The Epistemological Argument against Mathematical Platonism

An amended version of my "epistemological argument against mathematical platonism" (forthcoming in Bruce & Barbone, Just the Argument : 100 of the most important Arguments in Western Philosophy, Blackwell) can be read here : draft.

Une somme en français sur le darwinisme contemporain

Les Mondes darwiniens (Syllepses, 2009, 30 euros), sous la direction de Thomas Heams, Philippe Huneman, Guillaume Lecointre, Marc Silberstein, est une somme sur le darwinisme contemporain, y compris bien sûr les aspects théoriques fondamentaux (fonction, variation, espèce, etc), mais aussi l'enseignement de la théorie de l'évolution, le débat entre le créationnisme et le darwinisme, l'application du paradigme darwinien à d'autres champs de recherche (morale, éthique, linguistique, sciences humaines, etc). Une cinquantaine d'auteurs ont participé à la réalisation de cet ouvrage, indispensable pour tous les chercheurs et les étudiants travaillant sur des questions liées plus ou moins directement au darwinisme.

Notez que le livre est accompagné par un site intéressant : lesmondesdarwiniens, et que Florian Cova a réalisé un compte-rendu du livre sur NonFiction.

Paleontology is hot

Two important discoveries were made recently in Paleontology. Both are described in the lastest online issue of Nature. The first is all about the presence of the first tetrapod on earth : it seems they appeared 20 millions years before when we thought they had (400 millions and not 380 millions years before today). The second is about the discovery of a new human species, in Siberia, who share a common ancestor (homo erectus) with homo neandertalis and homo sapiens, and migrated before homo heidelbergensis, the ancestor of homo neandertalis, from Africa (between 300 000 and 500 000 years ago).

1) Tetrapod : an article in french (La Recherche) and a video on Nature.
2) New human species : Nature.

Both are really worth seeing and reading !

Aesthetic Realism is doomed

Voici le papier que Florian Cova et moi allons prononcer à l'Université de Louvain-la-Neuve, le 29 avril 2010, pour le colloque Arts en valeur : Le sens commun peut-il fonder le réalisme esthétique ? Enjoy !

Le Philosophe dans la Cité, Florian Cova et moi

Florian Cova et moi avons publié sur le site Philosophe dans la Cité. Il a fourni un intéressant article d'introduction à la philosophie morale dans la tradition analytique. Et j'ai proposé un article sur la manière dont Bouveresse interprète le postmodernisme et le post-structuralisme dans Rationalité et Cynisme.

Le Philosophe dans la Cité propose des documents remarquables, notamment le tout récent "La société et l'État chez Marx et Honneth" (Julien Rajaoson), ou des tables rondes (sur Entre d'eux, le 15 mai 2010, dans l'Amphithéâtre Guizot de la Sorbonne, avec l'auteur Céline Huot, et Laura-Maï Gaveriaux), etc. Mais aussi un blog, une École, des réflexions sur l'art et la littérature... Bref, un site très complet à découvrir.

Robert Sapolsky on the uniqueness of humans

Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist, is giving a lecture about the uniqueness of humans.



Discovered at OpenCulture.

Paraconsistent Foundations of Mathematics : a weblog.

Paraconsistent Foundations for Mathematics is a new blog created for a new project at the University of Melbourne. The project is under the direction of Pr. Graham Priest, Ass. Pr. Greg Restall, and a research associate Francesco Berto. Zach Weber is the author of the blog. I am looking forward to read the next posts !

(Introduction to Paraconsistent Logic.)

Descartes and his missing letters

A letter written by Descartes to Father Mersenne has been recently discovered. A very interesting letter indeed, because it is about the effects of censorship. All the story here.

DSM-V and debates about what is a mental disorder

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a manual of Psychiatry published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), is due in 2013. But, if you are interested in this topic, you can have a look at the APA website, where drafts of the articles (initial versions) written by the DSM-V group can be read and commented upon (until April 2010). The originality of the DSM is the fact that it does not only describe disorders, it gives the criteria to identify each disorder and a diagnosis. The definition of what is a mental disorder is at the core of this enterprise, and is the topic of many debate about the DSM.

The third version, the DSM-III (1980), was strongly orientated by an operationalist definition of what is a mental disorder. Spitzer and Endicott (DSM-III's editors) were influenced by the work of C. Hempel in Philosophy of Science. According to this approach, in order to define what is a mental disorder, we only need the experimental procedures which enable us to tell the conditions through which the concept can be applied. If we want to define what is cerebral activity, we only need to say that a subject has a cerebral activity iff, linked to encephalograph, we see indications of his brain activities on an encephalogramm. The authors tried to define mental disorder according to the operationalist approach. Of course, the main points of this strategy were to avoid any circular definition based on normality and to use the means provides by an empirical approach. As Spitzer said, mental illnesses are subcategories of medical disorders.

Wakefield, in his famous 1992 paper, shows that the DSM-III's idea of mental illness is at its core fonctionalist and not at all operationalist, by reinterpretating the whole definition in fonctionalist terms. He holds an hybrid position, which takes into account 1) harm and sufferings according to social value and 2) dysfunction, based in evolutionary theory. Wakefield's remarks were taken into account by the committee of specialists of mental health who enclosed a clinical criterion among the official criteria to define mental illness in the DSM-IV ("distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning"), published in 1994.

