Excerpt from Rechtsphilosophie als Naturlehre des Rechts 9b nun Diefe csigentbun1li(R)ieit Deß %uebeß a18 ein %drgug ober alé ein gebler Deflelben 511 betraeb ten bleibt Der @ntfebeibung Deé seeferö üb111affen (c)aß Die fi81'fi'enfeb11ft Deß s)raturreebtß feit einem 3abr sebent i1n 3ui'tande einer Strii'iß fieb befindet, werden alle, Die Sieb mit D11felben befebäftigen, {eben Iangi't wifi'en. (c)ie auf Der %afiß Der fantifeben %bilofobbie aufgebauten (c)bi'ten1e Deffelbem;;baben Daß am 2111 {eben verloren; Der Dureb jene'ßbilofopbie Dem sratur reebte vorgegeiebnete. Rreiß iii Durcbfaufen. Febnt (...) Sieb von alien (R)eiten naeb 9?euen1. 91b11 notb ift 15 Feiner iibeorie gelungen, g11allgemeiner 91nerfen: nung 511 gelangen. Sie begeifebe 9?eebtépbiißfopbie wird nur von Den %inbängern ibrer (c)ebule geprie fen; in (c)tablö nii)bilbfbbbi1 deé.sreobtä naeb ge febiebtlieber' 21nfiebh ift Der Fritifebe $bei[ n1eifierbaft, Der Dogrnatifebe weniger befriebigend. (c)eir Dem @1 febein1n' Diefeé fiberfeä ii't ein gewifi'er (R)tilli'iand in Der %ea1beitung Diefer fibifienfebaft eingetreten; in. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Réédition d'une importante inscription publiée en 1965 par A. Orlandos : souscriptions d'une trentaine de notables locaux, Grecs et Romains, en vue de rafraîchir plusieurs édifices publics. Ces réparations, modestes si l'on considère les sommes recueillies, étaient peut-être liées à l'introduction du culte d'Auguste à Messène, à la fin du Ier siècle av. J.-C. ou au début de notre ère. A noter la présence des Romains, naturelle dans la région à cette époque, et l'usage du denier comme monnaie de compte. (...) Plusieurs des monuments mentionnés le sont aussi par Pausanias ou peuvent être identifiés sur le site de l'Asclépieion. L'embarras financier de la cité, à ce moment, doit probablement s'expliquer par un manque de fonds disponibles plutôt que par des problèmes économiques ou sociaux. 3) il amorce enfin une redistribution chronologique des inscriptions financières de la dernière décennie de l'Indépendance en fixant plusieurs jalons sûrs ou probables, notamment la date d'une stèle de 174 avant J.-G. dont les deux sections, ID 440 et ID 456, ont été rapprochées et raccordées matériellement. (shrink)

Nach einigen einleitenden Bemerkungen zur Bedeutung von Fachzeitschriften für die Entwicklung der Wissenschaften und einem Hinweis auf die wichtigsten Abschnitte des Lebenslaufes von August Leopold Crelle wird seine herausragende Rolle als Gründer und Herausgeber wissenschaftlicher Fachzeitschriften gewürdigt. Zunächst wird die dabei von Crelle besonders für das Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik geleistete Arbeit ausführlicher dargestellt, dem sich der Versuch einer Einschätzung der Bedeutung dieser Zeitschrift mit Hilfe quantitativer Kennziffern anschließt. Schließlich wird die Bedeutung des gleichfalls von (...) Crelle begründeten Journals für die Baukunst untersucht und herausgearbeitet, daß durch das Baujournal den deutschen Ingenieuren wichtige Informationen und Erfahrungen aus dem technisch fortgeschrittenerem Ausland übermittelt wurden. Abschließend werden fünf unveröffentlichte Dokumente im Wortlaut wiedergegeben, die mit der vorstehenden Thematik im Zusammenhang stehen.After some introductory remarks on the significance of scientific journals for the development of science and an indication of the most important aspects of the career of August Leopold Crelle , his projected role as the founder and editor of scientific journals is discussed. First of all, his achievements with the Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik are described in detail, together with an attempt to estimate the significance of this journal with the help of quantitative analyses. Then the significance of the Journal für die Baukunst , which Crelle similarly founded, is examined, and it is shown that important information and experience of technically more progressive foreign countries was transmitted to German engineers through the engineering journal. Finally, five unpublished documents are reproduced, which relate to the previous topics. (shrink)

(1980). Der Gegensatz zwischen Julius Plücker und Jakob Steiner im Lichte ihrer Beziehungen zu August Leopold Crelle. Annals of Science: Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 189-213.

