I just read John Earman and John Roberts’ interesting papers defending Humean Supervenience about laws of nature, in PPR 2005. They argue that facts about which generalizations are nomic supervene on non-nomic observable facts. Their argument is that without such supervenience, it would be impossible to find empirical justification for …
EPSA07: 1st Conference of the European Philosophy of Science AssociationContributed papers are invited to the 1st Conference of the newly founded European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA). The conference will take place at Complutense University, Madrid, from 15-17 November 2007.For details of the Association (EPSA) and the Conference (EPSA07) see: …
Haugeland offers a theory of systems along the following lines: A component is a relatively independent and self-contained portion of a system in the sense that it relevantly interacts with other components only through interfaces between them (and contains no internal interfaces at the same level). An interface is a …
The next issue of the New York Times Magazine has an article on the way neuroscience is changing the law and judicial system. More reasons why philosophers of mind and ethicists should not ignore neuroscience.
I got an interesting letter from the grandmother of a child with hydranencephaly (reproduced by permission):Mr. Piccinini,Your response to Dr. Merker’s paper, Consciousness without a CerebralCortex: A Challenge for Neuroscience and Medicine, was educational anddisappointing. I appreciated the evaluation of phenomenal versuscreature consciousness and the application of state consciousness;however I …
As a factoid from intellectual history, there is reason to believe that Descartes would be much more sympathetic to the hypothesis of embodied cognition than his critics (e.g. Haugeland, 1998, Rowlands, 1999, 2003) and some of his supporters (e.g., Grush, 2003) have suggested. There is, for example, the well-known passage …
