In Chapter 7, I focus on the ‘conventionalist threat’ against the account presented in this book. I present Warren’s conventionalist account of mathematics and discuss Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics and its debated conventionalism. I identify strict conventionalism according to which mathematical truths are fundamentally arbitrary as the main threat against the present account. I then show that, due to arithmetic’s foundations in the evolutionarily developed proto-arithmetical abilities, my account survives the conventionalist threat. Arithmetical knowledge, under the present understanding, is maximally inter-subjective, which is enough to deal with the threat of arbitrariness. I then discuss the nature of mathematical conventions further, pointing out their importance without succumbing to the view that arithmetic is fundamentally based only on conventions.

● Darwin invented the concept of group selection to explain the evolution of traits that lead individuals to improve the fitnesses of others at a fitness cost to self. Such traits are now called “altruistic.” ● Understanding Simpson’s paradox is key to understanding how natural selection can cause altruism to increase in frequency in a meta-population. ● A criterion is derived for when altruism is fitter than selfishness in a meta-population in which there are groups of size 2. The relevance of correlation and genealogical relatedness to the evolution of altruism is discussed, as is the question of whether reciprocal altruism is really a form of selfishness. ● The concepts of cultural group selection and species selection require further refinements in how group fitness needs to be understood. ● In addition to individual selection and group selection, there is a third unit of selection – intragenomic conflict. Meiotic drive is a classic example. ● The reductionist thesis that group and individual selection reduce to selection on genes is criticized, as are conventionalist theses that assert that it is a matter of convenience, not biological fact, whether group selection occurs in a population.

This chapter deals with the relationship between the rule of recognition of a legal system and the material constitution. While the former concerns the ultimate criteria to identify the law, the material constitution points to those of such criteria (rules) that are supreme within a legal order. We contend that the material constitutions can be conceptualised as the ’original constitution’. Instead, we propose understanding it as a facet of the rule of recognition. Thus intended, this notion can help illuminate the complex interplay between written and unwritten constitutional rules. Moreover, after casting doubts on the idea of the material constitution as a descriptive device to detect the ordering forces within society, we sketch the contours of a material constitution based on a normative political conception of the rule of recognition. The normative presupposition of such a conception is a strong linkage between the individuation/acceptance of the law by laypeople and the existence of a given constitutional order. In virtue of such a strong linkage, the material constitution, as a legal notion, enjoys a specific normative legitimacy within a legal order. In pluralistic contemporary societies, such legitimacy hinges fundamentally on democratic/procedural principles rather than substantive goals.

This chapter discusses the polemical works that Pufendorf wrote in response to the violent criticisms directed against his main natural law work, the Law of Nature and Nations. Pufendorf collected these controversial writings under the title Eris Scandica (Scandinavian dispute) in 1686. Despite being indispensable for the reconstruction of Pufendorf’s thought, and notwithstanding its great success among his contemporaries, this work is one of the least known and used works by scholars of natural law. In beginning to make good this deficit the present chapter offers insights not only into the philosophical arguments of our author, but also into his formidable satirical style, at once strongly contentious and imaginative. Much of the ferocity of the disputes is explained by the fact that Pufendorf’s enemies were actually accusing him of heresy, which helps to clarify the centrality of the work’s philosophical-theological themes and the violence of Pufendorf’s reaction. In presenting the variety of philosophical issues covered in Eris Scandica, the chapter covers not only the classic themes of natural law—state of nature, moral entities, obligation—but also elucidates Pufendorf’s views of the relation between philosophical reason and Christian philosophy, thence philosophy and theology, and his stance towards Cartesianism.

The study of addiction throws up a wide range of philosophical issues, connecting with some of the deepest and longest-running debates in ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, to name but a few subdisciplinary areas. By straddling such a wide range of fields of scientific enquiry, as this Handbook demonstrates, it also throws up numerous conceptual, explanatory, and methodological quandaries between disciplines, of the sort that philosophers have over the years developed many tools to deal with and reconcile. In this chapter, I first summarize some early philosophical treatments of addiction, as well as descriptions of addiction among the ancient philosophers themselves, before considering some of the major philosophical debates with which the study of addiction intersects, and the significance of those debates and intersections for the understanding of addiction in other disciplines.

Focusing primarily on descriptive phenotypes for psychopathology, this chapter reviews the history and philosophy of operational definitions, emphasizing their provisional nature under the auspices of open concepts. It also reintroduces an important feature of operational definitions as originally proposed, namely the role of conventions in both defining and redefining the meaning of empirical concepts. It tentatively suggests that a shift toward a scientific realist conception of construct validation had the perhaps unintended consequence of obscuring the intrinsically provisional nature of concepts for psychological phenotypes. It explicates open concepts with the examples of schizophrenia, the five factor model of personality, and endophenotypes.