Pragmatism and Emergentism : In Chauncey Wright’s Evolutionary Philosophy

The notion of \u201cemergence\u201d has recently received renewed attention in research fields ranging from biology to cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind. Today\u2019s concept of \u201cemergence\u201d incorporates a long history of philosophical debates and reflections that can be traced back to James and John Stuart Mill and nineteenth-century associationist philosophy. This tradition reached its theoretical maturity in the early twentieth century with so-called classical British emergentism, which gained the attention of pragmatist philosophers from the beginning. In the current literature exploring the relationship between Pragmatism and the emergentist tradition, almost nothing is said about the interesting case of Chauncey Wright (1830-1875), a follower of J. S. Mill and A. Bain, and a crucial figure for the origins of pragmatist philosophy. After a brief historical introduction about the history of the notion of \u201cemergence\u201d and its relationship to classical Pragmatism, the paper aims to examine Wright\u2019s philosophy in relation, on one hand, to the pragmatist tradition and, on the other hand, to the problem of emergence. In the wake of Wright\u2019s original interpretation of Darwin\u2019s evolutionary theory, the article focuses on the key notions of \u201cnovelty\u201d and \u201cnew uses,\u201d through which Wright developed an \u201cemergentist\u201d philosophy that was well ahead of its time and attracted the interest of Samuel Alexander, one of the major philosophers of classical British emergentism. In the second part, the paper analyzes Wright\u2019s reflections about the origin of human self-consciousness as a paradigmatic case of authentic evolutionary novelty. In the final part, the article focuses on the kind of pragmatic realism sketched out by Wright and summarizes the most important aspects to have emerged during the scholarly debate on the topic

Mosaic evolution in hominin phylogeny : meanings, implications, and explanations

In paleoanthropological literature, the use of the term "mosaic" (mosaic evolution, mosaic trait, mosaic species, and so on) is becoming more and more frequent. In order to promote a clarification of the use of the concept in literature, we propose here a classification in three different meanings of the notion of mosaic in human evolution: 1) morphological (inter-specific and intra-specific) instability in a certain phase of a branched phylogeny; 2) multiple trajectories and versions of the same adaptive trait in a branched phylogeny; 3) the trait itself as a complex mosaic of sub-traits with different phylogenetic stories (as is the case in language). We argue that the relevance of such mosaic patterns needs a macro-evolutionary interpretation, which takes into consideration the interaction between general selective pressures (promoting different versions of the same adaptation) and a cladogenetic approach in which speciation played a crucial role, due to ecological instability, habitat fragmentation, and geographical dispersals in human evolution

Photorefractive light needles in glassy nanodisordered KNTN

We study the formation of 2D self-trapped beams in nanodisordered potassium-sodium-tantalate-niobate (KNTN) cooled below the dynamic glass transition. Supercooling is shown to accelerate the photorefractive response and enhance steady-state anisotropy. Effects in the excited state are attributed to the anomalous slim-loop polarization curve typical of relaxors dominated by non-interacting polar-nano-regions

Observation of an intrinsic nonlinearity in the electro-optic response of freezing relaxors ferroelectrics

We demonstrate an electro-optic response that is linear in the amplitude but independent of the sign of the applied electric field. The symmetry-preserving linear electro-optic effect emerges at low applied electric fields in freezing nanodisordered KNTN above the dielectric peak temperature, deep into the nominal paraelectric phase. Strong temperature dependence allows us to attribute the phenomenon to an anomalously reduced thermal agitation in the reorientational response of the underlying polar-nanoregions

Tecnica e linguaggio alle soglie dell'umano : riflessioni al crocevia tra filosofia ed evoluzione

