Rupert Read

“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Wittgenstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His complex body of work has been analysed by numerous scholars, from mathematicians and physicists, to philosophers, linguists, and beyond. This volume brings together some of his central perspectives as applied to the modern sciences and studies the influence they may have on the thought processes underlying science and on the world view it engenders. The contributions stem from leading scholars in philosophy, mathematics, physics, economics, psychology and human sciences; all of them have written in an accessible style that demands little specialist knowledge, whilst clearly portraying and discussing the deep issues at hand.

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.Crystallographic studies of ligands bound to biological macromolecules represent an important source of information concerning drug-target interactions, providing atomic level insights into the physical chemistry of complex formation between macromolecules and ligands. Of the more than 115,000 entries extant in the Protein Data Bank archive, ∼75% include at least one non-polymeric ligand. Ligand geometrical and stereochemical quality, the suitability of ligand models for in silico drug discovery and design, and the goodness-of-fit of ligand models to electron-density maps vary widely across the archive. We describe the proceedings and conclusions from the first Worldwide PDB/Cambridge Crystallographic Data Center/Drug Design Data Resource Ligand Validation Workshop held at the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics at Rutgers University on July 30-31, 2015. Experts in protein crystallography from academe and industry came together with non-profit and for-profit software providers for crystallography and with experts in computational chemistry and data archiving to discuss and make recommendations on best practices, as framed by a series of questions central to structural studies of macromolecule-ligand complexes. What data concerning bound ligands should be archived in the PDB? How should the ligands be best represented? How should structural models of macromolecule-ligand complexes be validated? What supplementary information should accompany publications of structural studies of biological macromolecules? Consensus recommendations on best practices developed in response to each of these questions are provided, together with some details regarding implementation. Important issues addressed but not resolved at the workshop are also enumerated.

International efforts on climate breakdown have focused on reducing climate-damaging emissions. They have basically failed: that can now be seen, as the Conference of Parties (CoP) system declines into near farce, and politics bites back against climate action, while temperatures and impacts accelerate. As we face an increasingly chaotic world, climate adaptation provides an essential pathway to resilience and disaster-readiness. It’s not only about reducing our exposure to damage but also about transforming our ways of life to live with, and in what ways are possible even make the most of, the new, hotter, more difficult reality. There’s no longer any doubt that some level of climate breakdown is inevitable, and, rather than denying this, we must focus on how to adapt to it, in a manner that can bring people together to face the coming storms, and so ultimately perhaps bring them (us) together to stop the storms getting worse.

In this article, we analyse one of the most famous recent thought‐experiments in philosophy, namely Donald Davidson's Swampman. Engaging recent commentators on Davidson's Swampman as well as analysing the spatio‐temporal conditions of the thought‐experiment, we will show how the ‘experiment’ inevitably fails. For it doesn't take seriously some of its own defining characteristics: crucially, Swampman's creation of a sudden in a place distinct from Davidson's. Instead of denigrating philosophical thought‐experiments per se, our analysis points towards considering thought‐experiments in a different sense: imaginary scenarios helpfully self‐deconstructing rather than constituting substantive philosophical resources.

This paper argues in favour of continuities between the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the Madhyamaka of Nāgārjuna, identifying not only methodological affinities but also a shared vision of philosophy as a liberatory praxis, enabling a radical form of freedom. In our view, neither philosopher posits any doctrines, philosophical theories or once-and-for-all claims. Instead, both Wittgenstein and Nāgārjuna aim to liberate us from disquieting pictures or ways of seeing. This study represents a new understanding of the continuities between Wittgenstein and Madhyamaka, rejecting not only the old paradigms of ineffability and anti-metaphysical readings, but also the notion that the scope of Wittgenstein and Nāgārjuna’s liberation should be seen as discontinuous. In different ways, we claim that their methods aim to affect a gestalt shift or transformative experience, thereby loosening the grip of fixations and preconceptions that cause us tension and suffering. We claim that both philosophers offer a form of salvation that goes beyond simply dissolving problems associated with philosophical problems, but addresses confusions anyone is susceptible to. This involves a radical reinterpretation of both the target of Wittgenstein’s liberatory method and the role and status of Nāgārjuna’s non-dualist description of ‘that-ness’ (tattva).

In this chapter we will focus on the relation between psychology as a discipline and how it understands nonsense. We will present a broad Wittgensteinian perspective inspired by the approaches of Peter Winch and Rom Harré, and use Wolcott’s approach to the ‘language’ of schizophrenia, Schizophrenese, as an object of analysis. Using a therapeutic understanding of Wittgenstein, we will claim that Wolcott’s approach resembles a substantial (Wittgensteinian) interpretation of Schizophrenese, debarring an actual (‘resolute’) understanding of the nonsensical character of Schizophrenese. In the end, we conclude that Winchian and Harréan approaches help develop our sensitivities towards the diversity and uniqueness of cultural practices, but that it can be misleading to assimilate severe mental disturbance to the concepts of culture and language. Doing so misunderstands and covers over such disturbance, in the very act of seeming/seeking to understand it.

It is an honour to be asked to write in response to Vinten’s sober, useful and thorough book. He does me the honour of treating my work (on the areas under discussion in his book) very respectfully and often fertilely. On my work on Rawls and on care ethics and future generations (including that co-authored with Makoff), and on my joint work with Harkin (critiquing Temelini), we are in fundamental agreement. I will therefore focus my remarks here upon his fairly in-depth and partly critical treatment of my book authored along with Hutchinson and Sharrock (2008).

This paper introduces the Special Issue on 'post-truth'. The contributions to this special issue try between them to strike a right balance. To establish how new ‘post-truthism’ really is – or isn’t. To seek a point of reflection on whatever is new in our current socio-political straits. And to consider seriously how philosophy can help. Whether by wondering about the extent to which reason, or truth, may rightly, if one follows Wittgenstein, be viewed in certain respects as a constraint upon thought or opinion. Or indeed by wondering whether we still have a long way to go in approaching truth at all.

Distinguishing between the source and the locus of value enables environmental philosophers to consider not only what is of value, but also to try to develop a conception of valuation that is itself ecological. Such a conception must address difficulties caused by the original locational metaphors in which the distinction is framed. This is done by reassessing two frequently employed models of valuation, perception and desire, and going on to show that a more adequate ecological understanding of valuation emerges when these models are fully contextualized in the intersecting life worlds of the ecological community. Ecological evaluation takes place in ongoing encounters between these worlds and a crucial part in this process is assigned to living beings that are “open-endedly open,” that is, open not only to what the world affords them and others, but open to an indefinite field of possible valuational encounters between all kinds of beings. Ecological valuation overcomes some of the conceptual failings of contemporary attempts to evaluate nature: “The Economics of Ecology and Biodiversity” and “Valuing Nature.”