So, what's new in the DSM-V ? 5 criteria are featured to define mental illness. Here they are :

1. A behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual.
2. The consequences of which are clinically significant distress (e.g., a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more important areas of functioning).
3. Must not be merely an expectable response to common stressors and losses (for example, the loss of a loved one) or a culturally sanctioned response to a particular event (for example, trance states in religious rituals).
4. That reflects an underlying psychobiological dysfunction.
5. That is not primarily a result of social deviance or conflicts with society.

First, the emphasis on the biological nature of a mental disorder is obvious (criterion 4), and is absent from the DSM-IV (here are the criteria of the DSM-IV). Second, the etiology is more and more evacuated from the criteria. Compare : "Is associated with present distress (e.g., a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more important areas of functioning) or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom", in the DSM-IV, and "The consequences of which are clinically significant distress;(e.g., a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more important areas of functioning)" in the DSM-V. The notion of risk (for the present distress or the disability to be the cause of death and pain) has disappeared. Third, the intensity of pain is taken into account into the DSM-V, which was not in the DSM-IV. Compare : "present distress" in the DSM-IV and "clinically significant distress" in the DSM-V. No universal scale is needed for this kind of scale. To be clinically significant, the scale is standardized by the patient himself.

Of course, all the anti-rationalists and all the anti-naturalists in the field of Psychiatry will be infuriated by the publication of the DSM-V. And it is not difficult to see why. I suppose that, as always, anti-DSM will state that the DSM-V is the product of the Western thought, that it holds a dogmatic approach, that it cannot account for behavior and disorder in non-Western areas of the World, and that it mixes up social features and behavioral syndromes. I wonder how long will they use the ineffective sophism of the origin to address the DSM. I wonder how long will they use old data (the debate about the presence of homosexuality in the DSM-II, in the 1960's and 1970's) to produce relevant, up-to-date and fruitful critics.


See also :
An article, by Anna Lieti, in Le Temps (19 février 2010) : "Tous des malades mentaux".
Wakefield, J. C, 1992, “The Concept of Mental Disorder: On the Boundary Between Biological Facts and Social Values.” American Psychologist 47:(3) 373–88.
Mental illness (SEP)

Philosophy and Human Evolution. Is it right to Clone a Neandertal ?

As it is shown in "Should we clone neandertals", we are facing a unique moment in the human history : the possibility to give a second chance to an old relative of ours, Homo neandertalensis, is within our reach. In the article, the author, Zach Zorich, analyses several issues concerning this possibility : biological, ethical and legal.


First things first. How are we (Homo sapiens) related to Homo neandertalensis ?

Our direct and common ancestor is Homo heidelbergensis, an extinct species of the genus Homo, who lived less than 1 million years ago. Sometimes in the last 450 000 years, Homo neandertalis appeared and became distinct from Homo heidelbergensis. Neandertals may have disappeared 35 000 years ago. The modern Homo sapiens may have appeared 160 000 years ago and is now the only living species of the genus Homo.


Why re-create Neandertals ?

Scientists have two reasons :

1. Knowledge : the more we know about Homo neandertalensis, the more we know about Homo sapiens. By re-creating a Neandertal, we can have the answers of many questions concerning our species and the genus Homo : Did all the members of Homo possess language ? (The fact that Homo neandertalensis possess the genetic ability -he possess the gene FOXP2-  is not a sufficient for having a language -birds have FOXP2 too-.) Were all members of Homo able to produce highly sophisticated reasonings ? Who was the smarter ? And so on.
2. Therapy : If Homo neandertalensis is sufficiently distinct from us, he may be immunized to Homo sapiens specific diseases, such as HIV, Polio... Neandertals cells would be use to find cure, through gene treatments.

How can we re-create Neandertals ?

If the author asks the question "Should we Clone Neandertals ?", it is because he is taking seriously the latest technical progress, which put in our hands the very possibility to do so. According to the author, there are several possibilities : altering the DNA of the Neandertals to make it compatible with a living human cell (but this would required, according to George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, "10 million changes to make a modern human genome match the Neanderthal genome") ; transfering the DNA of the Neandertal in an donor egg, from which the cell's genetic material has been removed (but most frequently, the cell dies) ; creating stem cells that have Neandertals' DNA, and, from the state of pluripotency of the cell, creating parts of a body or a living Neandertal. And it is highly probable that this last solution may work.

Are the reasons to clone Neandertals sufficient to do so ?

The author shows several arguments against the cloning of a Neandertal. For Bernard Rollin, a bioethicist and professor of philosophy at Colorado State University, it would be unfair to put a human into an environnment in which he does not belong. That is precisely why scientists considered the possibility to clone not only one, but a group of Neandertals, and the possibility to re-create their entire environnment. But is it right ?

For Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, the fact that the Neandertal has access to human rights will automatically undermined the reasons why he has been created. Well, if cloning a Neandertal is not a paradox, I am no philosopher. From a scientific, medical, and legal point of view, if a Neandertal is cloned, since he has access to every human rights, he cannot be experimented upon and studied according to the willing of the scientists. Thus the reason why scientists want the Neandertal to be cloned is the cause that he can neither be the object of scientific and medical experimentations. Even the success or the failing of the cloning is a paradox : from a legal and ethical point of view, if we succeed to clone a Neandertal, then, since he has immediate access to human rights, it is not right. But if the cloning fails, since he has immediate access to human rights, he is the victim of a murder.

This is why the alleged-reasons are not sufficient. But, since a mammoth is currently being cloned or will soon be, some scientists do not see why we should not clone a Neandertal...