A elaboração de um conceito em biblioteconomia encontrado no trabalho de um livreiro na primeira metade do século XIX na França deu ensejo, talvez, para que micronarrativas em torno do estabelecimento de uma disciplina e uma carreira se desenvolvessem. Carreira esta que, por assim dizer, vinha, desde os últimos quatro séculos, modificando seu conjunto de atividades. Em uma palavra, inúmeros personagens, dos mais célebres a alguns poucos lembrados, se tornaram, em maior ou menor grau, importantes operadores para a descrição de (...) um tipo especial de trabalho, que, historicamente, sempre se manifestou. Ou, queira se dizer, prosperou mais, pelo menos, nos locais em que a criação de universidades, o conhecimento da fabricação do papel e a liberdade de imprensa foram possíveis. Sendo assim, tal perspectiva histórica que aqui trabalhamos envolvendo a área da biblioteconomia, só nos foi possível construir tendo como ponto de partida a elaboração de um conceito em contexto. Desse modo, trabalhamos com a hipótese de que, até informação em contrário, o primeiro trabalho dessa natureza a utilizar a palavra no título foi o Bibliothéconomie: Instructions sur l'Arrangement, la Conservation et l'Administration des Bibliothèques do livreiro germano-francês Leopold Auguste Constantin Hesse publicado originalmente em 1839 na cidade de Paris e modificado em 1841. (shrink)

This year marks the 80 th anniversary of Clarence Darrow’s brilliant and passionate defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy teenagers who pled guilty to the kidnapping and murder of 14 year old Bobby Franks. On August 22, 1924 Darrow gave his famous twelve hour closing statement, bringing tears to the eyes of the presiding judge and saving his clients from the death penalty. Here are two excerpts from the summation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 17-35 [Access article in PDF] Late Antiquity and the Florentine Renaissance: Historiographical Parallels Christopher S. Celenza Aulus Gellius, at the end of the second century, shows us the type of writer who was destined to prevail, the compiler. In his Noctes Atticae he compiles without method or even without any definite end in view.... After him there is only barrenness. The (...) third century is a literary Sahara.... Thoughtless admiration for mathematics keeps up or reintroduces the mentality of magic.... In the fourth century ad Iamblichus had his brain almost turned by the science of numbers. 1 --Ferdinand Lot The rapid progress of humanism after the year 1400 paralyzed native impulses. Henceforth men looked only to antiquity for the solution of every problem, and consequently allowed literature to sink into mere quotation. 2 --Jacob Burckhardt Various aspects of late antiquity in western Europe and the Florentine Renaissance bear certain similarities which, if properly examined and contextualized, can lead to a deeper understanding of both periods--of their social as well as intellectual significance, of the manner in which politics relates to culture, and [End Page 17] of the relationship between urban life in a specific sort of milieu to the mechanisms of religious and philosophical dynamism. 3 The parallels are not always exact, but various underlying patterns are present. Here the main line of argument will be that a number of aspects of late ancient thought and of Renaissance thought (especially Renaissance Latin literature of all genres) went ignored by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars, thanks to certain underlying assumptions concerning what was appropriate to investigate. These assumptions were themselves related to the combination of two major factors: romantic essentializing ideas about the nature of language, inherited from the Enlightenment, and the development in the nineteenth century of nationalist, evolutionary historiographies. The results of these developments persisted into the twentieth century and can be seen to an extent even today. Nationalist Historiographies and the Problem of Language "Gentlemen, nations are thoughts of God." So Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) used to begin his history courses in Berlin, as Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) later remembered. 4 While Ranke himself was concerned primarily with documentary history and the evolution of the modern state, he was also part of a larger trend in the German speaking world which sought to identify, in the study of the past, the spirit, or Geist, of a given era or people, a project which had been theorized by Hegel. Ranke and others, like Johann Gustav Droysen and August Böckh, taking their point of departure from Barthold Niebuhr and, more immediately, from Wilhelm von Humboldt, saw themselves as self-consciously transcending Hegel, basing their ideas on documentary sources as opposed to a priori theorizing. 5 But certain assumptions were similar, none more so than presuppositions relating to the Volksgeist. It is not that Ranke was relentlessly teleological; [End Page 18] history was made in the process of the unfolding of events. His primary mission was the documenting and understanding of modernity, a task which, despite their later divergences in practice, Burckhardt shared. 6 The goal was, following Niebuhr's approach in classical studies, to present history in an appealing way and in a manner useful to modernity. 7 This was bound up with a larger set of movements, encompassing the search for national identity and a tendency toward locating essential characteristics of a "people." 8 One of these characteristics was language, and a central preoccupation of scholars became the manner in which culture expressed itself through language, even as philology was becoming "the first historical discipline, the model for all other historical sciences" and the general view of scholarly fields as separate, specialized entities was growing. 9In their concern with language as a vehicle for cultural transmission and as a defining characteristic of a people, nineteenth-century scholars were the heirs of the Enlightenment. Ideas of a plurality of cultures had flourished; as it was put in the Encyclopédie, language expressed the "genius of a people." If... (shrink)

