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By Peter Railton After being shown proudly around the campus of a prestigious American university built in gothic style, Bertrand Russell is said to have exclaimed, “Remarkable. As near Oxford as monkeys can make.” Much earlier, Immanuel Kant had expressed a less ironic amazement, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and Continue reading Moral Camouflage or Moral Monkeys? by: William L. Benzon Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which humanity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sign to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged Continue reading Cultural Evolution: A Vehicle for Cooperative Interaction Between the Sciences and the Humanities by: Dame Gillian Beer Darwin’s radical new history of the world did not give a central place to the human. It challenged human exceptionalism and emphasised what was shared, across all organisms extant and extinct. He thought of himself initially as a geologist, so was constantly alert to the ghosting presence of past life forms, visible Continue reading Late Darwin and the Problem of the Human by Elliott Sober This is a précis of an argument that I developed in an article called “Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?” The article was published in 2009 and may be found on my web set at http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/recent.html. An expanded version of the argument is the first chapter of a book that Continue reading Common Ancestry and Natural Selection in Darwin’s Origin by Margaret Boden Creativity and computers: what could these possibly have to do with one another? “Nothing!,” many people would say. The two are simply incompatible.” Well, I disagree. Computers and creativity make interesting partners with respect to two different projects. One, which interests me the most, is understanding human creativity. The other is trying to produce Continue reading Can computer models help us to understand human creativity? by Harriet Ritvo Although humanism itself has often been controversial, until recently there has been a fair amount of consensus about the denotation of “human” among practitioners and critics. This consensus has been notably durable. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the first three senses of “human” distinguish “mankind” from animals, from “mere objects or events,” and Continue reading Humans and Humanists (and Scientists) by Karen B. Strier I have been studying the same group of monkeys, known as northern muriquis, in a small forest in southeastern Brazil for nearly 28 years. When I began my research they were called Brachyteles arachnoides. Subsequently, and within the lifetimes of many of the individuals in my original study group, they were Continue reading The Challenge of Comparisons in Primatology |
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