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37Peter Vickers: Understanding Inconsistent Science (review)Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 46 (2): 413-418. 2015.
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58Ethics in Darwin's melancholy visionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (1): 20-29. 2011.Darwinian natural selection draws on Malthus’ harsh vision of human society to explain how organisms come to be adapted to their environments. Natural selection produces the appearance of teleology, but requires only efficient causal processes: undirected, heritable variation combined with effects of the variations on survival and reproduction. This paper draws a sharp distinction between the resulting form of backwards-directed teleology and the future-directed teleology we ascribe to intention…Read more
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514. Bootstrapping Norms: From Cause to IntentionIn Susan Sherwin & Peter Schotch (eds.), Engaged Philosophy: Essays in Honour of David Braybrooke, University of Toronto Press. pp. 343-364. 2006.
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50Philosophy of ecology (edited book)North-Holland. 2011.The most pressing problems facing humanity today - over-population, energy shortages, climate change, soil erosion, species extinctions, the risk of epidemic disease, the threat of warfare that could destroy all the hard-won gains of civilization, and even the recent fibrillations of the stock market - are all ecological or have a large ecological component. in this volume philosophers turn their attention to understanding the science of ecology and its huge implications for the human project. T…Read more
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31Smoke and Mirrors: A Few Nice TricksDialogue 38 (1): 123-. 1999.Two aims are at work in James Brown's Smoke and Mirrors: to defend realism against some of its recent detractors, and to expound his own programmatic commitment to a Platonic form of realism. I am sympathetic to his first goal, and dubious about the second, so, as Brown himself predicts, I am enthusiastic about the critical part of the book but critical of his Platonic project. But I will begin this review with a hearty recommendation. Smoke and Mirrors is clear, articulate, perceptive, occasion…Read more
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60Logic and aggregationJournal of Philosophical Logic 28 (3): 265-288. 1999.Paraconsistent logic is an area of philosophical logic that has yet to find acceptance from a wider audience. The area remains, in a word, disreputable. In this essay, we try to reassure potential consumers that it is not necessary to become a radical in order to use paraconsistent logic. According to the radicals, the problem is the absurd classical account of contradiction: Classically inconsistent sets explode only because bourgeois classical semantics holds, in the face of overwhelming evide…Read more
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3David N. Stamos, The Species Problem: Biological species, ontology, and the metaphysics of biology Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 24 (5): 371-374. 2004.
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71Logic on the Track of Social ChangeClarendon Press. 1995.The book sets out a new logic of rules, developed to demonstrate how such a logic can contribute to the clarification of historical questions about social rules. The authors illustrate applications of this new logic in their extensive treatments of a variety of accounts of social changes, analysing in these examples the content of particular social rules and the course of changes in them.
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82Rational Inconsistency and ReasoningInformal Logic 14 (1). 1992.Nicholas Rescher has argued we must tolerate inconsistency because of our cognitive limitations. He has also produced, together with R. Brandom, a serious attempt at exploring the logic of inconsistency. Inconsistency tolerance calls for a systematic rewriting of our logical doctrines: it requires a paraconsistent logic. However, having given up all aggregation of premises, Rescher's proposal for a paraconsistenl logic fails to account for the reductive reasoning Rescher appeals to in his accoun…Read more
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9Ethics in Darwin’s melancholy visionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (1): 20-29. 2011.
Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
General Philosophy of Science |