Taking An Anti-Reductionist Turn

Lewis

'Philosophy is often a matter of finding a suitable context in which to say the obvious.'

Iris Murdoch

'The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.'

Bertrand Russell

From whence I come

BSc - Human BiologyPhD - Anatomy

MA - History of Philosophy

'My research is concerned with exploring the biological and

philosophical aspects of the concepts of disease and health and considering the uses and applications of these findings.'

An essentialist position holds that not all of an object's properties are of equal signification – that is, some are

essential to its being what it is, whereas others are accidental. For example, one might argue that the

possession of pages is an essential feature if we are to call something a book, whereas the precise colour of those pages is accidental. The main problem with an

essentialist position is that of establishing the grounds upon which to base the distinctions one makes between essential and accidental features. It does not necessarily

follow that what one 'knows' intuitively can be easily supported by a rational argument. There are always

'what ifs' with which to contend.

'Historically, the focus of philosophical interest in medicine has been on its ethics, to the neglect of its logic, epistemology, and metaphysics. As a result, no philosophy of medicine exists comparable to the extant philosophies of science, law, religion, politics, history, or art.'

Edmund Pellegrino

'Darwinian medicine is the enterprise of trying to find evolutionary explanations for vulnerabilities to disease.'

Randolph Nesse

Nesse contends that since, according to Dobzhansky 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution', the same must also be true of medicine since biology is a basic science underpinning medicine.

What is it like to be exposed to selection pressures?

What forms do such pressures takein daily life?

How do we even begin to investigate questions such as these?

'As taught in Nat Sci 2, science was a liberal art, a way of knowing. We were taught how, through science, we could go about answering important philosophical questions ... There science facilitated the query of profound questions where philosophy and science merge ...'

Lynn Margulis

It seems to be physics that most often gets associated with the really questions about 'life, the universe and everything'.While there may be some perks to studying physics …

… of the sciences, it is biology that may be best suited to the enterprise to which Margulis refers.

However,

it depends very much on the way in which it is undertaken.

It's not just a matter of worrying about words.What is needed is a philosophy of the object.

(à la Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995))

What I did most recently.(i.e. the last couple of weeks)

Where I'm going

To be a Lockeone must also learn from Hume