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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.
This blog is designed evolved to host any random thoughts that happen to be passing through my forebrain at a given moment. So there will be errors...
I also have an Australia-focussed blog: The Drought Resistant Philosopher
The previous instantiation of this blog is accessible here.
Category: Logic and philosophy • Politics • Religion
This is to note that u n d e r v e r s e, the blog that uses nineteenth century German emphatic spacing, has been added to my blogroll (I hope - I'm not good that these customisation things), wherein you can read deep, intelligent and Chamberlainist musings by Chris Schoen. Highly recommended.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:17 PM • 1 Comments
Category: Logic and philosophy
Leiter reports that Benson Mates has died, and links to the UC Berkeley short obit:
The Department announces with great sadness the death, on May 13, 2009, of Prof. Emeritus Benson Mates. Born in 1919, Prof. Mates studied at the University of Oregon, completing the B.A. degree there in 1940 (in Philosophy and Mathematics). He began work at the graduate level in Philosophy at Cornell, but his studies were interrupted by a stint during the war in the US Navy. He entered the graduate program in philosophy at UC Berkeley in 1945, completing his Ph.D. degree in 1948 after working with (among others) Harold Cherniss and Alfred Tarski. His dissertation was a study of “The Logic of the Old Stoa”. Prof. Mates took up a position in the Philosophy Department at Berkeley in 1948, working as Assistant and then Associate Professor here from 1948–1958; he was promoted to full Professor in 1958, and held that title until his retirement in 1989.
Prof. Mates’s interests ranged widely over problems in logic, epistemology, and the history of philosophy. His influential books include Stoic Logic (1953); Elementary Logic (1965); and The Philosophy of Leibniz (1986). His own philosophical tendencies were sympathetic to strands in ancient skepticism, a theme that emerges clearly in his book Skeptical Essays (1981).
I am very familiar with the linked book - as an undergraduate we worked through it carefully, proving to ourselves the theorems given. I still have my copy, and look at it forlornly in remembrance of when I actually, for a very brief time, understood formal logic. It is a work of art.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:41 PM • 3 Comments
Category: Evolution • Species and systematics
Chris Nedin has another post of great interest (even if it is for a late period, the Pleistocene) which goes into my file of "the older naturalists were great observers", as he shows how modern chemistry supports Richard Owens' diagnosis of Thylacoleo as a carnivore, even though it is in a clade of herbivores.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:26 AM • 1 Comments
Category: Humor
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:24 AM • 1 Comments
May 14, 2009
Category: Religion
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:04 AM • 44 Comments
May 13, 2009
Category: Education • Politics • Religion • Social dominance
In keeping with the last post on humanities, I thought I'd ruminate with no effort or knowledge to back it up on what the term "secular" means.
If the fundamentalists are to be believed, it is a synonym of "humanist" and also "Satanist", "infidel" and "homosexual". But somewhat more seriously, I have seen it used in journals to mean those who are not religious, those who aim to the elimination of religion, and those who seek to exclude religion from the affairs of the political institutions. None of these are exactly right, as far as I can tell.
In Australia it seems to be a term used largely in the context of education, since given that we are a society that is largely secular (it's in the constitution: "116. The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth") the amount of state funding to religious schools is a debated topic. Some 70% of secondary and primary school federal funding is given to religious schools, although pre-tertiary education is a state responsibility.
Since the 1870s in various Australian states, state education has been supposed to be secular, and from that time on it largely meant "non-denominational". Only in the early part of the 20th century did it acquire the sense of "irreligious". The idea of secularism which Australia initially adopted, and which I suppose was also the sense in other western nations, was that no particular religion would be given priority in state activities, such as law, parliament, and so on. One of the major objectors to secularism at the time were Protestant ministers, who correctly saw that their dominance over Catholics was under threat.
But to call someone "secular" does not mean they are without religion at all, although it may be the case that a secularist has none, and fears dominance by religious interests in non-religious affairs. It means they do not want religions to be preferred in official matters of state. In other words, no governmental agency or instrument may favour one religion. This has also always been interpreted to mean that no governmental agency, etc., can impose religion upon the irreligious as well.
There are good terms for those who have no religious affiliations or convictions: "irreligious" will do nicely. For those who deny the existence or rationality of gods, "atheist" does fine. "secularist" means someone who opposes state religion of any kind.
I would very much like, therefore, politicians to stop currying favour with religious voting blocs (themselves quite legitimate in a democracy) by over-funding students of religious schools to the detriment of the "secular" schools. I suspect it is unconstitutional, but there's probably case law that allows it.* It is, at least, contrary to a society comprising many and no religions. Australia, since 1971, has allowed a "no religion" answer on the census, and since then it has grown to around 18%, but when you add in the "not stated/inadequately described" category, it is around 30% of the population. That is the largest slice of the demographic pie of all religions, even more than the Catholics. Some are Jedi, as well... That is over 3.5 million people.
So when politicians kowtow to religious parties and interests in Australia and impose on the rest of us the values of one religion or even one denomination, that is equivalent to Anglicans forcing Catholics to adopt women as priests by law. In fact, it's worse, because there are fewer Catholics (and far fewer Anglicans). That is what secularism prevents, and in a state ruled by law, notionally, it is a matter of parity for the largest minority that we get the same protections that any other religion does. And make no mistake, secularism, as I have argued before, protects other religions too.
