110th Anniversary of the Department of Philosophy（1912-2022）

Friday Lectures

Prof. Paul Griffiths

(University of Sydney, Australia)

2022年9月22日（周四）下午15:00 报告：

Can Biological Traits Be Explained

By Their Biological Functions

In this lecture I will challenge the most popular program in contemporary philosophy for reducing normative facts to biological facts. Many philosophers have argued that biological traits have biological functions and that they exist because they have these functions.  This idea has been used in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine and elsewhere to make sense of the idea that there are norms governing biological traits – they can succeed or fail to perform their biological functions. Philosophers have argued that the biological functions of traits define what it is for those traits to function correctly because they explain why those traits exist: the traits evolved by natural selection because they performed these functions.  I will show, however, that ‘biological functions’ as currently defined by philosophers explain the existence of traits only in some simple cases. This is because philosophical definitions of function extract from any evolutionary scenario only the information that would be explanatorily relevant in certain simple evolutionary scenarios implicitly assumed by those definitions. When applied to more complex (bit entirely realistic) scenarios the functions assigned by these definitions omit the key information that is explanatorily relevant in those more complex scenarios.

2022年9月23日(周五)下午15:00将报告：

Rethinking Adaptationism

Evolutionary biology is often accused of ‘adaptationism’. Examining actual examples of optimality-based reasoning in biology undermines the idea that ‘natural selection’ and ‘non-adaptive evolutionary processes’ are competing explanations of biological form. This in turn undermines the standard philosophical analysis of ‘adaptationism’ as overemphasis on natural selection to the exclusion of these other processes, such as constraint and stochasticity. In light of this I propose a new and more useful definition of ‘adaptationism’. ‘Adaptationism’ is the view that the traits we observe in living organisms can be explained by our current best models of evolution on by natural selection.

所有报告和讨论将在北京大学外国哲学研究所（老化学楼）227房间以及线上Zoom会议室同步进行。