philosophy

May

29

2012

philosophy bites: Adina Roskies on Neuroscience and Free Will

Recent research in neuroscience following on from the pioneering work of Benjamin Libet seems to point to the disconcerting conclusion that free will is an illusion. Adina Roskies of Dartmouth College is not convinced that this conclusion follows. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast she explains to David Edmonds why the conclusion that free will is an illusion is far stronger than the evidence warrants.
Adina Roskies on Neuroscience and Free Will - podcast - http://t.co/06c9AfD7

philosophybites.com/...euroscience-and-free-will.html

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philosophy neuroscience freewill Roskies neuroethics

in list: Neuroethics

May

31

2012

[Human Nature as a Subject of Science - Mill selection

philosophy.lander.edu/...millscience-a.pdf

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human-nature philosophy

Philosophy o fMind and Human Nature - Pasnau

spot.colorado.edu/...pasnau.mindandnature.pdf

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human-nature philosophy mind

Philosophy and Science of Human Nature - Gendler | iTunes

itunes.apple.com/...id514400730

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philosophy science human-nature

Human Nature, Religious and Philosophical Aspects - eNotes.com

www.enotes.com/...eligious-philosophical-aspects

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philosophy science human-nature

Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature w/ Tamar Gendler - YouTube

www.youtube.com/playlist

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philosophy science human-nature

Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature - Gendler syllabus

oyc.yale.edu/...phil-181

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philosophy science human-nature

May

15

2012

Daniel Dennett on human consciousness and free will - The Philosopher's Zone - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Daniel Dennett on consciousness and free will. (Radio.) Via Leiter. http://t.co/aLAtH4xX #philosophy

www.abc.net.au/...3686776

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philosophy

Dec

19

2008

Morality and Evolutionary Biology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

plato.stanford.edu/...morality-biology

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morality evolution philosophy

a strong, emotionally-laden sense of basic fairness, resentment of cheaters, and a desire that they be punished
what reasons the person had for making it—for thinking it to be true
17 more annotation(s)...
- whether evolutionary biology might shed light on the content of morality in the normative sense.
- In thinking about how we ought to live, do we get any insight from evolutionary theory?
- based on deep misunderstandings of evolution
- the pinnacle of evolution in its “highest phase”
- progressively “more evolved” (in the sense of “superior”) forms manifesting a greater “totality of life”
- the harmonious and mutually supportive behavior
- moral facts are themselves natural facts of some sort
- it is hard to see how such evolutionary facts can possibly have normative authority or force for a rational agent
- scientific evidence supports consequentialist ethical theories over deontological ones
- rationalized rather than resulting from moral reasoning
- able to grasp genuine truths even though those truths play no role in the story of how our basic mental capacities evolved.
- we have simply learned how to exercise them in developed cultural contexts to discover truths that go far beyond any that were relevant to the evolution of those underlying capacities.
- evolved emotional dispositions or “domain specific modules” that provide us with inherited moral instincts that shape our beliefs
- natural selection shaped those dispositions simply according to which variations best contributed to the biological fitness of our hominin ancestors, rather than in ways that would be expected to track independent moral truths, even if they existed.
- what is the relation between the evolutionary shaping of moral judgments and the independent moral truths posited by realists?
- deny that the evolutionary influence on the content of our moral beliefs is as pervasive as she claims
- our capacity to grasp moral truths—like our capacity to grasp philosophical truths about metaphysical necessity, say—is simply a byproduct of our general capacities for critical reasoning, combined with the evolved capacity for forming and employing normative concepts in our thinking and decision-making.

Apr

9

2012

Wake Forest examines value of college education - Education - NewsObserver.com

www.newsobserver.com/...-forest-examines-value-of.html

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philosophy major

Apr

5

2012

Wealth or Waste? Rethinking - WSJ.com

online.wsj.com/...4072004577323754019227394.html

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philosophy major

Mar

27

2012

Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

chronicle.com/...130453

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haidt morality philosophy

Mar

26

2012

Jerry Coyne on free will | Talking Philosophy

blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=4445

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philosophy freewill

Mar

21

2012

Undergraduate Research Opportunities - Frostburg State University

www.frostburg.edu/...aduate-research-opportunities1

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philosophy

Feb

28

2011

Metaethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

"Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice."

plato.stanford.edu/...metaethics

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philosophy metaethics 110

step back from particular substantive debates
reflecting on the presuppositions and commitments of those engaging in moral thought, talk, and practice and so abstracting away from particular moral judgments.
6 more annotation(s)...
- one is also left with the difficulty of explaining why God's commands are authoritative.
- perfect knowledge of right and wrong
- moral perfection
- reasonable to wonder why his commands have any special authority
- conventionalist views such as Glaucon's
- The history of moral theory is a history of attempts to identify, articulate, and defend general moral principles that serve to explain when and why various types of action, institutions, or characters count as right or wrong, just or unjust, virtuous or vicious.

