Describes how the author became an on-call substitute teacher in pursuit of the realities of American public education, describing his complex difficulties with helping educate today's students in spite of flawed curriculums and interpersonal challenges.

The Perils of Invention is based on three Hannah Arendt Center Conferences: "Human Being in an Inhuman Age," "Lying and Politics," and "Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age without Facts." Contributions written for these conferences are placed alongside many new essays that reflect on the ideas they raised. The result is a freshly invigorated investigation into these critical and timely themes. The authors have diverse backgrounds--Arendt scholars, public intellectuals, novelists, journalists, and business people--and include Uday Mehta, Marrianne Constable, Nicholson (...) class='Hi'>Baker, George Kateb, Marianne Constable, Linda M.G. Zerilli, Peg Birmingham, Davide Panagia, and many others. (shrink)

This collection of essays explores the metaphysical thesis that the living world is not made up of substantial particles or things, as has often been assumed, but is rather constituted by processes. The biological domain is organised as an interdependent hierarchy of processes, which are stabilised and actively maintained at different timescales. Even entities that intuitively appear to be paradigms of things, such as organisms, are actually better understood as processes. Unlike previous attempts to articulate processual views of biology, which (...) have tended to use Alfred North Whitehead’s panpsychist metaphysics as a foundation, this book takes a naturalistic approach to metaphysics. It submits that the main motivations for replacing an ontology of substances with one of processes are to be found in the empirical findings of science. Biology provides compelling reasons for thinking that the living realm is fundamentally dynamic, and that the existence of things is always conditional on the existence of processes. The phenomenon of life cries out for theories that prioritise processes over things, and it suggests that the central explanandum of biology is not change but rather stability, or more precisely, stability attained through constant change. This edited volume brings together philosophers of science and metaphysicians interested in exploring the consequences of a processual philosophy of biology. The contributors draw on an extremely wide range of biological case studies, and employ a process perspective to cast new light on a number of traditional philosophical problems, such as identity, persistence, and individuality. (shrink)

Philosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and as (...) a result philosophy of biology languished in a state of futility for much of the twentieth century. The situation, we are told, only began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a new generation of researchers began to focus on problems internal to biology, leading to the consolidation of the discipline. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted narrative of the history of philosophy of biology. We do so by arguing that the most important tradition within early twentieth-century philosophy of biology was neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but the organicist movement that flourished between the First and Second World Wars. We show that the organicist corpus is thematically and methodologically continuous with the contemporary literature in order to discredit the view that early work in the philosophy of biology was unproductive, and we emphasize the desirability of integrating the historical and contemporary conversations into a single, unified discourse. (shrink)

We investigated people's ability to infer others’ mental states from their emotional reactions, manipulating whether agents wanted, expected, and caused an outcome. Participants recovered agents’ desires throughout. When the agent observed, but did not cause the outcome, participants’ ability to recover the agent's beliefs depended on the evidence they got. When the agent caused the event, participants’ judgments also depended on the probability of the action ; when actions were improbable given the mental states, people failed to recover the agent's (...) beliefs even when they saw her react to both the anticipated and actual outcomes. A Bayesian model captured human performance throughout, consistent with the proposal that people rationally integrate information about others’ actions and emotional reactions to infer their unobservable mental states. (shrink)

This article critically examines one of the most prevalent metaphors in modern biology, namely the machine conception of the organism (MCO). Although the fundamental differences between organisms and machines make the MCO an inadequate metaphor for conceptualizing living systems, many biologists and philosophers continue to draw upon the MCO or tacitly accept it as the standard model of the organism. This paper analyses the specific difficulties that arise when the MCO is invoked in the study of development and evolution. In (...) developmental biology the MCO underlies a logically incoherent model of ontogeny, the genetic program, which serves to legitimate three problematic theses about development: genetic animism, neo-preformationism, and developmental computability. In evolutionary biology the MCO is responsible for grounding unwarranted theoretical appeals to the concept of design as well as to the interpretation of natural selection as an engineer, which promote a distorted understanding of the process and products of evolutionary change. Overall, it is argued that, despite its heuristic value, the MCO today is impeding rather than enabling further progress in our comprehension of living systems. (shrink)

When I started the book, I thought that if there are beliefs, then they are brain states. I still believe that. I express three caveats about the book.

In considering the patient's right to a certain quality of dying, this essay outlines how the legal and ethical justifications for passive euthanasia depend on the doctrine of acts and omissions. It is suggested that this doctrine is untenable and that alternative justifications are needed. The development of the modern mechanistic approach to death is traced, showing that a possible basis for an humane way of death lies in a reacceptance of a metaphysical concept of life.