The article aims at developing some aspects of the fruitful reflections contained in Carmine Di Martino\u2019s book Viventi umani e non umani. Tecnica, linguaggio e memoria (Milano 2017), es-pecially those concerning the nature and the origin of the human technique and language. The specific purpose of the present paper is to discuss some possible theoretical developments of those topics in connection with the latest discoveries in human evolution field and with the most recent lines of research emerging in the epistemological debates concerning the structure of the standard evolutionary theory. In particular, the article examines the proposal to rethink the human evolution in the light of a multilevel and extended evolutionary synthesis, and of a \u201ctree thinking\u201d and \u201cmosaic\u201d approach. A concluding section addresses a recurring crucial issue in Di Martino\u2019s book, concerning the relationship between philosophy and scientific theories. The possible role of the philosophical practice is analyzed in order to avoid the superstitious at-titude that consists of thinking about scientific truths as something absolutely objective and in-dependent from the practical activities, techniques, and theoretical constructions, which con-stantly put them into being

Il mosaico dell'evoluzione umana : una prospettiva integrata e multilivello al di là di ogni visione unilineare e finalistica

Despite Darwin\u2019s theory proposes a contingent view of life's evolution and a \uabtree thinking\ubb approach to reconstruct the history of living beings, human evolution has always been generally considered as an exception with respect to the normal evolutionary phenomena. The present article examines this recurrent view of human evolution, which is often depicted as a linear and teleological story that inevitably ends with the emergence of Homo sapiens. A multi-level and pluralist view of human evolution, able to integrate the most recent empirical evidence coming from different fields within a unified theoretical framework, seems to be an excellent antidote to reflect about the human uniqueness without preconceived ideologies

Observation of electro-activated localized structures in broad area VCSELs

We demonstrate experimentally the electro-activation of a localized optical structure in a coherently driven broad-area vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) operated below threshold. Control is achieved by electro-optically steering a writing beam through a pre-programmable switch based on a photorefractive funnel waveguide.Comment: 5 Figure

La prospettiva gerarchica dell'evoluzione : the Hierarchy Group e la storia di un dibattito internazionale

Il saggio prende in esame la prospettiva gerarchica sull\u2019evoluzione e ne ripercorre la storia e gli sviluppi fino ad arrivare alla sua versione pi\uf9 recente, elaborata da Niles Eldredge. Quest\u2019ultima \ue8 stata fatta oggetto di studi e di ricerche nell\u2019ambito del progetto internazionale del Hierarchy Group, un network di ricerca composto da studiosi altamente qualificati appartenenti ai campi pi\uf9 disparati, dalla biologia evoluzionistica alla paleontologia, dalla filosofia della biologia alla biologia molecolare. I risultati delle ricerche, coordinate dal Dipartimento di Biologia dell\u2019Universit\ue0 di Padova, sono stati presentati recentemente nel volume Evolutionary Theory: A Hierarchical Perspective (Chicago University Press, 2016). L\u2019obiettivo dell\u2019articolo \ue8 quello di presentare i contenuti scientifici della teoria gerarchica dell\u2019evoluzione e di riflettere sulle implicazioni filosofiche e teoretiche di una estensione del programma di ricerca Neodarwiniano a una pluralit\ue0 di livelli e di pattern evolutivi

