Tag: Biology
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The Uses of Philosophy
By Daniel A. Kaufman ___ [1] We need to distinguish between philosophy and what people have called philosophy. Physics is not philosophy and neither is biology, yet once, they — and the rest of the natural sciences — went under the name “natural philosophy.” [2] I would identify philosophy with a set of tools and techniques,…
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Frege’s View of the World
by Mark English ____ Gottlob Frege was a mathematician with strong philosophical interests and preoccupations. In an attempt to discover and make explicit the logical foundations of mathematics he developed — almost singlehandedly — the basic ideas of the predicate calculus. But he also had deep and compelling views on language and an appreciation of…
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More Thoughts on Individualism and Cultural Embeddedness
by Mark English ___ This post was prompted by some private discussion of a recent episode of my podcast, Culture and Value. The episode in question, entitled “Individualism and Cultural Embeddedness“, was centered – in fact the podcast in general is centered – around what you could see as the paradox of individualism: we are…
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Analysis of Variance and Causation
by David L. Duffy Energy, matter and mind, after Szekely & Rizzo 2017 I have been reading some papers from the philosophy of biology on “causal selection”. That is, the identification of those entities or variables that are the most important explanation of the behaviour of some feature of a complex biological system, which might…