Session 1 Abstracts

10:30–11:00 Vincent Bicego – Object(ives): Embedding Indigenous Perspectives (EIP) into Art + Design curriculum

11:00–11:30 John Wilkins – The Philosophers Universal Topick: What makes a phenomenon significant?

11:30–12:00 Ge Fang – A focus on persistence for cultural evolution

Vincent Bicego

Object(ives): Embedding Indigenous Perspectives (EIP) into Art + Design curriculum

This paper considers how Indigenous perspectives were embedded in a first year undergraduate art and design subject titled “100 Objects That Changed the World”. This subject was first offered in the Autumn session of 2020 in the School of Arts, English and Media at the University of Wollongong, and taught again in 2021.

Committed to Reconciliation, the teaching team wanted to design a subject that would be inclusive of Australian Indigenous cultures and histories. To ensure that this inclusion was not simply tokenistic, the subject needed to address the Eurocentric meta-narratives that have traditionally excluded non-Western world views and practices from the sciences and humanities. Inventions and discoveries that continue to be considered indicators of Western cultural superiority needed particular scrutiny.

I argue that a methodological use of ‘revised historical materialism’ and ‘human ecology,’ alongside other streams of critical theory such as postcolonialism, feminism and ecocriticism, allowed non-Western perspectives generally, and Australian Indigenous perspectives particularly, to effectively shape the course material. At a time when there are increased calls for artists and scientists to work together, “100 Objects” introduces Art and Design students to theoretical tools for achieving genuinely inclusive and critically-engaged design outcomes.

Vincent Bicego was awarded Doctor of Philosophy in 2017 from the University of Wollongong for his interdisciplinary dissertation, “ReDreaming Dharawal,” which explored the Aboriginal art traditions of greater southern Sydney in relation to cultural constructs of landscape. From 2017–2019 he was Research Assistant for the Faculty of Business as part of Jindaola, an interfaculty project that aims to embed Indigenous perspectives across the UOW university curriculum. Vincent has taught art history and theory subjects as a casual academic in the School of Arts, English and Media since 2009. His research focuses are contemporary Indigenous engagement with rock art, and localised experiences of the Anthropocene.

John Wilkins

The Philosophers Universal Topick: What makes a phenomenon significant?

Scientists and philosophers routinely talk about phenomena, and the ways in which they relate to explanation, theory and practice in science. However, there are very few definitions of the term, which is often used synonymously with “data”, “model” and in older literature, “hypothesis”. In this paper I will attempt to clarify how phenomena are recognised, categorised and the role they play in scientific epistemology. I conclude that phenomena are not necessarily theory-based commitments, but that they are what explanations are called to account for, and which are not presently explained.

John Wilkins completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2004. He has researched and taught at the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Melbourne. He has published several books: Species: A History of the Idea (2009, the first edition of his 2018 Species: The evolution of the idea, which is a much cleverer title), Defining Species (2009), The Nature of Classification (2013, with Malte C. Ebach), and edited Intelligent design and religion as a natural phenomenon (2010). He is the author or coauthor of 28 papers and 15 book chapters. John is currently Subject Coordinator at the University of Melbourne School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, where he has previously been an honorary fellow. He co-edited a book: Species Problems and Beyond for CRC Press, to be published in the first quarter of 2022. His Cambridge University Press tradebook Understanding Species is also expected in 2022.

Ge Fang

A focus on persistence for cultural evolution

Many philosophers have analysed the extent to which the analogy between cultural evolution and biological evolution can be stretched. So far most attention has been paid to the comparison between biological and cultural inheritance. We are asking the following questions: What is reproduced in cultural evolution – artifacts, ideas, behavior, or a combination of these? What are the underlying reproductive mechanisms – replications, preservations, or reconstructions? What is overlooked by the current analyses is a comparison between biological and cultural persistence. As long as reproduction is involved, theories of biological evolution can reasonably eschew the discussion of persistence: for development systems theorists, successive generations overlap with each other; for advocates of replicators, most replicators can be idealized as persisting as long as the organism lives. Neither can be said about cultural evolution. The acquisition and maintenance of cultural traits is not like a development, and many cultural traits are ephemeral: ideas fade; behavior ends; artifacts decay. I argue a new epistemic focus on cultural persistence is warranted, because it puts constraints on our search for cultural reproductive units and expands the scope of cultural reproductive mechanisms. For example, among mental representations, only those relying on long-term memories can withstand prolonged gaps between cultural reproductions, and the “reproduction” of long-term habitual memory relies on multiple sessions of social interactions spanning months rather than a single session of social learning that lasts for minutes.

Ge Fang is a fifth-year graduate student from the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. He currently works at Illinois Institute of Technology as a predoctoral teaching fellow. Before the PhD program, he worked as a software engineer, and got an MA degree in philosophy from Stanford University. His PhD dissertation project aims to understand the conservatism of the stone tool traditions in the Old Stone Age and the origin of cultural complexity, while focusing on the role of skill learning in cultural transmissions. Besides cultural evolution, he is also interested in philosophical issues surrounding addiction, compulsion, and weakness of will.