Philosophy
jstemwedel | November 4, 2006Guest Blogger: Prof. Steve Steve
My adventures with John Wilkins at the PSA meeting in Vancouver continue. Last evening, Wilkins brought me to a reception where I had the pleasure of mingling with a great many philosophers who have made philosophical studies of various aspects of evolutionary biology. Strangely, these minglings were punctuated with camera flashes. Here I am trying to have a word with Robert Brandon as the paparazzi close in on us.
Here I am trying to catch up with Roberta Millstein (who blogged at the much-missed Philosophy of Biology) about her recent move to UC Davis…
jstemwedel | November 3, 2006Guest Blogger: Prof. Steve Steve
My esteemed Panda's Thumb colleague John Wilkins invited me to attend the PSA meeting in Vancouver. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so I agreed.
Last evening started pleasantly enough. I met Wilkins, John Lynch, Ben Cohen and David Ng, and Janet Stemwedel (from whose blog I am writing to you now) for refreshments. Yes, there was a bit of confusion when it turned out that the hotel didn't have an ice machine on every floor. As well, there was the puzzle of how properly to utilize the fresh limes for beverages in the absence of a knife. (The…
mixingmemory | November 2, 2006What is psychology? If you were asked to define it, could you? In the 12 years that I've been studying psychology, I've been asked no more than 5 times what psychology is, and each time, I struggled and ultimately failed to come up with a definition. To be honest, though, that doesn't bother me in the least. If there's one thing psychology has taught me, it's that definitions aren't worth a whole hell of a lot anyway. And given how few times the issue has come up, despite the fact that I've been surrounded by psychologists for the entirety of my adult life, I never really thought it bothered…
mixingmemory | November 1, 2006I had a birthday recently, and my parents went shopping in an antique and rare book store, and got me the two volumes of Brand Blanshard's The Nature of Thought. I immediately read through the first book on perception, and was seriously impressed, perhaps because I've always been a closet fan of F.H. Bradley and the British Hegelians, and it's quite clear that Blanshard was as well. However, I don't really know anything about Blanshard outside of these two volumes, or really anything that was going on in American philosophy at the time outside of pragmatism and positivism, neither of which…
mixingmemory | October 27, 2006There's a really interesting post by Alberto over at Alpha Psy titled "Methodological Materialism" that I thought I'd point you to, in case you hadn't read it already. Here's an excerpt:
As I see things, there is no deeper epistemological concern in recognizing that methods from natural sciences are increasingly being applied to social sciences than in recognizing that (say) it is snowing more than we had forecasted.
The mistake that both Descombes and Sperber make in celebrating a false major philosophical event is their implicit commitment to the doctrine of "methodological essentialism":…
hrynyshyn | October 22, 2006For a guest post to the meta-blog Daily Canuck, I whipped off a few words on the chasm between what's considered politically feasible when it comes to a national climate change strategy for Canada and what climatology suggests will be necessary. Along the way, I got sidetracked by the bigger question of what to do when the "moderate," "reasonable" or, to use a Taoist phrase, the "middle way" is no longer up to the task of addressing a serious threat.
It seems pretty darn obvious that by now, we have allowed ourselves to get in just such a situation. Here's the fundamental problem:
1. Even…
clock | October 14, 2006John bemoans the state of science journalism, with some added history of the Atlantis hypothesis.
mixingmemory | October 4, 2006Over at the Experimental Philosophy blog, Joshua Knobe has a post about a series of experiments that he has run with Jesse Prinz on people's intuitions about consciousness, and he includes a link to a draft of the paper they're writing on the experiments. The experiments were motivated by two hypotheses. The first says that people have a concept of "phenomenal consciousness," even if they don't know it. As a result of this concept, people will be willing to attribute phenomenal states to certain kinds of agents (you know, like people or animals), but not to others (like group agents, like…
jstemwedel | October 2, 2006I started out thinking I was writing this as an open letter to my students, but it turns out I'm talking to you all, too.
* * * * *
I have very strong feelings about what the point of a college education should be. Maybe you do, too. It's entirely possible that we would disagree about this issue, or that you are so happy with your own picture of the point of a college education that you really have no interests in anyone else's.
That's fine. But if you're my student, certain things I get worked up about may strike you as mysterious if you don't know what I think this whole thing is aiming…
mixingmemory | September 13, 2006No, seriously. The paper in which Carrie Jenkins presents a conceptual analysis of flirting is here (via Online Papers in Philosophy). An except:
What is it to flirt? Do you have to intend to flirt with someone in order to count as doing so? Can such things as dressing a certain way count as flirting? Can one flirt with an AI character? With one's own long-term partner? With an idea?