What has brought this to my attention is that I am authoring a chapter of a book on Australian Atheism. Oddly, PZ Mackerel isn't one of the authors. I thought he had a contract with Beelzebul to be first author after Dawkins in all atheism books.
* Rather a famous one[PDF], I should have remembered.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:15 AM • 9 Comments
May 11, 2009
Category: Education • Logic and philosophy • Philosophy of Science
It is often the case that when non-academics, or even non-humanities academics, talk about my generic field, they refer to it as "arts", and mean by this the creative arts, like performing arts, crafts, and corporate accounting. So they justify the funding for the "arts" (or "the yartz", as a Barry Humpries character calls them) because we are supposed to entertain people and add to cultural life.
Those who know me know this is not what I do. I have been known to sing in the shower, but that is about it. So I was very pleased to see this piece in the Australian Higher Education section recently, by a former head of humanities at the Australian National University, Simon Haines. He discusses how to define the humanities, and comes up with a "quantity/quality" distinction. I am not so keen on that (because, as a humanities scholar, I reject the notion of quality, so I would cause a singularity and make the whole thing get sucked into a black hole of definitions).
What defines the humanities? Well, I think it is history, mainly. The humanities are those disciplines that studied the human aspect of the universe, before the social sciences had a fit of independence. So now they are what is left over after social science, linguistics, psychology, mathematics, and the sciences in general have gone their own way. Great! They're a trashcan categorial.
Only I think there are positive fields within the humanities that have something definite about them. Philosophy is about metaphysics, epistemology and ethics (what is, what humans know about what is, and what humans think should be done about it). History is about what humans did in the past. Literary studies are about what humans have written, and how that gets received in human society. There is something starting to be a theme here. The humanities are about aspects of humans; it doesn't matter that not everything about humans is included in the domain. Even religious studies is about what humans think of a particular aspect of human behaviour (ritual and numinal).
But what if, as I think, there is no real distinction to be had between the sciences of the natural and the sciences of the human? What if humans just are natural things themselves? This is, I think, reason to hope that the humanities will continue to generate new sciences. Philosophy of science is my field because I think it tells us about how we know the world; as Paul Griffiths says, that is where the epistemic action is. Epistemology not grounded in real knowledge gathering (done by introspection of the contents of Cambridge academics' minds) is otiose and misleading. Watching what happens when humans engage the world is far more interesting. One day that, too, will be a science; there are attempts to use the methods of social science in what is called "experimental philosophy" (or X-Phi, a term that makes me throw up in my mouth a little) that suggest this is already happening, as also in cognitive science.
The humanities are the breeding ground for new sciences. Yes, they contribute to the cultural discourse, but if sciences aren't doing that too, there's something very wrong. They should be funded the same way fundamental research in sciences is: because you simply can't tell what will pay off in the future. Sure, you might get Freud. But you might also get cognitive science.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:30 PM • 16 Comments
Category: Biodiversity • Evolution • Philosophy of Science • Species and systematics
Again, the press are talking about "the missing link". Let's get one thing clear. There is no missing link. Rather, there are an indefinite number of missing branches. To have a missing link, you need to visualise evolution as a chain. If there's a gap in the chain, then you have a missing link. But evolution, at least at the scale of animals and plants, is mostly a tree. And all we see are individual nodes of the tree, the extant species that form, in Darwin's metaphor, the leaves of the living tree, and the extinct species that form branching points deeper in the tree. But we do not have enough information to know the shape of the tree for all but the smallest twigs and larger branches. There may be, for all we know, millions of missing species. We might have a species that is an ancestor of some other species, and yet not know enough to say that they are indeed the ancestor in question.
This looks to be an exciting find, and possibly it will give us more information about the overall relationships of primates, but it is not the missing link, and it is one of potentially millions of missing nodes of the evolutionary tree.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:27 AM • 18 Comments
May 10, 2009
Category: History • Philosophy of Science • Species and systematics
Before this text in 1686, the term species just meant some sort or kind of organism. It was a Latin word in ordinary use without much meaning in natural history, but then arguments began whether or not there were one or more species for this or that group, and so it became important to know what was meant by the term in natural history. That is, a distinctly biological concept of species was needed, and John Ray gave it here:
The translation is this:
In order that an inventory of plants may be begun and a classification (divisio) of them correctly established, we must try to discover criteria of some sort for distinguishing what are called “species”. After long and considerable investigation, no surer criterion for determining species has occurred to me than the distinguishing features that perpetuate themselves in propagation from seed. Thus, no matter what variations occur in the individuals or the species, if they spring from the seed of one and the same plant, they are accidental variations and not such as to distinguish a species … Animals likewise that differ specifically preserve their distinct species permanently; one species never springs from the seed of another nor vice versa. [Historia plantarum generalis, in the volume published in 1686, Tome I, Libr. I, Chap. XX, page 40 (Quoted in Mayr 1982: 256)]
So now you know what was said and where. Note that this is not a "biological" species concept - there is nothing here about interfertility; it is a generative conception of species - things are one species if they generate the same forms reliably.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:53 PM • 7 Comments
Category: Education • Humor • Philosophy of Science
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:22 PM •
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