Memorial Symposium: In Honor of Paul F. Snowdon

By Tony Cheng In Memorial of Paul F. Snowdon Paul Snowdon began his academic journey as an undergraduate at University College, Oxford, where he was mentored by Sir. Peter Strawson. He later served as a tutorial fellow at Exeter College, Oxford, from 1971 to 2001. Following this, he held the …

[Updated!] SURe 2025, Miami: Call for Papers

CFA: 7th Scientific Understanding and Representation (SURe) Annual Workshop Host: University of Miami (FL) Department of Philosophy May 13-14, 2025  Call for Abstracts: We invite authors to submit abstracts of up to 750-words for the upcoming 7th annual Scientific Understanding and Representation (SURe) workshop by March 4th, 2025. The workshop will take …

Rethinking Functions: The Role of Selection

By Hanzhe Dong and Gualtiero Piccinini Introduction What are biological functions, and how should we think about them? This question has been controversial in the philosophy of biology (and technology). The Selected Effects (SE) account ties (teleological) functions to selection history, asserting that a trait’s teleofunction F is an activity …

Selection is Inescapable (Part 2: Re-rethinking Biological Functions)

Fabian Hundertmark, Bielefeld UniversityJakob Roloff, Justus-Liebig-University GießenFrancesca Bellazzi, University of Oslo, ERC Project Assembling Life (no.101089326) 1. Introduction In the target post, Dong and Piccinini criticize SE and propose a new goal-contribution account of functions (GCA) (also in Maley, Piccinini 2017; Piccinini, 2020). In this second post, we argue that …

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