I’ve just discovered that there is a Cambridge Companion to Philo that includes contributions from eminent Philonists such as David Runia and David Winston. Runia especially has done some much for Philonic scholarship. Glad to see some “new” names involved. My interest in Philo can be found here.
Here’s an experiment (I’m assuming it’s legit) brought to my attention by the blog Artificialites.
Here’s an article by Elizabeth Radcliffe from TPM on Hume:
He makes the astounding declaration that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
Maturana and Varela’s classic Autopoiesis and Cognition is freely available here (H/T to Paul Loader).
What makes a living system a living system? What kind of biological phenomenon is the phenomenon of cognition? These two questions have been frequently considered, but, in this volume, the authors consider them as concrete biological questions. Their analysis is bold and provocative, for the authors have constructed a systematic theoretical biology which attempts to define living systems not as objects of observation and description, nor even as interacting systems, but as self-contained unities whose only reference is to themselves. The consequence of their investigations and of their living systems as self-making, self-referring autonomous unities, is that they discovered that the two questions have a common answer: living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. The result of their investigations is a completely new perspective of biological (human) phenomena. During the investigations, it was found that a complete linguistic description pertaining to the ‘organization of the living’ was lacking and, in fact, was hampering the reporting of results. Hence, the authors have coined the word ‘autopoiesis’ to replace the expression ‘circular organization’. Autopoiesis conveys, by itself, the central feature of the organization of the living, which is autonomy.
Here is an excellent website I’ve come across called New Books in Philosophy. One of the people behind this enterprise is Robert Talisse whose work I know from two articles in EPISTEME. Robert interviews Sandy Goldberg about his new book.
Here’s an hour long audio discussion.
Here’s a paper I chanced upon. The full title: “The Four-Color Theorem Solved, Again: Extending the Extended Mind to the Philosophy of Mathematics” (I’ve just noticed that Ken Aizawa has already beat me to the punch!).
Today marks the first anniversary of the death of my chum Rob Haskell. Here is an obituary I posted earlier this year and a briefer one published on the UNE website.
Raised along the mid-Maine coast he loved, he combined in his own personality the rugged solitude, beauty, and magnetism of that state: he was first and always a scholar of the solitary cut who nonetheless commanded the attention and esteem of his colleagues.
Here is a survey paper that I was action editor for.
Here are two articles from Science:
“Searching for the Google Effect on People’s Memory“
“Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips“
Betsy Sparrow is interviewed here.
