By Sarah Robins, Purdue University Thanks to the Brains Blog for featuring some of the great work from the latest SSPP meeting this week. There are several ‘phil & psych societies’, so it feels worth kicking off the week with a note about what distinguishes the SSPP. The SSPP is, …
This week we are very happy to co-host a series of posts with the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, featuring work from this year’s annual meeting! Today, Sarah Robins will outline the mission of SSPP, and what makes it such a great venue. Then, the rest of the week …
Explaining our Actions: A Critique of Common-Sense Theorizing (CUP, 2025)Peter Carruthers 3. Pleasure and desire Much of the remainder of the book evaluates the standard model of action-explanation itself. Chapter 5 discusses decision making in light of one’s beliefs and desires, resulting in intentions to act. Here there is much …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Fabian Hundertmark, Bielefeld UniversityJakob Roloff, Justus-Liebig-University GießenFrancesca Bellazzi, University of Oslo, ERC Project Assembling Life (no.101089326) 1. Introduction Functions are everywhere. Coffee machines have the function of making our coffee and our hearts have the function of pumping our blood. But what are functions, and how should we think of …
