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5Michael Polanyi: The Art of KnowingIntercollegiate Studies Institute. 2006.The polymath Michael Polanyi first made his mark as a physical chemist, but his interests gradually shifted to economics, politics, and philosophy, in which field he would ultimately propose a revolutionary theory of knowledge that grew out of his firsthand experience with both the scientific method and political totalitarianism. In this sixth entry in ISI Books’ Library of Modern Thinkers’ series, Mark T. Mitchell reveals how Polanyi came to recognize that the roots of the modern political and …Read more
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5Perspectives on Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems: Proceedings Volume in the Santa Fe Institute Studies (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2004.This book is a collection of essays exploring adaptive systems from many perspectives, ranging from computational applications to models of adaptation in living and social systems. The essays on computation discuss history, theory, applications, and possible threats of adaptive and evolving computations systems. The modeling chapters cover topics such as evolution in microbial populations, the evolution of cooperation, and how ideas about evolution relate to economics. The title Perspectives on …Read more
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6Perspectives on Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems: Proceedings Volume in the Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2004.This book is a collection of essays exploring adaptive systems from many perspectives, ranging from computational applications to models of adaptation in living and social systems. The essays on computation discuss history, theory, applications, and possible threats of adaptive and evolving computations systems. The modeling chapters cover topics such as evolution in microbial populations, the evolution of cooperation, and how ideas about evolution relate to economics. The title Perspectives on …Read more
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20Complexity: a guided tourOxford University Press. 2009.What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of individual neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? What is it that guides self-organizing structures like the immune system, the World Wide Web, the global economy, and the human genome? These are just a few of the fascinating and elusive questions that the science of complexity seeks to answer. In this remarkably accessible and companionable bo…Read more
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6Personal participation: Michael Polanyi, Eric Voegelin, and the indispensability of faithJournal of Religious Ethics 33 (1): 65-89. 2005.In this paper I focus on the central role faith plays in the thought of Polanyi and Voegelin. I begin by indicating how both find the modern conception of scientific knowing seriously wanting. What Polanyi terms "objectivism" and Voegelin calls "scientism" is the modern tendency to reduce knowledge to only that which can be scientifically demonstrated. This errant view of knowledge does not occur in a vacuum, though, and both men draw a connection between this and the political pathologies of th…Read more
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5Polanyi and the Role of Tradition in Scientific InquiryBulletin of Science, Technology and Society 31 (3): 206-211. 2011.A characteristic of the modern mind is a disdain for tradition. Polanyi argues that neglecting the role of tradition leads to philosophical incoherence as well as moral and political chaos. Polanyi’s postcritical philosophy represents an attempt to show how tradition plays a vital role in the process of discovery. Ultimately, a coherent account of the sciences, as well as the humanities, is only possible when tradition is acknowledged as indispensable.
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3Life and Evolution in ComputersHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 23 (3/4). 2001.This paper argues for the possibility of 'artificial life' and computational evolution, first by discussing (via a highly simplified version) John von Neumann's self-reproducing automaton and then by presenting some recent work focusing on computational evolution, in which 'cellular automata', a form of parallel and decentralized computing system, are evolved via 'genetic algorithms'. It is argued that such in silico experiments can help to make sense of the question of whether we can eventually…Read more
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5Human olfactory discrimination of genetic variation within Cannabis strainsFrontiers in Psychology 13. 2022.Cannabis sativa L. is grown and marketed under a large number of named strains. Strains are often associated with phenotypic traits of interest to consumers, such as aroma and cannabinoid content. Yet genetic inconsistencies have been noted within named strains. We asked whether genetically inconsistent samples of a commercial strain also display inconsistent aroma profiles. We genotyped 32 samples using variable microsatellite regions to determine a consensus strain genotype and identify geneti…Read more
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7Joseph Leo Koerner. Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016. 448 pp (review)Critical Inquiry 44 (3): 603-609. 2018.
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14A Brief Symposium on Mark Mitchell’s Michael PolanyiTradition and Discovery 34 (2): 30-38. 2007.Paul Lewis and Walter Gulick summarize and evaluate Mark Micthell’s new book, Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing, and Mitchell responds to their comments in this symposium article.
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2Michael Polanyi and Michael Oakeshott: Common Ground, Uncommon FoundationsTradition and Discovery 28 (2): 23-34. 2001.This paper examines the work of Michael Oakeshott in relation to that of Polanyi. While there are important similarities that Oakeshott himself recognized, their fundamentally different conceptions of reality—Polanyi ‘s realism and Oakeshott’s idealism—ultimately serve to highlight important distinctions between these two thinkers.
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Natural Law: The Tacit DimensionDissertation, Georgetown University. 2001.At its core, natural law theory claims that certain moral truths exist and are known, in varying degrees, by all rational persons. While I agree with this general statement, it is my contention that we must re-examine the manner in which the precepts of natural law are known. It is frequently assumed that any theory of natural law must presuppose the possibility of tradition-independent rationality whereby each rational person can directly access universal moral truths; the ability of each perso…Read more
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1Can evolution explain how the mind works? A review of the evolutionary psychology debatesComplexity 4 (3): 17-24. 1999.
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2This paper studies the properties and performance of models for estimating local probability distributions which are used as components of larger probabilistic systems — history-based generative parsing models. We report experimental results showing that memory-based learning outperforms many commonly used methods for this task (Witten-Bell, Jelinek-Mercer with fixed weights, decision trees, and log-linear models). However, we can connect these results with the commonly used general class of dele…Read more
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6Memory for emotionally provocative words in alexithymia: A role for stimulus relevanceConsciousness and Cognition 19 (4): 1062-1068. 2010.Alexithymia is associated with emotion processing deficits, particularly for negative emotional information. However, also common are a high prevalence of somatic symptoms and the perception of somatic sensations as distressing. Although little research has yet been conducted on memory in alexithymia, we hypothesized a paradoxical effect of alexithymia on memory. Specifically, recall of negative emotional words was expected to be reduced in alexithymia, while memory for illness words was expecte…Read more
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11Modulation of long-term memory by arousal in alexithymia: The role of interpretationConsciousness and Cognition 18 (3): 786-793. 2009.Moderate physiological or emotional arousal induced after learning modulates memory consolidation, helping to distinguish important memories from trivial ones. Yet, the contribution of subjective awareness or interpretation of arousal to this effect is uncertain. Alexithymia, which is an inability to describe or identify one’s emotional and arousal states even though physiological responses to arousal are intact, provides a tool to evaluate the role of arousal interpretation. Participants scorin…Read more
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4Theories of structure versus theories of changeBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (5): 645-646. 1998.The dynamics/computation debate recalls a similar debate in the evolutionary biology community concerning the relative primacy of theories of structure versus theories of change. A full account of cognition will require a rapprochement between such theories and will include both computational and dynamical notions. The key to making computation relevant to cognition is not making it analog, but rather understanding how functional information-processing structures can emerge in complex dynamical …Read more
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |