Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

New Journal: Philosophy and the Mind Sciences

27. June 2019 Philosophy News News
A new academic journal, Philosophy and the Mind Sciences (PhiMiSci) will focus on “the interface between philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.” PhiMiSci is peer-reviewed and open-access. Its editors-in-chief are Sascha Benjamin Fink (Magdeburg), Wanja Wiese (Mainz), and Jennifer Windt (Monash). The first issue, for which manuscripts are currently under review, will be a special issue on “radical disruptions of self-consciousness.” While the editors anticipate other occasional special issues, they write that after the publication of the inaugural issue, “accepted articles will be published whenever peer-review and revisions have been successfully completed.” You can learn more about the journal, including its editorial board, here. (via John Schwenkler at Brains) The post New Journal: Philosophy and the Mind Sciences appeared first on Daily [More]
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Nature, the Artful Modeler: Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How We Can Arrange It Better

27. June 2019 Philosophy News News
2019.06.23 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Nancy Cartwright, Nature, the Artful Modeler: Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How We Can Arrange It Better, Open Court, 2019, 159pp., $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780812694680. Reviewed by Eric Winsberg, The University of South Florida The 1980s were a golden age for philosophy of science. A small number of incredibly influential philosophers released monographs that set the agenda for many of what are now the main topics in the field. But none quite so single-handedly created a subdiscipline in the philosophy of science as did Nancy Cartwright with her How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983). The book had both a narrow and a wider thesis. The narrow thesis was that scientific laws failed to play the role that most philosophers of science had taken for granted: "Rendered as descriptions of fact, they are false; amended to be true, they lose their fundamental explanatory force" (1983, p. 54). The wider thesis was that philosophers inadequately... Read [More]
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PhilPapers Publishes Its First Book

26. June 2019 Philosophy News News
In a move that may signal disruptive changes to academic philosophy publishing, PhilPapers, the free, massive, online philosophy database, has published its first book—an open-access edited collection. It’s The Open Handbook of Formal Epistemology, edited by Richard Pettigrew (Bristol) and Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto), and it features the following contributions: “Precise Credences”, by Michael G. Titelbaum “Decision Theory”, by Johanna Thoma “Imprecise Probabilities”, by Anna Mahtani “Primitive Conditional Probabilities”, by Kenny Easwaran “Infinitesimal Probabilities”, by Sylvia Wenmackers “Comparative Probabilities”, by Jason Konek “Belief Revision Theory”, by Hanti Lin “Ranking Theory”, by Franz Huber “Full & Partial Belief”, by Konstantin Genin “Doxastic Logic”, by Michael Caie “Conditionals”, by R. A. Briggs Weisberg, who was one of the creators of the open-access philosophy journal, Ergo, and who suggested the idea of the book to the PhilPapers, says that a second edition of the book may include more articles. In a post about the book at his site, Weisberg writes: “For me personally, a central aim of this project was to demonstrate a point about open access publishing and shared standards. The budget for this book was exactly $0.00, and this was only possible because we didn’t need a human typesetter.” This was possible because “Pretty much everyone in formal epistemology uses the same, standardized format to do their writing. And [More]
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Bioethicists’ Letter on the “Ethically Abhorrent” Treatment of Children at the U.S. Border

26. June 2019 Philosophy News News
Over 800 bioethicists have signed a letter calling for the United States government to remedy its failures to assure the children it is detaining at its border are in safe and sanitary conditions.  The letter has been provided to the lawyers representing the class of children covered by the Flores settlement, which set the government’s policies for the detention of children. There have been numerous reports regarding the horrible conditions in which the children are being kept. Below are some excerpts from the letter: We are experts in medical ethics who have devoted our careers to rigorous analysis of challenging ethical issues relevant to health and well-being, to advancing the ethical treatment of all people and especially the most vulnerable, and to examining historical failures to uphold basic ethical principles so that we can prevent future atrocities. It does not take any special expertise, however, to recognize that the conditions in which children are being detained at U.S. border facilities are ethically abhorrent and demand immediate remediation… We should not have to convince the U.S. government of its obvious ethical obligations to protect vulnerable children in its custody or of its obvious failure to satisfy those obligations to date. And yet, it appears that argument is needed. The basic principles of medical ethics entail respect for persons, avoidance of harm, and fair treatment. These principles apply whenever individual and community health [More]
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Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of Freedom: Freedom's Refrains

25. June 2019 Philosophy News News
2019.06.22 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Dorothea Olkowski and Eftichis Pirovolaki (eds.), Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of Freedom: Freedom's Refrains, Routledge, 2019, 232pp., $140.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780367077501. Reviewed by John Protevi, Louisiana State University This is a volume of specialist essays, stemming from a 2015 conference held in Athens, Greece, organized by one of the first promoters of Anglophone scholarship on Deleuze, Constantin Boundas, now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. (One of the editors, Dorothea Olkowski, is herself an early adopter of Deleuze, beginning her work on him in the early 1990s.) Not for newcomers to the field -- perhaps because freed of a requirement to bring novices up to speed -- the essays here are carefully wrought and thought-provoking, and will reward experienced readers with either clear restatements of established points (no mean feat with thinkers as difficult as Deleuze and Guattari) or with new approaches (also noteworthy now that... Read [More]
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