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John Wilkins is an eternal student, who thinks philosophy of biology is at least as interesting as politics or sport and twice as important. He has a PhD from the University of Melbourne and worked at the University of Queensland, in Australia, before taking up a research fellowship at the University of Sydney. After a varied career, involving factories, gardening, civil service, publishing, graphics, public relations but not, unfortunately for the CV, driving a truck, John finally completed his thesis on species concepts in 2004, which he has worked into two books.

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Couple new philosophy entries in SEP

Category: Logic and philosophy
Posted on: September 10, 2007 5:42 PM, by John S. Wilkins

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an online, but highly regarded, source of review articles on philosophical topics, edited by Ed Zalta. Three new articles have popped up lately that have attracted my attention:

The first is on Metaphysics, by Peter van Inwagen. Metaphysics is a hard discipline to define, by van Inwagen does a good job of presenting it for first time philosophers.

The second is Causal Processes by my colleague Phil Dowe. Dowe is a leading light in the topic of causation, which itself is a topic of metaphysics, and he has proposed a "conserved quantity" account of casual process.

The third is on Aristotle's Categories, by Paul Studtmann. It is not easy to read Aristotle, because either technical terminology is used that derives from the late medieval and early modern logicians, or English words are used that sort of match the vernacular Greek terms Aristotle used (such as the "what it is to be", which gets translated as "essence" in the Latin tradition). But Studtmann does a fair job of making him comprehensible.

Aristotle's book The Categories ~~(also known as The Topics)~~ is an attempt to classify all concepts in terms of ten apparently disconnected basic concepts, sometimes called "summum genera" in Latin. It is the foundation of all subsequent logic, and latterly, semantics. I know it because it is what the supposed essentialist story of species (another Latin term translating a Greek word eidos) is based on. [Buy the book :-) ]