Dec

5

2011

Cultural Evolution (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

plato.stanford.edu/...evolution-cultural

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evolution culture philosophy

the significance of cultural inheritance
vertical transmission—the inheritance of parental traits by offspring
31 more annotation(s)...
- learn from peers, authority-figures and so forth. This is known as horizontal transmission
- Forms of horizontal transmission are required to explain this transition, because if cultural transmission was always vertical, then the trait of having greater numbers of offspring would be maintained in the population by natural selection, albeit selection acting via cultural inheritance.
- The problem, then, is how to tune a learning mechanism so that beneficial behaviours are copied, while non-beneficial behaviours are not.
- prestige bias
- conformist bias
- decouple the causes of variation from the causes of selection
- integrate the effects of cultural inheritance into more standard biological models of evolution.
- necessary to find some form of cultural replicator that explains cultural inheritance
- limitations of the gene/meme analogy
- there is no known mechanism that could explain how memes are copied
- An idea can be copied simply through observation and inference:
- Ideas can also be copied using linguistic communication
- imitation is usually too error-prone to underpin replication
- attractors’—culturally shared patterns of thought, which enable representations to spread through a population without literal copying
- most cultural items are ‘re-produced’ in the sense that they are produced again and again—with, of course, a causal link between all these productions—but are not reproduced in the sense of being copied from one another
- Cultural units do not form lineages:
- ideas are rarely copied from a single source in a way that allows us to trace clear lineages
- if token ideas can appear in an individual in virtue of that individual's exposure to several sources or just one, then this makes it unlikely that anything close to Mendel's laws will be discovered within cultural evolution.
- one might worry that memetics merely offers a cosmetic re-packaging of a familiar set of stories about cultural change
- build models that allow for error-prone learning, and that acknowledge that an individual's beliefs are often the result of exposure to many sources, rather than copying from just one source.
- even if cultural change does not require cultural replicators, at least adaptive cultural change does.
- ‘conformist bias’ can overcome the effects of error-prone learning to produce reliable inheritance at the population level
- Less faithful copying demands stronger selective forces if adaptive variation is not to be lost.
- seek to explain the changes in trait frequencies in a population over time.
- ‘population thinking’
- general conditions required for evolvability
- the consequences of these individual-level dispositions for population-level properties
- Boyd and Richerson's claim in favour of the importance of prestige bias is primarily an effort to show how natural selection might have favoured cultural learning
- evolvability in a lineage
- The environment needs to cooperate: if selective pressures change very quickly then there will be no sustained environmental demands of the sort that might build complex adaptations over time. Development also matters. If ontogeny is set up in such a way that changes to any one trait tend to be accompanied by changes to all other traits, then the chances are that cumulative adaptation will be particularly hard to come by.
- suppression of ‘outlaws’

Jan

21

2008

Species (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The nature of species is controversial in biology and philosophy. Biologists disagree on the definition of the term 'species.' Philosophers disagree over the ontological status of species. A proper understanding of species is important for a number of reasons. Species are the fundamental taxonomic units of biological classification. Environmental laws are framed in terms of species. Even our conception of human nature is affected by our understanding of species. In this entry, three philosophical issues concerning species are discussed. The first is the ontological status of species. The second is whether biologists should be species pluralists or species monists. The third is whether the theoretical term 'species' refers to a real category in nature.

plato.stanford.edu/...species

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evolution species philosophy

