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Highlights<\/h2>\n
For the past months I’ve mostly concentrated on philosophy of science \u2013 around the issue of realism \u2013 and worked on many contemporary philosophers. This was something I\u2019ve been meaning to do for a long time. There are seven new people so I won\u2019t crowd here with screenshots showing all their sentences this time, but instead proceed with a topic-based overview for you, including the Russell-Eddington position about the silence of science regarding intrinsic nature:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n \u2026 the debates around Laudan\u2019s pessimistic (meta)induction (with a forerunner in Poincar\u00e9) and Putnam\u2019s no-miracles argument:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2026 Van Fraassen\u2019s solutions in his constructive empiricism and semantic approach (and Paul Churchland\u2019s objection<\/a>):<\/p>\n <\/p>\n and the (epistemic and ontic) structural realisms of Worrall and Ladyman, building on the Russell-Eddington view and extending all the way to Poincar\u00e9 and Duhem:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In addition, I\u2019m happy that this period\/region of 20th-century analytic philosophy shown below has improved in this update, with Kripke (5 new\/edited sentences), Laudan (newcomer), Van Fraassen (newcomer), Lewis (3), Boyd (3), and McDowell (2):<\/p>\n I intend to work more on these people this year.<\/p>\n At some point I needed a short break from scientific realism readings and I thought of using my old notes on Gombrich to add him \u2013 a curious choice for a break, I figured later, because his theory of art is heavily influenced by Popper. I also did some more reading on his disagreement with Goodman on the conventionality of perspective in visual representation:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019ve also spent some time on other topics, such as the variations of the concepts of (original) sin, evil, and free will in St Augustine, St Anselm and St Aquinas (more work to be done here):<\/p>\n The similarities between Anselm\u2019s and Kant\u2019s accounts of free will are also intriguing.<\/p>\n Bentham\u2019s famous \u201cCan they suffer?\u201d quote is frequently used in animal welfare debates. Actually that phrase comes after a utilitarian argument \u2013 which I\u2019ve recently added, along with a related idea by Peter Singer \u2013 defending the killing of animals for food or to protect human life, without making them suffer. \u201cWe are the better for it, and they are never the worse,\u201d says Bentham, because:<\/p>\n \u201cThey have none of those long-protracted anticipations of future misery which we have. The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier, and by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature.\u201d (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation<\/i>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n I also realized I didn\u2019t have a sentence representing the concept of group selection<\/i>, an important dimension of the units of selection<\/i> literature in philosophy of biology \u2013 what better than using Darwin\u2019s own formulation from The Descent of Men<\/em> to introduce it:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.denizcemonduygu.com\/philo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/22-01-eddington.png\")
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