Sam John

In his monograph, Ryan Patrick Hanley offers a revisionist interpretation of the political philosophy of François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai. A series of Enlightenment commentators and their progeny have hailed Fénelon as a political subversive who boldly attacked the injustices of the reign of Louis XIV and who prepared the arrival of an egalitarian society with socialist and pacifist traits. Hanley, however, argues that Fénelon actually defended a more moderate and realistic model of political society than his Enlightenment exegetes have suggested. Like earlier commentators, Hanley attempts to prove his argument primarily through an analysis of...

Ever since Darwin people have worried about the sceptical implications of evolution. If our minds are products of evolution like those of other animals, why suppose that the beliefs they produce are true, rather than merely useful? We consider this problem for beliefs in three different domains: religion, morality, and commonsense and scientific claims about matters of empirical fact. We identify replies to evolutionary scepticism that work in some domains but not in others. One reply is that evolution can be expected to design systems that produce true beliefs in some domain. This reply works for commonsense beliefs and can be extended to scientific beliefs. But it does not work for moral or religious beliefs. An alternative reply which has been used defend moral beliefs is that their truth does not consist in their tracking some external state of affairs. Whether or not it is successful in the case of moral beliefs, this reply is less plausible for religious beliefs. So religious beliefs emerge as particularly vulnerable to evolutionary debunking.

To the evolutionarily oriented clinical psychiatrist, the discipline of behavioural ecology is a fertile basic science. Human psychology discusses variation in terms of means, standard deviations, heritabilities, and so on, but behavioural ecology deals with mutually incompatible alternative behavioural strategies, the heritable variation being maintained by negative frequency-dependent selection. I suggest that behavioural ecology should be included in the interdisciplinary dialogue recommended by Keller & Miller (K&M). (Published Online November 9 2006).