New Book Promo (Short video trailer)

 

...coming summer 2026.

Cheers, 

Colin

20 Year Anniversary! (new YouTube Channel)

 

Twenty years ago this week I created this blog (here is that first post).  It amazes me that that was 20 years ago, the time seems to have flew by in the bat of an eye.

I have really benefitted from this blog, treating it as a space to file interesting scientific studies I wanted to catalogue, as well as testing out ideas that eventually became journal articles and books.

After 20 years on this blog I have decide to take the journey of my intellectual development in a new and exciting direction....  I have launched a new YouTube Channel entitled "The Intellect's Cove".  

After painting the wall in my spare room, and acquiring some equipment, I have already posted a few videos, including this intro video.

Over the summer months I plan to post a video about each chapter of my forthcoming book on longevity science.  So if you have enjoyed checking out this blog over the past 20 years, I invite you to subscribe to my new YouTube channel and stay up-to-date on my research interests and teaching with 1-2 videos I expect to post each month.  And thanks for checking in on this blog!

Cheers, 

Colin

Contributing to Philosophical Biology

BioScience has this interesting article on the philosophy of biology.  Of particular note is the following list of suggestions for philosophers:

Suggestions for philosophers who want to contribute to philosophical biology

1. Justify engagement with philosophical biology by its capacity to improve biology. Do not justify engagement with a topic by pointing to its interest to philosophers, or by a generic appeal to interdisciplinarity, or by apparent thematic overlap.

2. Understand that conceptual analysis needs to make a difference to scientific reasoning and practice. The development and clarification of biological concepts is best when based upon actual biology as opposed to imaginary counterfactual scenarios and thought experiments (Hull 1989).

3. Attain at least the level of comprehension of biology possessed by a senior undergraduate major in biology.

4. Publish normative claims about biology in biology journals, not just in philosophy journals.

5. Attend and present work at biology conferences. Collaborate with biologists.

6. Ensure that articles or books about a philosophical issue in biology are reviewed by a biologist with relevant expertise.

7. Do not claim what author X means (without documentation), as in “what Smith really means here is ….” Accept potential ambiguity as a part of human communication.

8. Anchor a descriptive claim about biology in the actual practice of biology (De Regt and Dieks 2005). Engage with current biology and not just biological authorities from the past (e.g., Darwin).

9. Understand that claims by biologists need to be understood in their social and historical context in addition to their epistemic context.

10. Avoid appeals to authority of biologists just because they support POB as an endeavor. (p.6)

Cheers, 

Colin 

RIP Habermas (1929-2026)

I was sad to hear the news that one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century passed away- the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. His passing elicited in me some thoughts about how the intellectual culture which helped create, and celebrate, such an innovative, ambitious thinker has changed.  I wrote my thoughts out below for this blog post.

I first encountered the work of Habermas while an MA student back in the mid 1990s.  I never took a university course that covered, in any depth, the work of Habermas.  His name would come up in different classes, and then one of my graduate supervisors suggested he might be someone I wanted to engage with given the embryonic ideas I was developing for my MA thesis.  That project involved defending free speech from a commitment to the pragmatics of dialogue.  Habermas's Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action had just been published in English a few years earlier.  

As I read through that book I felt like the universe had delivered Habermas to me at precisely that time to provide me with the theoretical commitments I needed to develop and defend my MA thesis!  The academic year of 1995/1996, a year devoted primarily to researching and writing my MA thesis, was so critical to my intellectual development.  

When I proposed my potential PhD thesis the following year I initially intended to explore Habermas for it.  In the summer after my MA thesis I enrolled in an introduction to German language course but dropped out as I found it too difficult.  In my first year of the PhD program I had proposed the faculty and students in our reading group read through Habermas's new book Between Facts and Norms, which had just been published that year.

However, that book proved a very challenging read.  And that same year I began to learn about John Rawls, and the exchange between Rawls and Habermas in the Journal of Philosophy.  I found Rawls's social contract theory a bit easier to comprehend and engage with.  But Habermas was the thinker that lead me to Rawls (for many it was the other way around), and I think that played a substantive part in my eventual departure from the Rawlsian project. 

