Roundup 3 Jan 2008 Some bloggable items not worth a post on their own: George MacDonald Fraser died. The author of the Flashman series, which I loved. Creating one of the best rogues in literature, Fraser also managed to get the history right. Peter Hare died. Hare was one of the leading moral philosophers of the 20th Century. Bradie and Harms have updated the excellent SEP entry on evolutionary epistemology. Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny have updated their excellent piece on biological information also in SEP. I missed this at the time (October). Evolution History
Biology A not terribly good post on the species problem 18 Jul 2019 As a biological phenomenon the species problem is worthy of serious study as an end in itself, and not as a mere corollary to work in some other field. It is, to be sure, a problem so fundamentally important that it touches many such fields. Workers in any one of… Read More
History On the decline of the humanities 11 Apr 2008 I’ve been pretty preoccupied this week with lectures and meetings, so this is my first post for a bit. Yesterday I attended a meeting at my university which pretty well aimed to wind up the disciplines of my school (history, philosophy, religion and classics) and present a single school with… Read More
History Copernicus did not demote humanity 5 Dec 2009 Stephen Jay Gould was fond of observing that of the two revolutions identified by Freud as having dethroned humanity – Copernicus, and Darwin’s – that Darwin’s was the more revolutionary, because (as he put it) Copernicus and Galileo merely changed our real estate, while Darwin changed our essence. But it… Read More