Traditionally, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is largely identified with his analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions. Here, we contribute to a minority tradition in the Kuhn literature by interpreting the history of evolutionary biology through the prism of the entire historical developmental model of sciences that he elaborates in The Structure. This research not only reveals a certain match between this model and the history of evolutionary biology but, more importantly, also sheds new light (...) on several episodes in that history, and particularly on the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the construction of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the chronic discontent with it, and the latest expression of that discontent, called the extended evolutionary synthesis. Lastly, we also explain why this kind of analysis hasn’t been done before. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

Burgess, J.P. and Rosen, G. Subject with No ObjectElliott, R.Faking Nature.

Alexandre Koyre was one of the most prominent historians of science of the twentieth century. The standard interpretation of Koyre is that he falls squarely within the internalist camp of historians of science-that he focuses on the history of the ideas themselves, eschewing cultural and sociological interpretations regarding the influence of ideologies and institutions on the development of science. When we read what Koyre has to say about his historical studies (and most of what others have said about them), we (...) find him embracing and championing this Platonic view of his work. Ultimately I think this interpretation of Koyre's history of science is lopsided and in need of correction. I claim, rather, that a careful reading of Koyre's work suggests that a tension exists between internal and external methodological considerations. The external considerations stem from Koyre's commitment to the unity of human thought and the influence he admits that the 'transscientifiques' (philosophy, metaphysics, religion) have on the development of science. I suggest in conclusion then, that if we are to put a philosophical label on his work, rather than 'Platonist', as has been the custom, 'Hegelian' makes a better fit. (shrink)

A collection of thirteen essays drawn from the three volumes of Gadamer’s Kleine Schriften, all written after the publication of his Wahrheit und Methode, and generally elaborating its arguments or background. The editor, David E. Linge, who did most of the translations, supplies a long introduction and an index.

An enthusiastic and not completely implausible attempt to interpret Aristotle as a "thoroughgoing behaviorist. He is, of course, a functional and contextual behaviorist, not a mechanistic behaviorist. For him, life is the power of living and knowing, the power of selective response to the world." Randall sees in Aristotle a disturbing and philosophically inexplicable tendency to "platonize" in the Organon, the De Caelo, Bk. X of the Ethics, and so on. The physical treatises, the Politics and Ethics, the Poetics and (...) Rhetoric, however, expose the "Aristotelian" side of Aristotle, since they deal with the powers of selective response and the variety of natural processes, as well as offering a method for achieving practical aims.--J. B. (shrink)

Although the title proper is certainly a misnomer, the subtitle may be adequate for a collection of fourteen fairly miscellaneous essays by a professional philosopher reaching out to a wider public. It should be said, however, that Holland believes that much of what he undertakes to "speak for can be found in Plato.".

One of five short texts in the publisher's "Foundations of Logic Series." Fisk presents a sentential calculus and extensions to uniform and full first-order quantification in terms of natural-deduction principles. The principles laid down are continually justified by reference to our instinctive use of language. In keeping with this approach, Fisk is concerned to base the system on an intensional implication relation which will avoid the familiar paradoxes. Unfortunately, his system S can be proved equivalent to the classical two-valued calculus. (...) This unanticipated result proceeds from principle S7, " p → q ∴ →." However, if S7 is dropped, the philosophical claims made for S hold good. By virtue of short but incisive discussions of controversial philosophical issues, e.g., existence and subjunctive conditionals, this book is a contribution as well as an introduction to philosophical thinking.—J. B. B. (shrink)

Extending Lukasiewicz's approach of axiomatization to the modal syllogistic, McCall develops a system of fourteen axioms with decision procedure, in which exactly those necessity syllogisms recognized by Aristotle are provable. Primitives, besides those of propositional logic, are Necessity and the A and I statement forms. The approach thus contrasts with that of the "structuralists", who would analyze Aristotle's modal statements further in terms of contemporary logic systems. The seemingly insurmountable problems of the contingency syllogisms are circumvented by taking contingency as (...) an additional primitive requiring fourteen further axioms. In the resulting system, all of Aristotle's contingency syllogisms, as well as twenty-four which he overlooked, are provable. Although a "structuralist" analysis would seem indispensable for an ultimate understanding of the modal syllogistic, McCall's formalization is more faithful to Aristotle than any hitherto proposed.--J. B. B. (shrink)

Adopting a noncognitivist metaethics, Smart presents hedonistic-act utilitarianism as a position which appeals to benevolent and sympathetic men. He renounces any attempt to prove the position, but he does try to show that it is not open to the usual objections. There are some interesting comments on the concept of happiness and a brief attempt to show a way in which game theory can be used in a utilitarian position.--J. B. S.