Die stratigraphischen Einheiten, durch welche heute die Erdgeschichte untergliedert wird, haben eine unterschiedliche und zum Teil recht komplexe Entstehungsgeschichte, wie hier am Beispiel des Keupers gezeigt werden soll. Das Wort ‘Keuper’ geht auf einen volkstümlichen Namen für bunte Tongesteine im Raum Coburg zurück. In den geologischen Sprachgebrauch wird es 1822 durch Leopold von Buch eingeführt, der es noch als Gesteinsnamen verwendet und die entsprechenden Schichten dem Buntsandstein zuweist. Die richtige Einstufung dieser Schichten über dem Muschelkalk gelang erstmals Ludwig Hausmann (...) und Peter Merian um 1820. Doch erst nachdem in den nachfolgenden Jahren deren Ergebnisse durch die Arbeit etlicher anderer Forscher bestätigt wurden, fand die neue, bis dahin unbenannte Formation aus bunten Mergeln und Sandsteinen breite Anerkennung. Als stratigraphischer Begriff, der auch Sandsteine und Gips umfaßt, wird die Bezeichnung Keuper erstmals von Friedrich Hoffmann im Jahre 1823 verwendet und von Christian Keferstein 1824 in die Literatur eingeführt. Eine wichtige Rolle spielten die Arbeit an den ersten geologischen Übersichtskarten Deutschlands und die Aufnahme der neuen Formation in die erste internationale Formationstabelle durch Keferstein . Mit der Integration des Keupers in die neue Formation ‘Trias’ durch Friedrich August von Alberti 1834 bekommt diese Einheit ihren seither festen Platz in der Stratigraphie.Geologic time is commonly subdivided by a set of stratigraphic terms, which all have their individual and sometimes complex histories. ‘Keuper’, now used as a stratigraphical term for the Upper Triassic, originated from a popular rock name of the Coburg area in southern Germany. The term ‘Keuper’, though still as a rock name, was first introduced into geological usage by Leopold von Buch in 1822, when he designated varicoloured marls and claystones, of what he thought to be Bunter Sandstein, as ‘Keuper’. In a stratigraphical sense, the term ‘Keuper-Formation’ was coined by Friedrich Hoffmann in 1823, who was the first to include sandstones and gypsum rocks with this notion. A year later it was introduced into the literature by Christian Keferstein. At this time, the existence of a distinct formation between Muschelkalk and Lias was already accepted by a number of geologists, though it had not yet been named. This ‘new’ formation has formerly been confused with Buntsandstein and even Carboniferous deposits by various authors until it was set into its right position by Ludwig Hausmann and Peter Merian in 1820. In the following years, the work of several geologists confirmed their results and led to general acceptance of the Keuper Formation as a separate entity. An important impetus came from the compilation of the first small-scale geological maps of Germany edited by Keferstein in the early 1820s, and from his international stratigraphical table , which already included the ‘Keuper-Formation’ as an integral part. In 1834, Friedrich August von Alberti included the ‘Keuper’ as part of the new Formation ‘Trias’ and thus defined its place in modern stratigraphy. (shrink)

