Notwithstanding the general rise of experimental disciplines in biology in the first decades of our century, in Germany and in the Netherlands the interest in the idealistic morphological tradition flourished, and compensated for a reductionistic causal approach to natural phenomena. This article analyses the influence of the German idealistic morphologists W. Lubosch and A. Meyer on the development of C.J. van der Klaauw's epistemology. It discusses the gradual incorporation of non-causal principles into van der Klaauw's concept of biology. (...) Van der Klaauw's epistemological concept of holistic biology was shaped in a critical confrontation with German idealistic morphology, and his early considerations can be interpreted as a direct impulse towards the development of his theory of functional components. Van der Klaauw's theories, being an alternative to the reductionistic experimental sciences, were among the causes of the fact that in the first half of our century biology in the Netherlands took a course deviating from the development of biology in the Anglo-American countries. (shrink)

The concept that renders morphology a tool for phylogeny reconstruction is homology. The concept of homology is rooted in pre-evolutionary idealistic morphology. The claim that the goal of idealistic morphology was the seriability of form may sound paradoxical given that this discipline proceeded within a framework of strictly delimited types. But the types only demarcate where seriability starts and where it comes to an end. Carl Gegenbaur’s was recognized as a milestone in idealistic (...) class='Hi'>morphology. A comparison with the second edition of 1870 illustrates Gegenbaur’s turn to evolutionary morphology. The methodology remained the same–seriability of form–but the series was no longer merely descriptive or conceptual but now a historical, evolutionary one. Gegenbaur emphasized that seriability of form was possible not only between species of the same type, but also between parts of organisms of the same type. Pursuing this project, he found that different parts of organisms evolve at different rates, resulting in an incongruence between the series of parts relative to the series of species under comparison. This incongrence was called chevauchement des spécialisations by Louis Dollo, Spezialisationskreuzungen by Othenio Abel, and heterobathmy of characters by Armen Takhtajan. Willi Hennig, the founder of modern methods in phylogenetic systematics, discovered that the heterobathmy of characters was a precondition for the establishment of the phylogenetic relationships based on shared derived characters. The result was a replacement of the search for ancestors by a search for relative degrees of phylogenetic relationships. (shrink)

In this study the relationship between functional morpholoy and evolutionary biology is analysed by confronting the main concepts in both disciplines.Rather than only discussing this connection theoretically, the analysis is carried out by introducing important practical and experimental studies, which use aspects from both disciplines. The mentioned investigations are methodologically analysed and the consequences for extensions of the relationship are worked out. It can be shown that both disciplines have a large domain of their own and also share a large (...) common ground. Many disagreements among evolutionary biologists can be reduced to differences in general philosophy (idealism vs. realism), selection of phenomenona (structure vs. function), definition of concepts (natural selection) and the position of the concept theory as an explaining factor (neutralists vs. selectionists, random variation, determinate selection, etc.). (shrink)

During the early twentieth century, the Swiss Zoologist Adolf Naef (1883–1949) established himself as a leader in German comparative anatomy and higher level systematics. He is generally labeled an ‘idealistic morphologist’, although he himself called his research program ‘systematic morphology’. The idealistic morphology that flourished in German biology during the first half of the twentieth century was a rather heterogeneous movement, within which Adolf Naef worked out a special theoretical system of his own. Following a biographical (...) sketch, we present an English translation of a previously unpublished typescript from Naef’s estate, which Naef intended as the introduction to a textbook on Comparative Anatomy for which he was unable to find a publisher before his sudden death in 1949. The typescript contains Naef’s mature thoughts with unprecedented conciseness, focus, and clarity. The density of Naef’s text warrants a historical and contextual explication of its content. (shrink)

