I’m a 3QD Philosophy Prize semifinalist 12 Sep 201122 Jun 2018 You no longer can vote for me, but I made the cut for this post on phenomena, so I think you should go read some cool philosophy posts while we wait for the editors to pick six entries to send to Pat Churchland for a final judgement… So, this being the closest thing to any kind of award I have ever received, I must show this badge: Administrative Philosophy
Epistemology Linnaeus: the founder of databases 17 Jun 200918 Sep 2017 A couple of years ago I was in Exeter, and was chatting to Staffan Müller-Wille, who is an expert in the history of biology specialising in Linnaean taxonomy. He mentioned to me that Linnaeus had invented the index card in order to keep track of the increasingly large data set… Read More
Evolution What is “nature”? 2 Jan 20142 Jan 2014 Many critics of science, including Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig,attack something they call “naturalism”, the view that the natural world is all there is. As Papineau notes in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, the term has no very precise meaning in philosophy, or in science…. Read More
Administrative Travel Diary 6 13 Oct 2009 Today I had a lovely time visiting Oxford University Press in the company of net-friend Mike Lyle and several of his philology friends. I checked that the OED has the right definitions of species (it’s not bad; I’ll send them a correction later), and then we went to a bookshop… Read More
Someone by the name of John Wilkins made a document titled A deflationary account of information in biology openly available on the web. I’ve been out of touch with research and the literature for 15+ years now. Perhaps I wasn’t very good when I was more deeply involved . Nevertheless … I am fascinated by the concept ‘biological Information’. It has been my more or less, on and off preoccupied theme-of-interest for several decades. (Seeking out Lila Gatlin’s work on the information content of DNA is what lead me to finding Wilkins’s manuscript.) Your manuscript holds me speechless sir. Even though I cannot bring myself to read it at the present moment because it is immediately strongly emotive and confusing. …. too much so to be useful for me … Despite all such, I immediately saw that document as touching upon and addressing, many if not all of the pertinent and essential qualities of ‘information’ and it’s relationship to biological process. Notwithstanding my own limited scholarship and dated knowledge … I cannot recall any other author or ‘theoretical biologist’ matching your complete and explicitly targeted engagement. That achievement of recognizing and engaging all that is prominent and appropriate is a sufficient and remarkable achievement, in and of by itself. You have earned my admiration. Thank you
I was over in Europe while this was going on, and am still trying to catch up with the Internet. When I have time (which may be before or after I am dead), I intend to read all 37 nominees for the prize so that I can find out which I would have voted for if I had voted, so that I can tell you, so that you can cast aspersions upon my sanity for my poor taste. Meanwhile I’m also reading the copy of “Lucian: Selected Dialogues” that I bought at the British Library (actually, my bookmark has been sitting patiently at page 74 for some time now). My comment so far is that the poor guy would have been a far better writer if only someone had had the foresight to lend him some Pratchett.