As COVID-19 spread, clinicians warned of mental illness epidemics within the coronavirus pandemic. Funding for digital mental health is surging and researchers are calling for widespread adoption to address the mental health sequalae of COVID-19. -/- We consider whether these technologies improve mental health outcomes and whether they exacerbate existing health inequalities laid bare by the pandemic. We argue the evidence for efficacy is weak and the likelihood of increasing inequalities is high. -/- First, we review recent trends in digital (...) mental health. Next, we turn to the clinical literature to show that many technologies proposed as a response to COVID-19 are unlikely to improve outcomes. Then, we argue that even evidence-based technologies run the risk of increasing health disparities. We conclude by suggesting that policymakers should not allocate limited resources to the development of many digital mental health tools and should focus instead on evidence-based solutions to address mental health inequalities. (shrink)

This paper introduces a body of research on Organizational Behavior and Industrial/organizational Psychology that expands the range of empirical evidence relevant to the ongoing character-situation debate. This body of research, mostly neglected by moral philosophers, provides important insights to move the debate forward. First, the OB/io scholarship provides empirical evidence to show that social environments like organizations have significant power to shape the character traits of their members. This scholarship also describes some of the mechanisms through which this process of (...) reshaping character takes place. Second, the character-situation debate has narrowly focused on situational influences that affect behavior episodically and haphazardly. The OB/io research, however, highlights the importance of distinguishing such situational influences from influences that, like organizational influences, shape our character traits because they are continuous and coordinated. Third, the OB/io literature suggests that most individuals display character traits that, while local to the organization, can be consistent across situations. This puts pressure on the accounts of character proposed by traditional virtue ethics and situationism and provides empirical support to interactionist models based on cognitive-affective processing system theories of personality. Finally, the OB/io literature raises important challenges to the possibility of achieving virtue, provides valuable and untapped resources to cultivate character, and suggests new avenues of normative and empirical research. (shrink)

Over the years, companies have adopted hiring algorithms because they promise wider job candidate pools, lower recruitment costs and less human bias. Despite these promises, they also bring perils. Using them can inflict unintentional harms on individual human rights. These include the five human rights to work, equality and nondiscrimination, privacy, free expression and free association. Despite the human rights harms of hiring algorithms, the AI ethics literature has predominantly focused on abstract ethical principles. This is problematic for two reasons. (...) First, AI principles have been criticized for being vague and not actionable. Second, the use of vague ethical principles to discuss algorithmic risks does not provide any accountability. This lack of accountability creates an algorithmic accountability gap. Closing this gap is crucial because, without accountability, the use of hiring algorithms can lead to discrimination and unequal access to employment opportunities. This paper makes two contributions to the AI ethics literature. First, it frames the ethical risks of hiring algorithms using international human rights law as a universal standard for determining algorithmic accountability. Second, it evaluates four types of algorithmic impact assessments in terms of how effectively they address the five human rights of job applicants implicated in hiring algorithms. It determines which of the assessments can help companies audit their hiring algorithms and close the algorithmic accountability gap. (shrink)

This paper argues that the question, ‘where are virtues?’ demands a response from virtue theorists. Despite the polarizing nature of debates about the relevance of empirical work in psychology for virtue theory, I first show that there is widespread agreement about the underlying structure of virtue. Namely, that virtues are comprised of cognitive and affective processes. Next, I show that there are well-developed arguments that cognitive processes can extend beyond the agent. Then, I show that there are similarly well-developed arguments (...) that affective processes can extend beyond the agent. I then introduce three cases to establish that these cognitive and affective processes are relevantly similar to the cognitive and affective processes countenanced by plausible theories of virtue. Finally, I conclude that virtue theorists must abandon default internalism, the view that the cognitive and affective processes comprising virtues are internal to the agent. (shrink)

Dominant views about the nature of health and disease in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine have presumed the existence of a fixed, stable, individual organism as the bearer of health and disease states, and as such, the appropriate target of medical therapy and ethical concern. However, recent developments in microbial biology, neuroscience, the philosophy of cognitive science, and social and personality psychology (Ickes...

