“The Battle over Science in America: How Biology is Changing our Politics”

The location for the public lecture is The Helene Fortunoff Theater in the Monroe Lecture Center. Dr. Moreno will also be presenting a Philosophy/Cognitive Science colloquium on Wednesday, March 6, 11:15–12:40 in 103 Starr with the topic “Neuroethics and National Security.”

In the presentation, I will explain why I believe it’s important to pursue the question of what science tries to produce, and then describe how the answer might be changing in recent science. I’ll discuss the answer that has dominated our thinking about science for centuries, a view we can call “the Newtonian Ideal.” I’ll examine some of the problems with the Newtonian Ideal and ways those problems have been addressed in the last few years by philosophers of science. Then, in Part 2, I’ll outline an alternative answer I developed in a 2011 article published in Philosophy & Theory in Biology. In that article, I analyzed a body of theory about competition in ecology, and argued that it aims at something other than the Newtonian Ideal. Then, I’ll invite your questions and comments about these ideas, and, if you like, about philosophy of science more generally.

Contact me or Hofstra student Michael Kahen if you’re a student interested in attending.

The presenters will be Bob Hale (University of Sheffield), Amie Thomasson (Miami), and Stephen Yablo (MIT), with organizer Anthony Dardis (Hofstra). The workshop is sponsored by Hofstra University Department of Philosophy and Hofstra University Honors College.

On April 4, the workshop will run from 1–5 pm. Attendance is free and open to all; however, if you plan to come, please let us know in advance by phoning 516-463-5612 or emailing Anthony Dardis.

The central question of PHI 161 “Philosophy of Science” is What is science? What distinguishes good science from bad science? What distinguishes scientific theories from unscientific ideas? For example, what makes Astronomy and Astrology so different, since they draw on the same data? Then, is what makes them different the same as what makes Evolutionary Biology and Intelligent-Design theory different? Is Sociology scientific for the same reasons Physics is? Is there a single scientific method? Does culture influence science? Is good science value-free, and if so, are Medicine and Conservation Biology not scientific? Does science progress, and if so, how do we know it does? How can we be confident that science sometimes reveals the world? Working with philosophical arguments and case studies from the history of science, this course will examine some very different answers to these questions advanced by philosophers like Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper, W.V.O. Quine, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, Ernan McMullin, Helen Longino, and Deborah Mayo. We will examine how thought about what it means to be scientific has itself developed, especially from 1920 to the present. The course is taught by Christopher Eliot (Philosophy), and the CRN is 94153.

Electives offered for the minor during Fall 12 include ENGG 19 “Technology and Society” (Richard Jensen), PHI 10 “Introduction to Philosophy” (various instructors including Amy Karofsky and Mark McEvoy), PHI 91 “Technology and Human Values” (Ralph Acampora), and PHI 154 “Introduction to Symbolic Logic” (Christopher Eliot).

The Darwin Day event this year is Thursday, March 8, 2012 , and the topic is “Ancient Fossils, Regulatory Genes, and the Neurology of Language: New Frontiers in Evolution Science.” Faculty members presenting are Dr. J Bret Bennington (Geology), Dr. Russell Burke (Biology), and Dr. Patrick J. Gannon, (Science Education), Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine.

Location: The Helene Fortunoff Theater (Monroe Lecture Center, California Avenue, South Campus)
Time: 7:30 to 9 p.m.

Philosophy of ecology is a new and quickly developing research area in philosophy of science, and this book contains articles by some of the researchers working most on it. Ecology is an exciting area of biology for philosophers to engage, because its questions are important ones — like How much are biological systems on which we depend changing with global climate change? — and yet ecology is very different from physics. If there are laws of ecology at all, they have nothing like the precision that the laws of physics have. And there may be no laws. So, how do we recognize where ecologists have produced models we can trust? Some biologists themselves have been writing on that and related philosophy of science questions, too, like Steward Pickett et al’s 2007 Ecological Understanding: The Nature of Theory and the Theory of Nature.

My essay in the book takes up the question of whether, or in what sense, there are ecological communities — actual things corresponding to the units ecologists use to discuss groupings of multiple species, like “Beech-Maple Forest.” Environmental ethicists have suggested that conservation should focus on preserving communities, rather than just species. But if so, communities would probably need to be real things, not accidental collections. For example, the group of birds and squirrels that are within 100 yards of Heger Hall right now form an accidental collection. They don’t have any particularly special relationship to one another that a Cardinal 105 yards away is missing. So that is not an interesting community. It is not something anyone would want to preserve as a thing. But then, what is? What kinds of relationships do there need to be among parts to make up interesting wholes? -CE

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries science offered serious challenges to the idea that human beings have essences that define who they are through time. Yet, if humans don’t have essences, what determines that you’re the same person today you were ten years ago? What if all the cells in your body had been replaced by new ones during that time, so that no individual cell remained. Why are you still the same person? For that matter, since everything changes, what makes anything keep on being the same thing it has been — a tree emerging from a seed, a melting glacier, an exploding star?

Philosophers call this problem the problem of identity over time. If biology and chemistry challenged essences as a way of grounding personal identity, interpretations of quantum mechanics have called into question whether even a single particle of physics can have identity over time. Very spooky.

Philosopher Graham Priest (NYU/Melbourne) took on this problem in his visit to Hofstra on November 16. Drawing on some ideas from Buddhist philosophy, Priest argued that we can “embrace the groundlessness of things.” He spoke to a full lecture hall and visited with students.