For many years my research then developed in ways that had minimal contact or engagement with that of Habermas.  But my path crossed his again when he published The Future of Human Nature in the early 2000s.  

By that time I had already devoted most of my post-PhD research to studying and writing about the impact of the genetic revolution.  This was a bit of an intellectual risk for me, as it was not (and still isn't) a topic of interest to most political theorists.  But having a heavy-weight like Habermas engage with these topics, even if I disagreed with much of what he argued, was a major source of both inspiration and reassurance that these were important issues that political theorists should address. 

Habermas was my first intellectual "crush", and in many ways I consider him one of my "intellectual grandfathers".  As a 25 year old grad student reading Habermas's research on discourse ethics was one of the most transformative experiences of my intellectual life.  Which leads me to some broader reflections on how things have changed in academia and society more generally, over the past few decades.  

I see Habermas as a figure who represents the last of an intellectual era in two important respects.  Firstly, he was a creative and ambitious thinker who wrote great works of philosophy that spoke to a large audience.  The professional norms that came to dominant the field by the 1990s, with the proliferation of publication venues, department rankings, sub-field specializations, etc.  incentivized the inward specialization which, in my opinion, narrowed (rather than expanded) the intellectual interests and problem-solving tool-kit of philosophy.  Habermas's work pre-dated that era, which I think is a main reason why his work will remain a work "for the ages". 

Habermas is also the last of the tradition of public intellectuals who were relevantly well known for the ideas he published in scholarly works covering decades of research versus tweets or social media posts.  The latter has also, in my opinion, had a corrosive impact on the field.  Habermas would have never developed his creative ideas had he been preoccupied with reducing his communication to the size of a "tweet" and being preoccupied only with the problems dominating the news/ social media of his day.  

When I think about the reasons I am so saddened by the news of Habermas's passing, my feelings extend beyond the loss of just him as one intellectual and scholar.  I am sad for the passing of the culture and time that made someone like Habermas possible in the first place.  That is not to say it is not possible for an intellectual giant on par with him to emerge today.  But I do believe the changes in the norms and practices of academia, as well as technology and society, have altered the intellectual landscape in significant ways.  Making it unlikely that someone with Habermas-like potential could spend many decades developing and refining such creative and ambitious ideas.  

The world of ideas was meaningfully impacted in a positive way by having had the good fortune to have enjoyed Habermas an active participate for so many decades.  Let his example inspire the public intellectuals and philosophers of tomorrow. 

Cheers, 

Colin 

Rule #31

Yesterday I came across this excellent 1997 essay by the sociologist Gary Marx.  Brilliant description of the moral imperatives of intellectual inquiry.

Cheers, 

Colin

Nature Commentary on AI

 

Nature has this excellent comment on AI I wanted to make a note of for future reference. A sample:

Intelligence, as we have seen, does not require strong autonomy — a finding that complicates debates about legal and moral responsibility of artificial-intelligence systems, which often assume the two go together. We need more careful, empirically grounded ways to assess and establish responsibility for AI. Furthermore, conventional methods of governance are unlikely to work for AGI, precisely because of its generality. Technology is typically governed on the basis of its possible uses, but AGI can be used almost anywhere.

Cheers, 

Colin

Apes Share Human Ability ot Imagine

So says the title of this news alert .  

Such research is of particular interest to me as I now revive a decade-old research project on play, which I had to put on the back shelf while working my book on aging (though it also is importantly linked to that theme as well).

Nature news has the scoop on this study as well.

And the paper in Science is here.  The abstract:

Secondary representations enable our minds to depart from the here-and-now and generate imaginary, hypothetical, or alternate possibilities that are decoupled from reality, supporting many of our richest cognitive capacities such as mental-state attribution, simulation of possible futures, and pretense. We present experimental evidence that a nonhuman primate can represent pretend objects. Kanzi, a lexigram-trained bonobo, correctly identified the location of pretend objects (e.g., “juice” poured between empty containers), in response to verbal prompts in scaffolded pretense interactions. Across three experiments, we conceptually replicated this finding and excluded key alternative explanations. Our findings suggest that the capacity to form secondary representations of pretend objects is within the cognitive potential of, at least, an enculturated ape and likely dates back 6 to 9 million years, to our common evolutionary ancestors.

Cheers, 

Colin