Willey emphasizes the social-political context as the source of problems which neo-Kantian thought had to—and largely failed to—cope with. "I believe the neo-Kantians expressed the tentative and unsuccessful efforts of a segment of the upper bourgeoisie to make peace with the proletariat and to retain an attitude of cultural community with the West". The first of these two themes refers to the rapprochement of academic philosophy and socialism which is mainly associated with "the Marburg School," above all, F. A. Lange (...) and Hermann Cohen, which led to diverse practical extensions in Karl Vorländer, Kurt Eisner, and Eduard Bernstein. (shrink)

This book is one of the more important works to appear in its field in the last ten years. Besides his well known abilities in Hegelian studies, Hartmann here demonstrates a wide and serious understanding of Marxism after Lenin. His references to the Frankfurt School, Althusseur, Lukacs, Merleau-Ponty, etc., are not only good presentations of their thought but often show critical insight into their works. Hartmann’s major concern is to examine Marx’s dialectical interpretation of history and in so doing decide (...) whether 1) it is consistent throughout his work and can be reconciled with his critique of political economy, and 2) whether the negative dialectic can become positive. Marx’s use of the anthropological model of man as species-being allows him to suggest, but not understand, what will be the result of the dialectic in communist man. His discussion of the present wherein man, owing to production activity, is not able to fully realize himself as species-being, while allowing for the important critique of the present and the explication of the immediate past, does not explain how or why alienated being will be liberated through the negative dialect which itself must be negated. The very concept of alienated labor remains in question throughout Marx’s work and is not sufficient to provide a necessary historical reconciliation with the negative social-economic process of alienation as a whole. The result is that Marx’s theory of practice lacks necessity and his theory of history is left in doubt. Marx’s critique of political economy is not able to systematically elucidate the concept of alienation he has provided in his anthropological model of man. Such an interpretation of Marx as Hartmann presents will almost certainly engender further work in the field.—J.B. (shrink)

This, the fifth volume to appear in the "authoritative" edition of The Works of William James, is the first that is not strictly based on a previously published work, although 11 of the 21 essays were included in Collected Essays and Reviews, edited in 1920 by Ralph Barton Perry, and 2 in Memories and Studies, edited in 1911 by Henry James, the philosopher’s son. The selection is based on subject matter, "philosophy in a narrower sense" than was customary for James, (...) and subsequent volumes will include parallel collections of "essays in psychology, in religion and morality, and in psychic research". (shrink)

At once a distinguished mathematician and an important figure in the Vienna Circle, Hans Hahn conducted a seminar in 1924-25 on the Principia Mathematica to "a very large audience" of mathematicians and philosophers. Translated from the German and edited by Brian McGuinness, with a biographical introduction by Karl Menger, the present volume consists largely of papers in the philosophy of mathematics covering the years 1929-34. "Our adoption of Russell’s position," writes Hahn, "may cause some surprise in Germany where all ears (...) are tuned, to the controversy between... Hilbert and Brouwer." It turns out, however, that Wittgenstein has made the decisive move: mathematics consists of tautologies, Russell having "shown" how to get by without sets. (shrink)

This book stands as a panegyric of the glories and grandeur of Indian philosophy without managing to embody or display those heights of attainment itself. In the few essays that are worthwhile, the author attempts to correct a number of misconceptions about Indian thought: that it is world-denying, that it promotes spiritual pessimism, that it bases its philosophical claims more on intuition than on rational argument, and that it is concerned more with inner than with outer reality. In support of (...) his claims, he sets forth what he believes to be the basic tenets of Indian philosophy, which are: the divine or spiritual nature of the universe, the ultimate moral order of the universe, the transmigration of the soul, the ultimate destiny of man through "the liberation of the soul from bondage to the body," and the implicit trust placed in the testimony of seer-saints "to whom they [truths] are supposed to have been revealed beyond doubt in their direct and immediate experience." In a chapter entitled, "Svapramanatva and Svaprakasatva: An Inconsistency in Kumärila's Philosophy," he presents a fairly informative and well-reasoned argument that the validity of cognitions cannot be verified on the basis of both the inherent quality of the senses which give immediate satisfaction and the quality of external conditions which must await subsequent investigation. Finally, he soundly criticizes R. C. Zaehner's The Comparison of Religions for interpreting and evaluating Hindu religion and philosophy through the spectacles of Catholic Christianity. But his own contention, reiterated again and again throughout the book, that "there is nothing in common between Hindu religion and philosophy," makes no sense. Surely, one thing which distinguishes Indian philosophy from Greek and modern philosophy in the western world is the continual insistence by Indian thinkers that philosophical reflection and rational argumentation are not ends in themselves but merely means to salvation, paths to Enlightenment.--J. B. L. (shrink)

Are the truths of arithmetic analytic, as Frege insisted in opposition to Kant? Although bits and pieces of an adequate answer to the question are doubtless to be found scattered throughout the literature, one continues to be disappointed by the absence of any extended treatment of the issue that would undertake to digest the rich body of diverse material that has accumulated since the publication of Frege's Begriffsschrift in 1879.