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, proponents of digital psychiatry were touting the promise of various digital tools and techniques to revolutionize mental healthcare. As social distancing and its knock-on effects have strained existing mental health infrastructures, calls have grown louder for implementing various digital mental health solutions at scale. Decisions made today will shape the future of mental healthcare for the foreseeable future. We argue that bioethicists are uniquely positioned to cut through the hype surrounding digital mental health, which can (...) obscure crucial ethical and epistemic gaps that ought to be considered by policymakers before committing to a digital psychiatric future. Here, we describe four such gaps: The evidence gap, the inequality gap, the prediction-intervention gap, and the safety gap. (shrink)

This paper aims to expand the range of empirical work relevant to the extended cognition debates. First, I trace the historical development of the person-situation debate in social and personality psychology and the extended cognition debate in the philosophy of mind. Next, I highlight some instructive similarities between the two and consider possible objections to my comparison. I then argue that the resolution of the person-situation debate in terms of interactionism lends support for an analogously interactionist conception of extended cognition. (...) I argue that this interactionism might necessitate a shift away from the dominant agent-artifact paradigm toward an agent–agent paradigm. If this is right, then social and personality psychology—the discipline(s) that developed from the person-situation debate—opens a whole new range of empirical considerations for extended cognition theorists which align with Clark & Chalmers original vision of agents themselves as spread into the world. (shrink)

Cohen (2023) takes a fair and measured approach to the question of what ChatGPT means for bioethics. The hype cycles around AI often obscure the fact that ethicists have developed robust frameworks...

Leopold first discusses the conservation of natural resources in the southwestern United States in economic tenns, stressing, in particular, erosion and aridity. He then concludes his analysis with a discussion of the moral issues involved, developing his general position within the context of P. D. Ouspenky’s early philosophy of organism.

Case reports about patients undergoing Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for various motor and psychiatric disorders - including Parkinson’s Disease, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Treatment Resistant Depression - have sparked a vast literature in neuroethics. Questions about whether and how DBS changes the self have been at the fore. The present chapter brings these neuroethical debates into conversation with recent research in moral psychology. We begin in Section 1 by reviewing the recent clinical literature on DBS. In Section 2, we consider (...) whether DBS poses a threat to personal identity. In Section 3 we argue for engagement with recent empirical work examining judgements of when identity changes. We conclude in Section 4 by highlighting a range of ethical issues raised by DBS, including various cross-cultural considerations. (shrink)

Peer commentary on: Blumenthal-Barby, J. S. (2016). Biases and heuristics in decision making and their impact on autonomy. The American Journal of Bioethics, 16(5), 5-15.

This article identifies and examines a tension in mental health researchers’ growing enthusiasm for the use of computational tools powered by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). Although there is increasing recognition of the value of participatory methods in science generally and in mental health research specifically, many AI/ML approaches, fueled by an ever-growing number of sensors collecting multimodal data, risk further distancing participants from research processes and rendering them as mere vectors or collections of data points. The (...) imperatives of the “participatory turn” in mental health research may be at odds with the (often unquestioned) assumptions and data collection methods of AI/ML approaches. This article aims to show why this is a problem and how it might be addressed. (shrink)

Peer commentary on: Goering, S., Klein, E., Dougherty, D. D., & Widge, A. S. (2017). Staying in the loop: Relational agency and identity in next-generation DBS for psychiatry. AJOB Neuroscience, 8(2), 59-70.

Peer commentary on Char, Abràmoff & Feudtner (2020) target article: "Identifying Ethical Considerations for Machine Learning Healthcare Applications" .

Truth is no longer based on reason What we feel is now the truest reality Yet despite our obsession with the emotive and the experiential we still face anxiety despair and purposelessness Tracing trends in twentieth century thought Francis ...

Gathers the pre-Sand Country Almanac writings of Aldo Leopold, showing that he was not born an ecologist, but evolved over time through experimentation and thought.

