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46The biological justification of ethics: A best-case scenario: Alexander RosenbergSocial Philosophy and Policy 8 (1): 86-101. 1990.Social and behavioral scientists — that is, students of human nature — nowadays hardly ever use the term ‘human nature’. This reticence reflects both a becoming modesty about the aims of their disciplines and a healthy skepticism about whether there is any one thing really worthy of the label ‘human nature’. For some feature of humankind to be identified as accounting for our ‘nature’, it would have to reflect some property both distinctive of our species and systematically influential enough to…Read more
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46Sociobiology and the Preemption of Social ScienceJohns Hopkins University Press. 2019.Although largely conceptual, the book is an unequivocal defense of this new theory in the explanation of human behavior.
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45Philosophy of biology: a contemporary introductionRoutledge. 2008.EM Music Education /EM is a collection of thematically organized essays that present an historical background of the picture of education first in Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, then Early-Modern Europe. The bulk of the book focuses on American education up to the present. This third edition includes readings by Orff, Kodály, Sinichi Suzuki, William Channing Woodbridge, Allan Britton, and Charles Leonhard. In addition, essays include timely topics on feminism, diversity, cognitive psych, test…Read more
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44Philosophy of biologyIn Peter Clark & Katherine Hawley (eds.), Philosophy of Science Today, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 147--180. 2003.
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44Theory Construction: From Verbal to Mathematical FormulationsPhilosophy of Science 39 (4): 572-573. 1972.
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424 Can naturalism save the humanities?In Matthew C. Haug (ed.), Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory?, Routledge. pp. 39. 2013.
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42Are generic predictions enough?Erkenntnis 30 (1-2). 1989.I have argued not that economics has no predictive content, but that it is limited, or at least has so far been limited to generic predictions. Now this is an important kind of prediction, and almost certainly a necessary preliminary to specific or quantitative predictions. But if the sketch of an important episode in the twentieth century history of the subject I have given is both correct and representative, then economics seems pretty well stuck at the level of generic prediction. And at leas…Read more
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41On the very idea of ideal theory in political philosophySocial Philosophy and Policy 33 (1-2): 55-75. 2016.
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41Will genomics do more for metaphysics than locke>In P. Achinstein (ed.), Scientific Evidence: Philosophical Theories & Applications, The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005.
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41Content and consciousness versus the International stanceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3): 375-376. 1983.
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40Weintraub's Aims: A Brief RejoinderEconomics and Philosophy 3 (1): 143-144. 1987.Weintraub is not really interested in whether economics is “science” or not. “Economists are not so unsophisticated as to think that calling economics a ‘science’ says anything about what economists do or should do”. But can it really be a matter of indifference to him whether the subject has the character of chemistry as opposed to literary criticism?
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40Protagoras Among the PhysicistsDialogue 22 (2): 311-317. 1983.Scientific realism at least in large measure reflects the conviction that physics limns the true nature of reality; that it is the right metaphysical picture of things. This conviction is in turn a product of the failure of positivism's attempt to expunge metaphysics from the corpus of philosophically respectable activities. Since natural science is objective knowledge of the worldpar excellencepost-positivists have embraced it as the ontology which their predecessors had failed to make unnecess…Read more
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40Is Epigenetic Inheritance a Counterexample to the Central Dogma?History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 28 (4). 2006.This paper argues that nothing that has been discovered in the increasingly complex delails of gene regulation has provided any grounds to retract or qualify Crick's version of the central dogma. In particular it defends the role of the genes as the sole bearers of information, and argues that the mechanism of epigenetic modification of the DNA is but another vindication of Crick's version of the central dogma. The paper shows that arguments of C.K. Waters for the distinctive causual role of the…Read more
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391. From developmental molecular biology to neurogenomics 2. More than you wanted to know about short term and long term implicit memory 3. How are explicit memories stored? 4. How the brain recalls memories 5. Each explicit memory is just a lot of implicit memories 6. Is ‘knowledge how’ computable? 7. Computationalism and neuroscience..
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39Perceptual presentations and biological function: A comment on MatthenJournal of Philosophy 86 (January): 38-44. 1989.
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39Concrete occurrences vs. explanatory facts: Mackie on the extensionality of causal statementsPhilosophical Studies 31 (2). 1977.
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39The Return of the Tabula Rasa (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2): 476-497. 2007.
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36Equality, Sufficiency, and Opportunity in the Just SocietySocial Philosophy and Policy 12 (2): 54-71. 1995.It seems to be almost a given of contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy that the just society is obligated to establish and ensure the equality of its members. Debate begins when we come to delineate the forms and limits of the equality society is obligated to underwrite. In this essay I offer the subversive suggestion that equality is not something the just society should aim for. Instead I offer another objective, one which is to be preferred both because it is more attainable and be…Read more
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36The Political Philosophy of Biological Endowments: Some ConsiderationsSocial Philosophy and Policy 5 (1): 1-31. 1987.Is a government required or permitted to redistribute the gains and losses that differences in biological endowments generate? In particular, does the fact that individuals possess different biological endowments lead to unfair advantages within a market economy? These are questions on which some people are apt to have strong intuitions and ready arguments. Egalitarians may say yes and argue that as unearned, undeserved advantages and disadvantages, biological endowments are never fair, and that…Read more
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35The human genome project: Research tactics and economic strategies*: Alexander RosenbergSocial Philosophy and Policy 13 (2): 1-17. 1996.In the Museum of Science and Technology in San Jose, California, there is a display dedicated to advances in biotechnology. Most prominent in the display is a double helix of telephone books stacked in two staggered spirals from the floor to the ceiling twenty-five feet above. The books are said to represent the current state of our knowledge of the eukaryotic genome: the primary sequences of DNA polynucleotides for the gene products which have been discovered so far in the twenty years since cl…Read more
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35The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics by Daniel M. Hausman (review)Journal of Philosophy 90 (10): 533-537. 1993.
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35Ignorance and disinformation in the philosophy of biology: A reply to STENT (review)Biology and Philosophy 1 (4): 461-471. 1986.
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33The Inevitability of a Generalized Darwinian Theory of Behavior, Society, and CultureAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 58 (1): 51-62. 2021.The paper argues that the evident features of all human affairs of interest to the social scientist demand Darwinian explanations. It must however be recognized that the range of regularities, models, theories that a successful Darwinian research program will inspire must be heterogeneous, operate at very different scales, identify a diversity of distinct and often unrepeated processes operating through multifarious instances of blind variation and environmental selection. There will be no canon…Read more
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Arizona State UniversityPhilosophy - School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious StudiesProfessor (Part-time)
Durham, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Social Science |