Levin follows the development of Freud's ideas up to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, claiming that "his writings through 1905 can easily be recognized as containing virtually all the fundamental elements of his system." The interpretation has two complementary emphases: "that his early theoretical models were much more closely tied to current medical and psychological literature than has previously been acknowledged, and that, contrary to presently accepted views, Freud, from his first studies of the neuroses, consistently eschewed speculations (...) concerning possible organic explanations for these diseases". (shrink)

A clear, compact, technical presentation of the traditional topics of symbolic logic. The propositional calculus, which Lorenzen develops for ten truth functions, is formulated in six axioms to enable comparison with intuitionism. An important part of the book is Lorenzen's "establishment" of the axioms of Brouwer's intuitionistic calculus by proving their universal admissibility for any calculus. If the and's and if's of these axioms are interpreted as metalinguistic terms used in stating inference rules for object calculi, then no matter what (...) calculus the axioms are added to, no new theorems become provable. In the process of this "establishment" of what he calls "effective logic," Lorenzen makes use of nine different kinds of implication.-J. B. B. (shrink)

Another textbook of traditional logic, subject to the characteristic limitations of that tradition. Propositional logic receives scant attention, and polyadic predicates are ignored. Propositions are in places confused with terms, as when the transitivity of implication is analyzed in terms of the Barbara syllogism. Although professedly Aristotelian, the treatment departs from Aristotle on a number of points: syllogisms are presented as inference rules rather than as logical theses; singular statements are assimilated to universal ones; and modal syllogisms are not covered. (...) Only about one-third of the book treats formal logic; the remainder includes discussion of basic semiotic, definition and division, induction, and fallacies, along with the rudiments of Thomistic epistemology and metaphysics.--J. B. B. (shrink)

This essay in transcendental philosophy argues for theism on the basis that God is the guarantor of meaning. In the pursuit of the logical and metaphysical foundations of theoretical thought, where thought is taken as that which stands "in intentional relation to the act or function of thinking," Young begins by dwelling overly long on the linguistic origin of "theory" in the Greek theoria as used by the Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle. He then proceeds through a discussion of the family (...) resemblances among scientific and philosophical usages of "theory" to the understanding of the content of theoretical thought as meaning formed in concepts and propositions. The marks of the contents of theoretical thought are abstractness, universality, and a priority. Utilizing a distinction between cogency and validity and distinguishing among presuppositions, rules, and premisses. Young attempts to justify the belief in the existence of God on the basis of the ontological argument which he gives in various formulations. The resurrection of the ontological argument in the context of modal logic and language philosophy is an interesting exercise.--J. B. L. (shrink)

It is largely through a return to the old-fashioned topic of judgment that the new "revisionist" history is seen to be taking shape according to which the "apostolic succession" proceeds from Kant not to Hegel but to Frege, though the Begriff is by no means ignored. A pivotal work, David Bell’s elegant monograph is at once useful and challenging. In the forefront lies the purely exegetical question, "What does Frege mean when he says that concepts are unsaturated?" In the background: (...) a fight over Frege’s soul, Kant vs. Plato, where Bell discreetly advances the cause of the new anti-realism of which Michael Dummett is the éminence grise. (shrink)