The question of whether or not an act of flirtation has taken place is often highly significant in our practical decision-making. For example, one may want to know whether or not one's partner has been flirting…
clock | September 12, 2006Fundamental Questions in Biology. Here is a quote from the end:
The questions that biologists from diverse subdisciplines are asking have commonalities that make clear the continued existence of fundamental challenges that unify biology and that should form the core of much research in the decades to come. Some of these questions are as follows: What features convey robustness to systems? How different should we expect the robustness of different systems to be, depending on whether selection is operating primarily on the whole system or on its parts? How does robustness trade off against…
jstemwedel | August 15, 2006Chatting with the chair of the philosophy department at one of the local community colleges:
CC Dept. Chair: Yeah, so I'm scheduled to teach six classes this term.
Me: Six?! While you're the chair?!!
CC Dept. Chair: Yeah, six. We have big enrollments, the full-time faculty are fully scheduled, and I can't find enough part-timers to teach all the sections.
Me: Good grief! So you have to teach them yourself?
CC Dept. Chair: The enrollments are what will get us permission to hire another full-timer, so I can't not teach them.
Me: Yikes!
CC Dept. Chair: Also, I need to counteract the…
clock | August 11, 2006Not just in the USA. Visceral queeziness coupled with religious sentiment coupled with scientific ignorance appears in other parts of the world as well, as in the UK
The Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, a professional group based in Edinburgh, has published a report on the ethical implications of the practice in the journal Human Reproduction and Genetic Ethics. The report is online at www.schb.org.uk.
The article lists some examples of research:
Later research has spawned human-animal creations, the report said. These usually die at the embryonic stage, but often survive if the…
hrynyshyn | July 31, 2006On the one hand, it's kind of sad that early 21st-century society is in need of frequent reminders of just how important reason is. Israelis and Lebanese are slaughtering each other. Iraq is in the midst of what can best be described as a civil war. American politics is dominated by those who believe a flag-burning prohibition is among the most urgent issues facing the country. On the other, it's good to know that some of our media gatekeepers recognize the need for those reminders. Required reading this week for children of the Enlightenment is an essay on the significance of Baruch Spinoza…
clock | July 22, 2006This is by far the most popular of the four installments in this series because it contains the nifty puzzle exercise. Click on the spider-web-clock icon to see the comments on the original post.
Just like last week, I have scheduled this post to appear at the time when I am actually teaching this very lab again. If there are any notable difference, I'll let you know in the afternoon.
When teaching the lecture portion of the course, I naturally have to prepare the lectures in advance, and each lecture has to cover a particular topic. This makes biology somewhat fragmentary and I try to use…
mixingmemory | July 21, 2006From what I know of Graham Priest, he's an interesting philosopher. I read his book on intentionality, Towards Non-Being a few months ago, and enjoyed it, and I read his Introduction to Non-Classical Logic a few years ago, and have recommended it. So when I saw that he had written a paper titled "What is Philosophy?" in a recent issue of the journal Philosophy (sorry, it's not online anywhere, and Philosophy is woefuly slow in updating its website), I thought I'd check it out.
It was popular in the 20th century to write books with this title, or some variant thereof (I particularly like this…
hrynyshyn | July 13, 2006Is every species of living thing on the planet equally deserving of protection?
I don't think you're going to find too much sympathy for such an extreme position. For one thing, you can't give rights to dinner. I can foresee a time when some of the higher primates, and perhaps some cetaceans, may be afforded some of the respect for life and liberty now enjoyed exclusively by humans, but even that's a ways off.
There is a related issue, however, that is worthy of debate: is every species worthy of preservation? Much more fodder there,
hrynyshyn | July 11, 2006This might be premature, but it's beginning to look like the debate between believers and scientists is getting some traction in the public sphere again. And that would be a good thing, if for no other reason that it gives us a chance to improve the quality of the discourse. The latest offerings, however, offer little more than "can't we all just get along?"
First, Time magazine delivers in its July 9 edition a profile of Francis Collins on the occasion of his new book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Genome impressio Collins is a former self-described "…
hrynyshyn | July 5, 2006I'm sure Robert Samuelson isn't the only pundit who doesn't buy Al Gore's argument that climate change is a moral issue. The Newsweek editor and Washington Post columnist weighs in on "An Inconvient Truth" today by rejecting Gore's characterization of the problem.
The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.
Which got me to thinking: if climate change doesn't involve morality, then what does a public policy debate have to…