The Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Monist, Materialist and Mechanist

This essay will present Hobbes as the most consistent philosopher of the 17th century, and show that in all areas his endeavors have cogency that is unrivalled, in many ways even to this day. The second section will outline Hobbes’ conception of philosophy and his causal materialism. Section 3 will deal briefly with Hobbes’ discussion of sensation and then present his views on the nature and function of language and how reason depends upon language. Section 4 portrays his views about the material world; Section 5 deals with nature of man; and the 6th section with the artificial body of the commonwealth and the means of its creation

Perceiving and Knowing as Activities

According to the tradition of most empiricists, perception is the basis for all our knowledge (at least of the world). The tradition also assumes that perception by humans is a passive activity resulting in some static states pertaining perception and belief, which are then, in some versions, modified by the mind before being passed onto memory and knowledge. Following the work of J. J. Gibson, we argue that perceiving involves many activities and actions. This is true of both visual as well as olfactory-taste perception. The main moral of this paper is that perceiving and knowing are best thought of not as involving static states, but rather as ongoing temporal activities involving change. This presumably means giving up a frozen ontology of states and moving towards something like a dynamic ontology as a basis

Mechanistic Information and Causal Continuity

Some biological processes (our examples are DNA expression and a reflex response in the leech) move from step to step in a way that cannot be completely understood solely in terms of causes and correlations. This paper develops a notion of mechanistic information that can be used to explain the continuities of such processes. We compare them to processes (including the Krebs cycle) that do not involve information. We compare our conception of mechanistic information to some familiar notions including Crick’s idea of genetic information, Shannon-Weaver information, and Millikan’s biosemantic information

Session 5: Development, Neuroscience and Evolutionary Psychology

Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Workshop in History and Philosophy of Biology, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, March 23-24 2001 Session 5: Development, Neuroscience and Evolutionary Psycholog

Activities and Causation

This paper details the ontological and epistemic character of activties that occur in mechanisms. It explains why they are sufficient to handle the problems of causation

Louis de La Forge and the ‘Non-Transfer Argument’ for Occasionalism

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Multiple Causation and the Measurement of Unemployment

The establishment of appropriate policy measures for fighting unemployment has always been difficult since causes of unemployment are hard to identify. This paper analyses an approach used mainly in the 1960s and 1970s in economics, in which classification is used as a way to deal with such a complex, multiple causal phenomenon like unemployment. The method is based on decomposing unemployment into classes of unemployment and the measurement of each of these classes by reference to stable, measurable macroeconomic relationships like the Phillips curve and the Beveridge curve. In this way economists were able to ‘diagnose’ unemployment and make policy recommendations for fighting unemployment without making explicit reference to the underlying singular causes of unemployment