Wednesday May 23, 2012
ephilosopher.com is an online community dedicated to philosophical thinking. Login or become a member!
Facebook.com
Twitter.comNews Feeds:
Philosophy Links
| Philosophy Links | Search | Add Entry |
|
Mechanistic explanation and the nature-nuture controversy (pdf), Bechtel, W. and Abrahamsen, A. Website Both in biology and psychology there has been a tendency on the part of many investigators to focus solely on the mature organism and ignore development. There are many reasons for this, but an important one is that the explanatory framework often invoked in the life sciences for understanding a given phenomenon, according to which explanation consists in identifying the mechanism that produces that phenomenon, both makes it possible to side-step the development issue and to provide inadequate resources for actually explaining development. When biologists and psychologists do take up the question of development, they find themselves confronted with two polarizing positions of nativism and empiricism. However, the mechanistic framework, insofar as it emphasizes organization and recognizes the potential for self-organization, does in fact provide the resources for an account of development which avoids the nativism-empiricism dichotomy. |
Website collating articles of philosophy and culture inspired by the regions of Asia |
|
Laws of Nature and Natural Properties, Alexander Bird (PDF) Website This book is about the metaphysics of laws of nature and of natural properties. These are clearly connected, since laws concern the properties of things. The law of gravity tells us how the force on an object depends on its mass and the mass of other objects as well as their separations; Kirchhoff’s laws tell us how the current, e.m.f. and impedance in electrical circuits are related, where those quantities are properties of the circuit or its parts; the laws of thermodynamics relate the thermal properties, such as heat, entropy, and temperature of substances and systems. Two influential views concerning laws agree with that laws concern properties but regard the connection as loose. They both regard the laws of nature as metaphysically contingent—the laws could have been otherwise. So the masses and separations of objects need not have been related to the forces on them in the way that the law of gravitation says; indeed they need not have been related by any law at all. A third view concerning laws says that the connection is rather tighter. The properties of things can only relate in laws as they actually relate— it is metaphysically necessary that they do so. It is part of the very nature or essence of those properties that they relate as they do. It is this third view that I promote and defend in this book. |
Unexpected A Posteriori Necessary Laws of Nature (PDF), Alexander Bird Website Australasian Journal of Philosophy (December 2005) In this paper I argue that it is not a priori that all the laws of nature are contingent. I assume that the fundamental laws are contingent and show that some non-trivial, a posteriori, non-basic laws may nonetheless be necessary in the sense of having no counterinstances in any possible world. I consider a law LS (such as 'salt dissolves in water') that concerns a substance S. Kripke's arguments concerning constitution show that the existence of S requires that a certain deeper level law or variants thereof hold. At the same time, that law and its variants may each entail the truth of LS. Thus the existence of S entails LS. Consequently there is no world in which S exists and fails to obey LS. I consider the conditions concerning the fundamental laws that would make this phenomenon ubiquitous. I conclude with some consequences for metaphysics. |
|
An Internationalist Conception of Human Rights, David Reidy (PDF) Website In this article I set out an internationalist conception of human rights meant to serve as an attractive alternative to the reigning cosmopolitan orthodoxy. It is an alternative I find latent in John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples, though in this article I set it out and assess its merits largely free of any attempt at Rawlsian exegesis. I have undertaken that task elsewhere (in an essay forthcoming in a volume to be published by Blackwell). On the internationalist conception, human rights emerge as part of a liberal democratic people's solution to the first practical problem of international relations: given that liberal democratic people’s claim for themselves a right to self-determination and non-intervention, which, if any, other bodies politic must they, if they’re to be reasonable, recognize as possessed of the same right? To answer this question liberal democratic peoples must determine the moral basis of their own claims to self-determination and non-intervention. I argue that liberal democratic peoples rest their claim to self-determination and non-intervention on the fact that their political-legal systems satisfy a range of conditions which when taken together underwrite prime facie but bona fide moral obligations to obey the law on the part of all citizens, i.e., political obligations. These conditions, as it happens, specify roughly a political-legal system that is a constitutional republic (though not necessarily liberal and democratic). Liberal democratic peoples, then, if they’re to be reasonable, must recognize a right to self-determination and non-intervention for all constitutional republics or bodies politic satisfying the relevant conditions. Within the domain of international relations, then, these conditions function for liberal democratic peoples as, they give the content to, human rights as international norms universally enforceable prior to and apart from any voluntary undertakings (treaty and so forth). This is a conception of human rights other nonliberal, nondemocratic but otherwise decent peoples or states could reasonably and freely accept. |
Some Counterexamples to Causal Decision Theory (PDF), Andy Egan Website Many philosophers (myself included) have been converted to causal decision theory by something like the following line of argument: Evidential decision theory endorses irrational courses of action in a range of examples, and endorses “an irrational policy of managing the news”.2 These are fatal problems for evidential decision theory. Causal decision theory delivers the right results in the troublesome examples, and does not endorse this kind of irrational news-managing. So we should give up evidential decision theory, and be causal decision theorists instead. |
|
Property Rights and Genetic Engineering (PDF), Kristin Shrader-Frechette Website Eighty percent of (commercial) genetically engineered seeds (GES) are designed only to resist herbicides. Letting farmers use more chemicals, they cut labor costs. But developing nations say genetically engineered seeds cause food shortages, unemployment, resistant weeds, and extinction of native cultivars when “volunteers” drift nearby. While GES patents are reasonable, this paper argues many patent policies are not. The paper surveys GE technology, outlines John Locke’s classic account of property rights, and argues that current patent policies must be revised to take account of Lockean ethical constraints. After answering a key objection, it provides concrete suggestions for implementing its ethical conclusions. |
Epistemic Modals, Relativism, and Assertion (Doc), Andy Egan Website I think that there are good reasons to adopt a relativist semantics for epistemic modal claims such as “the treasure might be under the palm tree”, according to which such utterances determine a truth value relative to something finer-grained than just a world (or a |
|
How Hume and Mach Helped Einstein Find Special Relativity (pdf), John Norton Website Prepared for M. Dickson and M. Domski, eds., Synthesis and the Growth of Knowledge: Essays at the Intersection of History, Philosophy, Science, and Mathematics. Open Court. |
Event Concepts (PDF), Achille Varzi and Roberto Casati Website draft of a paper to appear in T. F. Shipley and J. Zacks (eds.), Understanding Events: How Humans See, Represent, and Act on Events, New York: Oxford University Press. |
| Powered by Sigsiu.NET |  |