The Seminars of Philosophy of Perception, Mind, and Language
The Seminars of Perception, Mind, and Language (former Seminars of Philosophy of Language and Mind) take place every year since 2001 at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Milan. The meetings aim at being an opportunity for people working in analytic philosophy to debate the latest directions of research.
The meetings are structured as a 45-50 minutes presentation, followed by an extensive discussion time. They are open to anyone interested in the topic, especially undergraduate and Ph.D. students. The language of the talks is either Italian or English.
Elena Casetta (CFCUL - Centre for Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon)
March 24 MON — 12.30-14.30
Sala Riunioni — Direzione del Dipartimento (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)
Biodiversity Surgery
Elena Casetta & Jorge L.M. da Silva
Abstract: In his foundational article, “What Is Conservation Biology?” (1985), Michael Soulé explains that Conservation biology is often a crisis discipline and claims that its relation to biology or ecology “is analogous to that of surgery to physiology and war to political science. In crisis disciplines, one must act before knowing all the facts; crisis disciplines are thus a mixture of science and art, and their pursuit requires intuition as well as information.” This presentation is about such surgery. Firstly, some data about the so-called “Big Sixth”—the disease at issue and its severity—will be presented. Then epistemic and epistemological difficulties of the initial phases of the surgery, namely extinction assessment and conservation prioritization, will be pointed out. In conclusion, it will be suggested that the extent of these difficulties is of such significance to require a thorough re-assessment of the very nature of the patients, i.e., outside the metaphor, of the concept of species.