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114Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Readings (edited book)Routledge. 2001.This comprehensive anthology draws together writings by leading philosophers on the philosophy of science. Each section is prefaced by an introductory essay from the editors, guiding students gently into the topic. Accessible and wide-ranging, the text draws on both contemporary and twentieth century sources. The readings are designed to complement Alex Rosenberg's textbook, _Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction_, but can also serve as a stand-alone volume in any philosophy of scie…Read more
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7Does Homo Sapiens Need a Recipe for Survival? Do We Have One?Social Philosophy and Policy 40 (2): 503-523. 2023.It is argued that the natural and human vicissitudes of the Northern Hemisphere—or at least western European history between 1315 and 1648—provide a preview of the sort of consequences for humanity and its demography that will result from the serious if not catastrophic climate change that is now anticipated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Game theory suggests that at least some nation-state players in the strategic problem that climate change raises will not choose Nash…Read more
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45Philosophy of biologyIn Peter Clark & Katherine Hawley (eds.), Philosophy of science today, Oxford University Press. pp. 147--180. 2003.
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11ObjectivityIn Lee C. McIntyre & Alexander Rosenberg (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science, Routledge. pp. 281-291. 2016.
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7Social Science, Philosophy ofIn W. Newton-Smith (ed.), A companion to the philosophy of science, Blackwell. 2000.Do the social sciences employ the same methods as the natural sciences? If not, can they do so? And should they do so, given their aims? These central questions of the philosophy of social science presuppose an accurate identification of the methods of natural science. For much of the twentieth century this presupposition was supplied by the logical positivist philosophy of physical science. The adoption of methods from natural science by many social scientists raised another central question: w…Read more
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12Reductionism in BiologyIn Sahorta Sarkar & Anya Plutynski (eds.), Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, Blackwell. 2008.This chapter contains section titled: Reduction as Relation between Theories: Historical Considerations Antireductionism about Intertheoretical Relations Reductionism as a Thesis about Explanations in Biology Reductionism and Explanation in Evolutionary Biology References Further Reading.
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54Privacy as a Matter of Taste and RightSocial Philosophy and Policy 17 (2): 68. 2000.Privacy is something we all want. We seek privacy to prevent others from securing information about us that is immediately embarrassing, and so causes us pain but not material loss. We also value privacy for strategic reasons in order to prevent others from imposing material and perhaps psychic costs upon us. I use the expression “securing information” so that it covers everything from the immediate sensory data that a voyeur acquires to the financial data a rival may acquire about our businesse…Read more
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44On the very idea of ideal theory in political philosophySocial Philosophy and Policy 33 (1-2): 55-75. 2016.
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73Fitness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web 17 (8): 457-473. 2011.
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65More worry and less love?Metascience 17 (1): 1-26. 2008.Review symposium of Alexander Rosenberg’s Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology [2006]. Worry carries with it a connotation of false concern, as in ‘your mother is always worried about you’. And yet some worrying, including that of your mother, turns out to be justified. Alexander Rosenberg’s new book is an extended argument intended to assuage false concerns about reductionism and molecular biology while encouraging a loving embrace of the two.
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8Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human NaturePhilosophy of Science 53 (4): 607-608. 1986.
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Prospects for the elimination of tastes from economics and ethicsIn Ellen Frankel Paul, Jeffrey Paul & Fred Dycus Miller (eds.), Ethics and economics, [published By] B. Blackwell For the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University. 1985.
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66The Political Philosophy of Biological Endowments: Some ConsiderationsSocial Philosophy and Policy 5 (1): 1. 1987.Is a government required or permitted to redistribute the gains and losses that differences in biol ogical 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 so me people are apt to have strong intuitions and ready arguments. Egalitarians may say yes and argu e that as unearned, undeserved advantages and disadvantages, biological endowments are never fai r, and t…Read more
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109The Biological Justification of Ethics: A Best-Case ScenarioSocial Philosophy and Policy 8 (1): 86. 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’
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How physics fakes designIn R. Paul Thompson & Denis Walsh (eds.), Evolutionary biology: conceptual, ethical, and religious issues, Cambridge University Press. 2014.
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Philosophical challenges for scientism (and how to meet them?)In Jeroen de Ridder, Rik Peels & Rene van Woudenberg (eds.), Scientism: Prospects and Problems, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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21The philosophy of science: a contemporary introductionRoutledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 2000.Any serious student attempting to better understand the nature, methods, and justification of science will value Alex Rosenberg's and Lee McIntyre's updated and substantially revised Fourth Edition of Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction. Weaving lucid explanations with clear analyses, the volume is as a much-used, thematically-oriented introduction to the field.
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39The 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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58Follow the leader : local interactions with influence neighborhoods (review)Philosophy of Science 72 (1): 86-113. 2005.We introduce a dynamic model for evolutionary games played on a network where strategy changes are correlated according to degree of influence between players. Unlike the notion of stochastic stability, which assumes mutations are stochastically independent and identically distributed, our framework allows for the possibility that agents correlate their strategies with the strategies of those they trust, or those who have influence over them. We show that the dynamical properties of evolutionary…Read more
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97Scientism versus the theory of mindThink 19 (56): 59-73. 2020.Many philosophers call themselves ‘naturalists’ because they believe theism is incompatible with science. However, many also hold that science is compatible with many other theistic beliefs about morality, free will, the mind, and the meaning of life. Those naturalists who reject these other beliefs need a different label for their view. This article recommends the term ‘scientism’.
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38Genes, Mind and Culture by Charles Lumsden and E. O. Wilson (review)Journal of Philosophy 80 (5): 304-311. 1983.
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28Reduction and MechanismCambridge University Press. 2020.Reductionism is a widely endorsed methodology among biologists, a metaphysical theory advanced to vindicate the biologist's methodology, and an epistemic thesis those opposed to reductionism have been eager to refute. While the methodology has gone from strength to strength in its history of achievements, the metaphysical thesis grounding it remained controversial despite its significant changes over the last 75 years of the philosophy of science. Meanwhile, antireductionism about biology, and e…Read more
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25Theory Construction: From Verbal to Mathematical FormulationsPhilosophy of Science 39 (4): 572-573. 1972.
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8History as Applied Science: A Philosophical Study (review)Philosophy of Science 41 (4): 430-431. 1974.
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79How is eliminative materialism possible?In Radu J. Bogdan (ed.), Mind and Common Sense: Philosophical Essays on Common Sense Psychology, Cambridge University Press. 1991.
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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 |