Category: Uncategorized

Here is an interesting discussion of a recent paper on the operational and theoretical definitions of “epigenetics”. This term – which has a deep history, well before genetics – is interpreted in every manner from inherited histone patterns on chromosomes to parental investment and extrasomatic inheritance. The authors of the…

I received this via Channels: Dear Philosophers of Biology, You’ll be interested in the first biennial “Philosophy of Biology @ Madison” workshop/conference that we’ll be hosting in Madison a year from May. It’s a ways off, but note that submitted abstracts are due earlier than you might think: September. This…

But this one’s going to be huge. The Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science has a new group blog. [How do I know? I set it up.] It will act as a clearing house for events and ideas at what has become a very large concentration of HPS types…

Marjorie Grene was a doyen of philosophy and history of biology, and I reviewed one of her last texts a while back and linked to an interview. She died yesterday, according to Leiter, aged 99.

Brian Leiter has asked who that was in the train of the New York Times declaring that it was Wittgenstein.So far, Russell is leading. Russell? My goodness, he was important but hardly the best – most read more than best, I suspect. Moore was better than Russell. As to the…

David Chalmers and his student David Bourget at the Australian National University have developed a new resource: PhilPapers. This is a hot list to online versions of (so far) over 188,000 items in current philosophy. I checked my own papers and they were all there (something Thompson International seems unable…

Below the fold is a video produced by the Australasian Association of Philosophy back in the 1990s. The talking head is, I think, Graeme Graham Priest.

Siris has a nice short post on the use of “truth” in discourse: This appeal to truth is incantatory: it is not an argument but a rhetorical ploy that usually involves a false dichotomy. By ritually displaying one’s ‘interest in the truth’ in contrast with someone else’s interest in something…

The body of the man who started off the modern scientific revolution in the 16th century, Nicholas Copernicus, has been found and his face reconstructed.