In 1916 John Dewey expressed a worry that American philosophy would be relegated to “chewing a historic cud long since reduced to a woody fibre, or an apologetics for lost causes (lost to natural science).”1 In this paper, I will attempt to contribute to a growing body of literature within the classical American philosophical tradition that seeks to avoid this fate by engaging Dewey’s thought with debates in contemporary philosophy of mind.2 To date, the vast majority of this work has (...) centered around Dewey’s notion of embodiment and its relation to the thesis of the embodied mind. In this paper I will evaluate the degree to which the embodied mind thesis (henceforth “EMT”) provides the proper framework for .. (shrink)

This paper argues that the activist, feminist and pragmatist Jane Addams was an experimental philosopher. To defend this claim, I argue for capacious notions of both philosophical pragmatism and experimental philosophy. I begin in Section 2 with a new defence of Rose and Danks’ [‘In Defense of a Broad Conception of Experimental Philosophy’. Metaphilosophy 44, no. 4 : 512–32] argument in favour of a broad conception of experimental philosophy. Koopman [‘Pragmatist Resources for Experimental Philosophy: Inquiry in Place of Intuition’. Journal (...) of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 1 : 1–24] argues that many twentieth-century American pragmatists can make important contributions to contemporary experimental philosophy. In Section 3, I argue that while this may be true, it is also true that under the broad conception, many of the pragmatists just were experimental philosophers. In Section 4, I argue that as a pragmatist philosopher in her own right, Jane... (shrink)

The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA provided opportunities for women to conduct research in the late 19th and early 20th century at a time when many barriers existed to their pursuit of a scientific career. One woman who benefited from the welcoming environment at the MBL was Mary Jane Hogue. Her remarkable career as an experimental biologist spanned over 55 years. Hogue was born into a Quaker family in 1883 and received her undergraduate degree from Goucher College. She (...) went to Germany to obtain an advanced degree, and her research at the University of Würzburg with Theodor Boveri resulted in her Ph.D.. Although her research interests included experimental embryology, and the use of tissue culture to study a variety of cell types, she is considered foremost a protozoologist. Her extraordinary demonstration of chromidia in the life history of a new species of Flabellula associated with diseased oyster beds is as important as it is ignored. We discuss Hogue’s career path and her science to highlight the importance of an informal network of teachers, research advisors, and other women scientists at the MBL all of whom contributed to her success as a woman scientist. (shrink)

Debates about obesity in bioethics tend to unfold in predictable epicycles between individual choices and behaviours and the oppressive socio-economic structures constraining them. Here, we argue that recent work from two cutting-edge research programmes in microbiology and social psychology can advance this conceptual stalemate in the literature. We begin in section 1 by discussing two promising lines of obesity research involving the human microbiome and relationship partners. Then, in section 2, we show how this research has made viable novel strategies (...) for fighting obesity, including microbial therapies and dyad-level interventions. Finally, in section 3, we consider objections to our account and conclude by arguing that attention to the most immediate features of our biological and social environment offers a middle ground solution, while also raising important new issues for bioethicists. (shrink)

Excerpt from Fragmenta Philosophorum Græcorum Valckemrius Diatrib. In Eur. Fragm. P. 282; Wyltenbaehius Epist. Ad Heusd. Opuse. II p. 38, alii. Mms. Cue. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, (...) such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Commentary about the role of AI in bioethics for the 10th anniversary issue of AJOB: Empirical Bioethics.

Abstract: While pragmatism and the so-called 4E program may form a united front against methodological individualism, classical cognitivism, traditional internalism, and the like, the 4E approach is not without its own internal tensions. One such tension, between Embodied and Extended, is brought to light by Clark (2008), who argues in favor of the latter. Dempsey and Shani (2013) reply that Clark’s functionalism undercuts what should be a more fundamental commitment to Embodied. With respect to this tension, Gallagher (2014) claims that (...) “there may be resources in pragmatism that can help to adjudicate some of the current debate and to develop a more integrated perspective” (Gallagher 2014, 110). In this paper, I assess Gallagher’s strategy and offer a critical perspective on the use of Deweyan pragmatism to resolve these tensions in the 4E program. (shrink)

Bas van Fraassen’s Darwinian explanation for the success of science has sparked four decades of discussion, with scientific realists and antirealists alike using biologically inspired reasoning to support their points of view. Based on critical engagement with van Fraassen’s proposal itself and later contributions by Stathis Psillos and K. Brad Wray, we claim that central arguments on both sides of this controversy suffer from an insufficient understanding of Darwinism and its underlying biological concepts. Adding the necessary biological background turns out (...) to subvert the argumentative force of viewing the success of scientific theories as analogous to the behaviour of biotic entities. In conclusion, we sketch more productive ways of viewing the relationship between biology and scientific realism. (shrink)