Kant on Touch, Embodied Activity, and the Perception of Causal Force

In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant claims that perception of force through touch is fundamental to our knowledge of substance in space. However, he also holds that perception cannot have modal content. Causation is a modal notion, so how can Kant allow perception of causal force? In response to this puzzle, I provide a new reading of Kant’s theory of touch. Touch does not involve perception of the necessity of a cause, but it does involve awareness of the activity of our body in relation to other bodies. Human embodied activity has a hitherto unrecognized central role in Kant’s accounts of empirical cognition of substance in space, the science of such a substance, and the irreducibility of its causal forces.

Mind the step: did Hooker's judgement clinch Darwin's disenchantment?

The decade from 1844 to 1854 in which Charles Darwin first published two books and then studied barnacles for the final eight years has long been a puzzling digression from the development of his theory of evolution. This essay proposes that it was a conjunction of two quite different activities: a three-year pause initiated to assess and hopefully finalize the editorial completion of his 1844 Essay for publication, followed by a step-change decision to redirect his primary research activity in late 1847. A disenchantment hypothesis is proposed; it presents the step-change decision as a consequence of weighing up the accumulated unencouraging prospects for species-theory development in competition with the emergence of promising projections associated with a broad study of marine invertebrates. Recognition of the triumph, as Darwin initially saw it, of his Essay, followed by years of hostile inputs, opens this new route to understanding this decade. Within it Joseph Hooker emerges as a significant causal force. Many of the customary ‘postponement’ explanations of this digression can be integrated with this pause-and-step-change explanation, whereas explanation of the interval as a gap due to a pre-planned activity cannot, and is revealed to be seriously faulty.

The Pathological Pressure to Predict

The premier technocrats of our age, neoclassical economists, are poorly equipped to balance homogenizing forces against heterogeneous ideas, as economists altogether ignore agents’ ideas. They do so by attributing to agents the automatic ability to act optimally, effacing the agents’ need to interpret their circumstances and thus the possibility that the ideas on which their interpretations are based will be mistaken. An error-free agent—meaning, for practical purposes, one whose interpretation of her circumstances matches that of the economist—is an agent whose actions the economist can conveniently predict. Similarly, attempts by economists of information and behavioral economists to render economics more realistic overlook ideational heterogeneity and the fact that ideas must form interpretations before they can guide actions. Thus, the agent depicted by these types of economist remains predictable despite the information asymmetries and putative irrationality identified in these literature. Even the recent shift toward empiricism in economics relies on an undertheorized positivism that, again, ignores the causal force of ideational heterogeneity. Nontechnocratic research in social psychology, however, suggests that the neglect of people’s ideas is not unique to economists, posing a wider cultural problem for technocracy—but also the hope that ideational changes might lead to a judicious form of technocratic governance.

Reconstructing Chrysippus’ Cosmological Hypothesis. On Plut. Stoic. rep. 1054c–d

Two literal quotations from Chrysippus’ On Possibles, preserved in Plutarch’s On the Contradictions of the Stoics, seem to contradict the Stoic thesis of the isotropy of the void. According to this thesis the void is an infinite undifferentiated expanse (a wide continuous area) whose center is marked by, and coincides with, the position of the world. Since there is nothing else outside the world, the cohesive force that pervades it is sufficient on its own to guarantee the quasi–indestructibility of the trans–cyclical διακόσμησις (i.e the fact that in the new cosmic cycle the διακόσμησις returns in a form identical to the one it had in the previous cosmic cycle) and the eternity of the οὐσία. Conversely, in these two quotations Chrysippus maintains that there is a central διαφορά equipped with causal force. This seems to imply the anisotropy of the void. Chrysippus’s view here is also at odds with another official Stoic thesis, i.e. that the incorporeal is causally inert. In this paper it will be argued that there is in fact no contradiction, because, in those two quotations, Chrysippus consciously develops a cosmological hypothesis in order to resolve a difficulty concerning the role of fire during the universal conflagration. Chrysippus’ solution to this difficulty belongs to modal logic and consists in distinguishing between the actual universe and the possible ones.

FORMALISING ARISTOCRATIC POWER IN ROYALACTAIN LATE TWELFTH- AND EARLY THIRTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE AND SCOTLAND

ABSTRACTOur understanding of the development of secular institutional governments in Europe during the central Middle Ages has long been shaped by an implicit or explicit opposition between royal and lay aristocratic power. That is to say, the growth of public, institutional and/or bureaucratic central authorities involved the decline and/or exclusion of noble aristocratic power, which thus necessarily operated in a zero-sum game. While much research has shown that this conflict-driven narrative is problematic, it remains in our understanding as a rather shadowy but still powerful causal force of governmental development during this period. This paper compares the changing conceptualisation of the relationship between royal and aristocratic power in the French and Scottish kingdoms to demonstrate, first, how narratives built at the periphery of Europe have important contributions and challenges to make to those formed from the core areas of Europe and, second, that state formation did not involve a decline in aristocratic power. Instead, the evidence from royalactain both kingdoms shows that aristocratic power was formalised at a central level, and then built into the forms of government which were emerging in very different ways in both kingdoms in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Set in broader perspective, this suggests that governmental development involved an intensification of existing structures of elite power, not a diminution.