: Aristotle struggles with two basic tensions in his understanding of reality or substance that have parallels in Indian metaphysical speculation. The first of these tensions, between the understanding of reality as the underlying substrate (to hupokeimenon) and as the individual "this" (tode ti), finds a parallel in the concept of dravya in Patañjali's Mahābhāsa. The second tension, between the understanding of reality as the individual this and as the intelligible essence of the individual this (to ti ēn einai), corresponds (...) to an ambiguity in the concept of vastu in Kumārila's Ślokavārttika. (shrink)

The subject of biomaterials science concerns artificial materials used in medical devices to repair or reconstruct natural human tissue damaged by disease or trauma. It embraces the emerging field of tissue engineering, where artificial materials are used as scaffolds to provide the architecture for replacement organs. As such, the field raises numerous ethical issues, which are reviewed in this paper. These include the use of animal models, the testing materials and devices in patients, and what may be viewed as potential (...) abuses, where augmentation and repair are carried out for cosmetic as opposed to clinical reasons. The paper gives detailed consideration of the recent problems of metal-on-metal hip replacements as an exemplar of some of the key ethical issues that arise in this field. (shrink)

In this article I would like to reflect on Buddhist soteriology in light of debates in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the nature of folk psychology. My point of departure is the argument of Paul and Patricia Churchland that our commonsense understanding of mind and behavior can, and indeed should, be transformed on the basis of scientific knowledge of the brain and its functioning. Like many theorists in the 1980s and 1990s, the Churchlands regarded folk psychology—our natural and (...) spontaneous interpretation of human behavior in terms of mental states, preeminently beliefs and desires—as a theory akin to those folk theories used to explain natural phenomena in default of the modern scientific theories... (shrink)

Graphical AbstractFunding agencies (and journals) seem to be discriminating against ideas that are contrary to the mainstream, leading to leading to the preferential funding of predictable and safe research over radically new ideas. To remedy this problem a restructuring of the scientific funding system is needed, e.g. by utilizing laymen - together with scientists - to evaluate grant proposals.

This article reviews some of the merging ethical issues in restorative dentistry. This is a branch of healthcare concerned with quality of life, since retention of functioning teeth is important in allowing a healthy diet to be consumed. Yet the supply of dentists is such that, in many of the world’s poorest countries, extraction is the only viable option for treating tooth decay. Available repair materials present various ethical problems. Silver amalgam is being phased out in much of the world, (...) because of environmental concerns with mercury, yet it is cheap and reliable. Alternatives have been developed, influenced by the West’s preoccupation with appearance, yet these materials are difficult to place and are less durable than amalgam. These concerns lead to significant ethical problems, which are explored in this article. It concludes by proposing a way to deal with the emerging ethical problems. (shrink)

Polybios’ famous description of Philip V of Macedon as “the darling of the Greeks” (ἐρώμενος … τῶν Ἑλλήνων) comes about at a critical moment in the historian’s narrative of the king’s life: it appears at the end of a summary extolling all of the good characteristics and deeds Philip exhibited and achieved in his early years, when he had inspired great hopes of future magnanimity amongst his Greek allies (4.27.9, 77; 7.11); and just before the king takes a sudden turn (...) for the worse in 215 BC, when he incites revolution in the allied city of Messene and attempts to impose a Macedonian garrison on its citadel. This article sets out to break new ground not only in the study of the Macedonian king, but also in the study of the literary aspects of Polybios’ work, by exploring this statement in more depth and arguing that it retained its significance beyond the structural demarcation of Philip’s change. The imagery that such a title inherently possessed and conveyed helped to define and deepen understanding of the relationship between Philip and his Greek allies in his early years by evoking implicit connotations within the audience. (shrink)

Much has been written about the self, yet its evolution and functioning are matters of controversy in evolutionary psychology. The article argues that it is an evolved capacity, essential for co-evolutionary processes, including cultural development, to occur. A model of self-regulation is offered to explain its adaptive functioning, elaborating William James’ I-me distinction, and drawing upon contemporary analyses in social psychology and neuroscience. The model is used to illustrate how adaptive behavior is facilitated by the exercise of self-control, to defer (...) and re-order goals, revise perceptions of the world, modify conceptions of the self, and alter repertoires of learned action sequences, heuristics, and habits. It also identifies potential areas of dysfunction, mediated by self-deception and misperception. Through this lens one can see how leadership is a historically co-evolving function of social systems, changing to meet altered circumstances. The recursive relationship involves interaction between changing leader–follower relationships, within which leaders’ self-regulation is a central process. Individual differences in leaders as agents are thus also critical. The article concludes by considering the need for insight in order to steer these co-evolving functions in directions that help us as a species to master the global challenges and threats we face in our times. (shrink)