Dibs and dobs 28 Oct 2008 One of the downsides to being old is that your favourite teachers die. I learned most of what I know about the Empiricists, in particular John Locke, from a book by C. B. Martin, who passed away recently. Hat tip to Leiter. I didn’t know he spent so much time in Australia. John Lynch is tantalising me with a workshop I very much want to go to but can’t: The 2009 ASU-MBL History of Biology Seminar: Theory in the Life Sciences. It looks like enormous fun (hey, I’m a philosopher: I use philosophical values of “fun”). I Have Views on what counts as a theory in life sciences, and I’d love to see how well they hold up under withering scorn criticism. [If any of my incredibly wealthy readers want to stump for a plane ticket, I can stay with Lynch again. He didn’t mind the snoring much…] The internet filter issue is gathering speed. A good criticism is made by Argosy about the failure of internet filtering in Pakistan and China. Education General Science Internet filtering Technology
Education Philosopher threatened with prison for copyright violations 5 Apr 2009 I’m very conflicted about this: An Argentinian professor who put Derrida’s works in translation online because the published works were out of print or too expensive (way more than the European editions) has been charged with criminal copyright infringement, according to this page. While I think that publishers, especially academic… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity Miscellany 26 Jun 200818 Sep 2017 Barbara Forrest has an excellent analysis and background story on the introduction of the creationist bill in Louisiana, and the organisations supporting it, here at Talk2Reason. There’s a new phylogeny of birds out. See GrrllScientist’s post, and a full size tree here. Late edit See Bird Evolution – Problems with… Read More
Evolution Do bacteria think? 10 Dec 2007 Let’s suppose there is a game, say, baseball. This game is named and described for the ways that adult humans with bats, balls, and fields, behave normatively, as written up in an authoritative manual. Everybody knows what baseball is, or can point to an example of it. Along comes someone,… Read More
I never met the man. But there’s a link to a PDF of his obit at the U Calgary link (first one given).
This is very sad. I have Martin’s The Mind In Nature (2008) right next to me as I read this. I picked it up from my library at my university the day before he died–last Wednesday. So far, this is an interesting, austere book–much inside to be admired and fruitfully studied. If the publication was anything like the man, what interesting details can you give us about him, John? Mourning together, BR