Observations, Narrative, and Data in Nineteenth-Century Asylum Medicine

French asylum doctor Ludger Lunier’s effort to measure the causal force of war and revolution in the production of insanity involved reasoning from data in an unfamiliar form. Lunier built up what we can call a medical database from an accumulation of about four hundred compact case narratives, some of them based on his direct experience. Although the conclusions he sought were purely quantitative ones, he returned repeatedly to these elemental accounts of the genesis of madness. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Histories of Data and the Database edited by Soraya de Chadarevian and Theodore M. Porter.

Causality, Agency, and the Limits of Medicine

The difference between ancient Greek medicine and ancient Greek philosophy has often been seen by scholars in terms of two targets of expertise: the body and the soul. In this paper, I argue that we can better understand the boundaries between medicine and philosophy in antiquity by focusing instead on the difference between causes and motivations (or causes and desires). The reason is this. It is not the case that the writers of the Hippocratic Corpus are uninterested in the soul (psychē). They are, however, reluctant to address their therapies to expressions of the patient’s own agency, despite tacitly acknowledging such agency as a causal force that cannot be reduced to the automatic behavior of the body. I go on to show how thinkers like Plato and Democritus zero in on the problem of perverted desires as part of a strategy of establishing a new domain of therapy, a domain that comes to be classified as the therapy of the soul.

La extensión de la Síntesis Biológica y sus implicaciones para la noción de especie

RESUMENEl debate sobre la noción de especie se viene produciendo en dos planos. En el plano conceptual y en el ontológico. Respecto del primero, se han analizado las ventajas y desventajas de diversos conceptos de especie (biológico, fenético, ecológico, filogenético…). En el plano ontológico se discute si las especies son clases, individuos o algún otro tipo de entidad. Ambos debates has estado marcados durante casi medio siglo por el puesto central que ocupaba el nivel genético. Con la extensión de la síntesis biológica producida en las dos últimas décadas, el gen empieza a perder al lugar central y privilegiado que ocupaba, como causa y explicación de todo fenómeno biológico. Comenzamos ahora a reconocer la importancia ontológica y causal de otros niveles de la jerarquía biológica. Pensamos que este cambio de perspectiva afectará al debate sobre lanoción de especie, tanto en el plano conceptual como en el ontológico. Todavía no estamos en disposición de ofrecer conclusiones cerradas, pero sí de vislumbrar el rumbo que tomará de ahora en adelante el debate de las especies. Estimamos probable que tengamos que convivir indefinidamente con una pluralidad de conceptos de especies. Y en el plano ontológico proponemosun tipo de pluralismo no homogéneo, con reconocimiento de entidad y fuerza causal a los diversos niveles de organización biológica, desde el gen hasta el ecosistema, incluyendo posiblemente la especie, pero no otorgándoles el mismo peso a cada uno.PALABRAS CLAVESCONCEPTO BIOLÓGICO DE ESPECIE, GEN, ESPECIE COMO INDIVIDUOABSTRACTThe debate on the notion of species has been occurring in two realms: conceptual and ontological. Regarding the former, the biologists have analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of various concepts of species (biological, phenetic, ecological, phylogenetic...). In the ontological realm, biologists and philosophers have discussed whether species are classes, individuals or some other entity. For nearly half a century, both debates have been marked by the prominent role of the genetic level. With the extension of the biological synthesis produced in the last two decades, the gene begins to lose its privileged place as cause and explanation of every biological phenomenon. We now begin to recognize the importance of other ontological and causal levels along the biological hierarchy. We think that this change of perspective will affect the debate on the notion of species, both in the conceptual and ontological realms. We are not yet able to offer definitive conclusions, but we will shine a light on the future direction of the debate on the notion of species. We estimate that we have probably to live indefinitely with a plurality of concepts of species. And, regarding the ontological plane, we would propose a non-homogeneous pluralism. Probably we will be forced to recognize causal force and ontological weight to entities of various levels, from the gene to the ecosystem, possibly including species, although not according the same weight to each one.KEYWORDSBIOLOGICAL CONCEPT OF SPECIES, GEN, SPECIES AS INDIVIDUAl