Although Ordinary Language Philosophy is widely believed to have disappeared leaving scarcely a trace in this era of formal semantics, it is very much the formal semantics of ordinary language that dominates the scene. More common ground than one might have supposed proves thus to be available for the unreconstructed ordinary language philosopher, in the present volume, to enter into the thick of current discussion. The prevailing tone of the work is certainly much more formal than anything one recalls from (...) the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, and in its episodic fashion the central topics—e.g., reference, opacity, identity, propositions—are standard enough, though by the end an effort has been made to reinstate synonymy, analyticity, and even verificationism. On the specific side of grammar the nominalization of sentences receives extended attention, and it is in that connection that Bede Rundle queries the postulation of propositions as metaphysical objects for the so-called propositional attitudes. The deepest, most pervasive theme of the book turns out to be that of ontological commitment. In an uncharacteristic, refreshing moment of testiness Rundle confides that serious controversy as to whether there are or are not events "just cannot get going unless our ordinary language is supplanted... by the grandiose but ill-defined jargon of ‘ontology'." The focus of the work tends to be blurred owing to a tacit assimilation of Quine to the formal semanticists of ordinary language. If the Quinean framework of ontological commitment would seem to be almost ubiquitous today, the semantic emphasis on the ontological commitments of ordinary language renders the current fashion almost as alien to Quine as to the later Wittgenstein. Rundle is thus faced with a shifting target. His excellent anti-Fregean, quasi-nominalistic discussion of number brings out some of the difficulty. Sensitive to the difference between the nonreferential and referential uses of number words in ordinary language, Rundle argues that one can only go so far with the former. Accordingly, he will allow that "by ordinary standards there quite clearly are numbers", a thesis that neither Wittgenstein nor Quine—for very different reasons—would accept. At the outset of his book Rundle writes as follows, "We could look more favorably upon the pragmatic approach if there were room for a choice, if the analysis of the meaning of, say, sentences seemingly alluding to certain abstractions, left the question of existence undecided. There are reasons for thinking that this cannot be so, and the arguments to come will, I hope, bear out the general objection in particular cases." The discussion of number fails to connect with Quine who readily concedes ordinary language to the nominalist. It is only when one consults such items as sets, which Quine takes to have scarcely any footing in ordinary language, that his pragmatism comes properly into its own. Are the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory analytic or synthetic? Are they perhaps synthetic a priori? Shall we indeed accept them as true? It can hardly be supposed that pre-Quinean approaches, whether empiricist or rationalist, have proved very fruitful here. And what guidance can linguistic analysis provide? (shrink)

A description of the characteristics of libraries in general is followed by a discussion of the objectives and functions of national, university, special, and public libraries considered in the context of their historical development. The libraries should observe ideological neutrality by reflecting the pluralistic intellectual life of the times and thus avoid being the tool of either a democratic or a totalitarian way of life.--J. B. B.

The first of two volumes to be added to Dilthey’s Collected Works, making available unpublished manuscripts connected with his Introduction to the Human Sciences. The present volume includes plans and outlines from Dilthey’s philosophical beginnings, ca. 1865, with an appendix of aphorisms from his student years, probably pre-1860, preliminary writings for what was to become the "Treatise of 1875," i.e., "On the Study of the History of the Sciences of Man, Society, and the State," with the related project of a (...) methodological introduction to a study of the natural law of the Sophists and its reemergence in the 16th- and 17th-century egoistic theories of man, which was to provide an example of "historical research of philosophical intent," continuations of the "Treatise of 1875," elaborations of Dilthey’s descriptive psychology from around 1880, and two epistemological manuscripts: "On the possibility of a consistent shaping [Gestaltung] of empiricism, through which the insight into the objectivity of appearances would be given a foundation," 1874, and "Essay on the Philosophy of Experience and Reality in opposition to Empiricism and Speculation," 1879. The following volume will be comprised essentially of the extensive drafts for a continuation of the Introduction to the Human Sciences, one of which was already close to completion in 1882/83 when the first volume was sent to press and Dilthey was given Lotze’s chair in philosophy at Berlin. The present volume thus is devoted mainly to writings from Dilthey’s Breslau period 1871-82; its successor will be evenly divided between the so-called "Breslauer Ausarbeitung" and the "Berliner Entwurf." It should be a great benefit to Dilthey studies that these manuscripts are finally being published, and it is to be hoped that they will also excite further interest in the surprisingly neglected Introduction to the Human Sciences itself. (shrink)

Sokolowski’s book is a refreshing departure from the norm of much Husserlian literature in English. Neither paraphrase nor summary, it explores and illumines the central and thorniest issues in Husserl’s thought, doing so in lively and graceful language unencumbered by transcendental jargon. The author insightfully draws parallels between Husserl and philosophers in the linguistic tradition such as Austin and Strawson. The binding thread throughout the work is the theme of "being truthful." Through the exploration of Husserl’s texts, Sokolowski aims at (...) describing "what it is to be truthful and to be human, and to show what philosophy is." Husserlian phenomenology may be understood as the systematic and clear reflection on being truthful as it is realized in the natural attitude, but also as it is achieved in philosophy itself, which seeks truth in the unique mode of reflecting upon being truthful. (shrink)