This entry discusses three philosophical issues concerning species. The first issue is their ontological status. Are species natural kinds, individuals, or sets? The second issue concerns species pluralism. Monists argue that biologists should attempt to find the correct definition of ‘species.’ Pluralists disagree. They argue that there is no single correct definition of ‘species’ but a plurality of equally correct definitions. The third issue concerns the reality of species. Does the term ‘species’ refer to a real category in nature? Or, as some philosophers and biologists argue, is the term ‘species’ a theoretically empty designation?
Species are also units of evolution
23 more annotation(s)...
- fundamental units of biological classification
- all and only the members of a kind have a common essence
- the essence of a kind is responsible for the traits typically associated with the members of that kind
- knowing a kind's essence helps us explain and predict those properties typically associated with a kind
- The universality of a biological trait in a species is fragile.
- species have vague boundaries and that such vagueness is incompatible with the existence of species specific essences
- Contemporary biology can explain variation within a species without positing a species' essence. So according to Sober, species essentialism has become theoretically superfluous.
- Individuals, unlike classes, consist of parts that are spatiotemporally restricted.
- A number of processes can cause a trait to become prominent in a species. Hull highlights selection. Selection causes a trait to become prominent in a species only if that trait is passed down from one generation to the next. If a trait is not heritable, the frequency of that trait will not increase cumulatively. Hereditary relations, genetic or otherwise, require the generations of a species to be causally connected. Reproduction requires the generations of a species to be causally and hence spatiotemporally connected. So, if species are to evolve in non trivial ways by natural selection, they must be spatiotemporally continuous entities. Given that species are units of evolution, species are individuals and not classes.
- When Hull asserts that species are units of evolution, he does not simply mean that the gene frequencies of a species change from one generation to the next. He has a more significant form of evolution in mind, namely a trait going from being rare to being prominent in a species.
- the relationship between an organism and its species is not a member/class relation but a part/whole relation
- From an evolutionary perspective, there is no biological essence to being a human. There is no essential feature that all and only humans must have to be part of Homo sapiens. Humans are not essentially rational beings or social animals or ethical agents.
- Proximate explanations cite the more immediate cause of a trait, for example, the genes or developmental pathways that cause the occurrence of a trait in an organism. Ultimate explanations cite the evolutionary cause of a trait in a species, for example, the selection forces that caused the evolution of thumbs in pandas and their ancestors.
- species are natural kinds on a proper conception of natural kinds. These authors adopt Boyd's Homeostatic Property Cluster (HPC) theory of natural kinds. HPC theory assumes that natural kinds are groups of entities that share stable similarities.
- An HPC kind consists of entities that share similarities induced by that kind's homeostatic mechanisms. According to Boyd, species are HPC kinds and thus natural kinds because "species are defined . . . by . . . shared properties and by the mechanisms (including both "external" mechanisms and genetic transmission) which sustain their homeostasis" (1999b, 81)
- In addition to Boyd's ‘homeostatic’ mechanisms we need to recognize ‘heterostatic’ mechanisms that maintain species variation
- The Biological Species Concept defines a species as a group of organisms that can successfully interbreed and produce fertile offspring. The Phylogenetic Species Concept (which itself has multiple versions) defines a species as a group of organisms bound by a unique ancestry. The Ecological Species Concept defines a species as a group of organisms that share a distinct ecological niche.
- Perhaps there is a process or a pattern that occurs in species but not in other types of taxa.
- process of interbreeding
- stabilizing selection
- genetic and developmental homeostasis.
- species are bound by different types of processes
- ontological structure,

Feb

15

2012

Cosmopolitanism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

plato.stanford.edu/...cosmopolitanism

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philosophy politics cosmopolitanism

all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, do (or at least can) belong to a single community, and that this community should be cultivated.
Socrates, too, it can be argued, was sensitive to this more cosmopolitan identification with human beings as such
8 more annotation(s)...
- these examinations are both genuinely political (Gorg 521d6-8) and extended to all
- Cynic Diogenes
- I am a citizen of the world
- the whole Cynic way of life is supposed to be cosmopolitan: by living in accordance with nature and rejecting what is conventional, the Cynic sets an example of high-minded virtue for all other human beings.
- the cosmos is put in perfect order by law, which is right reason
- the Stoics believe that goodness requires serving other human beings as best one can, that serving all human beings equally well is impossible, and that the best service one can give typically requires political engagement.
- a cosmopolitan considers moving away in order to serve, whereas a non-cosmopolitan does not.
- The maximally committed cosmopolitan looks around to determine whom he can best help and how, knowing full well that he cannot help all people in just the same way, and his decision to help some people far more than others is justified by cosmopolitan lights if it is the best he can do to help human beings as such.

Feb

17

2012

What Does It Mean To Be Human? A Historical Perspective 1800-2011 | Brain Pickings

www.brainpickings.org/...eans-to-be-human-joanna-bourke

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human philosophy 110

Feb

16

2012

A Romp Through Philosophy of Mind | University of Oxford Podcasts - Audio and Video Lectures

podcasts.ox.ac.uk/...romp-through-philosophy-mind

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philosophy mind podcasts lectures Talbot

Rudy Garns's Library tagged philosophy → View Popular, Search in Google

philosophy bites: Adina Roskies on Neuroscience and Free Will

[Human Nature as a Subject of Science - Mill selection

Philosophy o fMind and Human Nature - Pasnau

Philosophy and Science of Human Nature - Gendler | iTunes

Human Nature, Religious and Philosophical Aspects - eNotes.com

Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature w/ Tamar Gendler - YouTube

Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature - Gendler syllabus

Daniel Dennett on human consciousness and free will - The Philosopher's Zone - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Morality and Evolutionary Biology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Wake Forest examines value of college education - Education - NewsObserver.com

Wealth or Waste? Rethinking - WSJ.com

Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Jerry Coyne on free will | Talking Philosophy

Undergraduate Research Opportunities - Frostburg State University

Metaethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Cultural Evolution (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Species (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Cosmopolitanism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

What Does It Mean To Be Human? A Historical Perspective 1800-2011 | Brain Pickings

A Romp Through Philosophy of Mind | University of Oxford Podcasts - Audio and Video Lectures

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