay I will argue that 1) a stronger case can be made demonstrating that the Swampman is not metaphysically possible and 2) at any rate the Swampman is not possible in an epistemological sense; that is, it could not know anything. (shrink)

The conclusion of this paper will be that e-sports are not sports. I begin by offering a stipulation and a definition. I stipulate that what I have in mind, when thinking about the concept of sport, is ‘Olympic’ sport. And I define an Olympic Sport as an institutionalised, rule-governed contest of human physical skill. The justification for the stipulation lies partly in that it is uncontroversial. Whatever else people might think of as sport, no-one denies that Olympic Sport is sport. (...) This seeks to ensure that those who might wish to dispute my conclusion might stay with the argument at least for as long as possible. Secondly, the justification for the stipulation lies partly in its normativity—I have chosen an Olympic conception of sport just because it seems to me to offer some kind of desirable version of what sport is and might become. Thirdly, I give examples which show how prominent promoters of e-sports agree with my stipulation, as evidenced by their strenuous attempts to comply with it i... (shrink)

This paper presents a counterfactual account of what a mechanism is. Mechanisms consist of parts, the behavior of which conforms to generalizations that are invariant under interventions, and which are modular in the sense that it is possible in principle to change the behavior of one part independently of the others. Each of these features can be captured by the truth of certain counterfactuals.

Donald Davidson finds folk-psychological explanations anomalous due to the open-ended and constitutive conception of rationality which they employ, and yet monist because they invoke an ontology of only physical events. An eliminative materialist who thinks that the beliefs and desires of folk-psychology are mere pre-scientific fictions cannot accept these claims, but he could accept anomalous monism construed as an analysis, merely, of the ideological and ontological presumptions of folk-psychology. Of course, eliminative materialism is itself only a guess, a marker for (...) material explanations we do not have, but it is made plausible by, inter alia, whatever difficulties we have in interpreting intentional folk-explanations realistically. And surely anomalous monism does require further explanation if it is to be accepted realistically and not dismissed as an analysis of a folk-idiom which is to be construed instrumentally at best. Some further explanation is needed of how beliefs, desires, etc. can form rational patterns which have ‘no echo in physical theory’ and yet those beliefs, desires etc. be physical events. To this end I propose to graft on to anomalous monism a modest version of functionalism. (shrink)