UN INCONTRO TRA DARWINISMO E PRAGMATISMO: LA FILOSOFIA EVOLUZIONISTICA DI CHAUNCEY WRIGHT

The Darwinian evolutionary theory was a real revolution, not only in biology and, generally, in scientific fields, but even in philosophical and epistemological thought. However, in the years that followed the publication of The Origin of Species (1859), virtually nobody, among scientists and philosophers, agreed with the principle of natural selection put forward by Darwin as the main explanation of the evolutionary process. This happened because Darwin\u2019s theory was quite opposed to the \u201corthodox\u201d view behind natural sciences and the philosophy of nature both in Europe and in America. Natural theology was taught in every school, academy, college, and it claimed that all the species in nature are created by God for a good purpose or a general design, are fixed in time, and they are already fitted to their environment from the beginning. Some theologians could account for organic forms by evolution to a certain degree, but all of them agreed on the \u201cargument from design\u201d and to the idea that man was \uabthe glory and the supreme king of the natural realm\ubb, as Darwin ironically wrote. One of the few that stood against this background and followed Darwin in his \u201cstruggle\u201d against the teleological and anthropocentric interpretation of natural beings was an American philosopher from Cambridge whose name was Chauncey Wright. Wright (1830-1875) was the well loved master of famous thinkers as William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, or Oliver Wendell Holmes at the \u201cMetaphysical Club\u201d in Cambridge, now considered the birth place of American Pragmatism. Wright started from the William Hamilton\u2019s philosophy and then, in the 1860s, rejected it in favour of the utilitarianism of Bentham, James Mill and John Stuart Mill. When Darwin\u2019s Origin arrived to America, in 1860, he immediately became a firm supporter of the evolutionary theory. To him, the principle of natural selection was just an application of the Mills\u2019 utilitarian philosophy and, moreover, it was even an improvement of it: e.g., the principle of natural selection could shed new light on the origin of different complex human feelings, ideas, behaviours, whereas the principles of mental association, which were the basis of the utilitarian ethics, were very vague and generic on these genetic problems. For these reasons Wright thoroughly studied the Darwinian theory for ten years and then he wrote some articles on this topic in the early 1870s. Three of them aimed to take issue with Alfred Russell Wallace and George Mivart\u2019s arguments against the principle of natural selection, and they were so well conducted that Darwin himself thanked Wright and decided to publish one of them in England as a pamphlet at his own expenses. The last of these articles on evolution, titled The Evolution of Self-Consciousness (1873), is the most important of the series. After the death of this author, in 1875, his friends collected almost all his published works in a book entitled Philosophical Discussions (1877) and most of his Letters (1878). In general, until now, Chauncey Wright\u2019s philosophy has been obscured by the more famous thought of the American Pragmatists, such as Peirce, James, Dewey. Not many scholars wrote on this philosopher and, among them, those who studied his philosophy were more interested in comparing it to the Pragmatist one, rather than in directly elucidating its basic principles and in deeply exploring its theoretical features. For these reasons Edward Madden, the most important Wright scholar, named him a \u201cforgotten philosopher\u201d. At present, only one of Wright\u2019s articles (The evolution of self-consciousness, 1873) has been translated into Italian, and, in general, this thinker is almost unknown in Italy. On the contrary, my work sets out to prove that Wright\u2019s philosophy is not only fundamental to well understanding the origin and the roots of American Pragmatism, but it is also very important in order to focus on the most interesting philosophical implications of the Darwinian evolutionary theory. In particular, my thesis examines the new epistemology worked out by Wright, which, beginning from a deep analysis of Darwin\u2019s theory, highlighted the still unseen importance of the principle of \u201cthe new uses for old functions\u201d. In his stressing the significance of this principle, Wright showed to conceive the evolutionary process in a very similar way, in its main features, to the one advanced by some modern biologists, such as, for example, Gould, Eldredge or Lewontin. As Wright did a century and a half ago, the above mentioned biologists highlight the importance of this mechanism of new uses for old functions, or, as they call this transformational principle, \u201cexaptations\u201d, in order to go beyond an \u201cadaptationist\u201d or \u201cpanselectionist\u201d interpretation of the Darwinian theory. This pluralistic view, as a working hypothesis, is very effective in its approach to the theoretical problems, especially when Wright applied it on the very classic philosophical question of the nature and of the origin of self-awareness. The main role of these new uses of old powers (like \u201cmemory\u201d or \u201cattention\u201d) in relation to the new importance accorded by Wright to the habits and to the use of signs, establishes that Wright\u2019s approach to the problem of the evolution of self-consciousness is a very new one, as it appears to be an interesting combination of an original (and modern) version of Darwinism and an incipient kind of Pragmatism. Nowadays, the solution developed by Wright in his approach to the question of the \u201chuman\u201d, could be useful in philosophy and biology to better think and to shed new light on this very controversial and ancient riddle, namely, the origin of language and the evolution of human mind from an evolutionary point of view

The labor productivity slowdown: the true issue of the Italian Economy

This paper deals with the issue of the weak growth in Italian labor productivity with particular reference to the period between 2000 and 2016. In analyzing the data relat-ing to labor productivity, the influence of capital productivity and multifactor produc-tivity were also considered. The analysis shows how the weak growth in labor produc-tivity is due to some peculiar structural aspects of the Italian production system. At the end of the paper some comments are offered on possible policy interventions