With Carl Gegenbaur and Ernst Haeckel, inspiredby Darwin and the cell theory, comparativeanatomy and embryology became established andflourished in Jena. This tradition wascontinued and developed further with new ideasand methods devised by some of Haeckelsstudents. This first period of innovative workin evolutionary morphology was followed byperiods of crisis and even a disintegration ofthe discipline in the early twentieth century.This stagnation was caused by a lack ofinterest among morphologists in Mendeliangenetics, and uncertainty about the mechanismsof evolution. Idealistic morphology (...) was stillinfluental in Germany, which prevented a fullappreciation of the importance of Darwinstheory of natural selection for comparativemorphology. Evolutionary morphology andembryology failed to contribute significantlyto the modern synthesis of evolutionarybiology, thereby probably delaying theintegration of developmental biology intomodern evolutionary biology. However, Haeckelsstudent Oscar Hertwig, as well as Victor Franzand Alexej N. Sewertzoff from a youngergeneration, all tried to forge their ownsynthetic approaches in which (inspired byHaeckels work) embryology played an importantrole. Important for all three researchers wereattempts to refine, and sometimes redefine, thebiogenetic law, and to find new scientificexplanations for it (and for the manyexceptions to it). Their research was latermore or less forgotten, and had littleinfluence on the architects of the modernsynthesis. As the relationship betweenevolutionary and developmental biology is nowagain rising in importance in the form ofEvo-Devo, we would like to draw attention tohow this earlier research tradition grappledwith similar questions to those now on theagenda, albeit from sometimes quite differentperspectives. (shrink)

This article argues that Cassirer’s thinking about the relationship between the different symbolic forms is best elucidated via the paradigm of “organic harmony.” Although Cassirer did not use the term himself, the harmonious cooperation between the parts found in the organic world provided him with a welcome alternative to traditional accounts of order (i.e., identity or hierarchy). This article gives three examples of “organic harmony” from which Cassirer drew inspiration: Goethe’s idealistic morphology, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s account of language, (...) and Herder’s account of history. Through “organic harmony” we can make better sense of and better articulate the pluralism of Cassirer’s PSF. Finally, this article shows how the motif of organic harmony is the normative moment in Cassirer’s own challenge to twentieth-century fascism and argues that the Cassirerian emphasis on finding a coherence which does justice to the uniqueness of particulars—harmony—is an ethical injunction relevant for our times. (shrink)

This article argues that Cassirer’s thinking about the relationship between the different symbolic forms is best elucidated via the paradigm of “organic harmony.” Although Cassirer did not use the term himself, the harmonious cooperation between the parts found in the organic world provided him with a welcome alternative to traditional accounts of order (i.e., identity or hierarchy). This article gives three examples of “organic harmony” from which Cassirer drew inspiration: Goethe’s idealistic morphology, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s account of language, (...) and Herder’s account of history. Through “organic harmony” we can make better sense of and better articulate the pluralism of Cassirer’s PSF. Finally, this article shows how the motif of organic harmony is the normative moment in Cassirer’s own challenge to twentieth-century fascism and argues that the Cassirerian emphasis on finding a coherence which does justice to the uniqueness of particulars—harmony—is an ethical injunction relevant for our times. (shrink)

The relatively late acceptance of Darwinism in German biology and paleontology is frequently attributed to a lingering of Lamarckism, a persisting influence of German idealistic Naturphilosophie and Goethean romanticism. These factors are largely held responsible for the vitalism underlying theories of saltational and orthogenetic evolutionary change that characterize the writings of many German paleontologists during the first half of the 20th century. A prominent exponent of that tradition was Karl Beurlen, who is credited with having been the first German (...) paleontologist to present a full-fledged theory of saltational evolution and orthogenetic change. A review of Beurlen's writings reveals motives and concerns far more complex, however, and firmly rooted in contemporary völkisch thought and Aryan Science. Beurlen's mature theory of evolution can indeed be understood as his own contribution to Aryan Geology and Biology, tainted as it was with National-Socialist ideology. Evolutionary biologists of the time who opposed the theories of Beurlen and likeminded authors, i.e., idealistic morphology, typology, saltational change, orthogenesis and cyclism did so on Darwinian principles, which ultimately prevailed. But at the time when the battle was fought, their adherence to the principle of natural selection was likewise ideologically tainted, namely in terms of racial theory. National-Socialist ideology was unable to forge a unity of evolutionary theory in Germany even amongst those of its proponents who endorsed this ideology. (shrink)

The German paleontologist H. G. Bronn is best remembered for his 1860 translation and critique of Darwin's Origin of Species, and for supposedly twisting Darwinian evolution into conformity with German idealistic morphology. This analysis of Bronn's writings shows, however, that far from being mired in an outmoded idealism that confined organic change to predetermined developmental pathways, Bronn had worked throughout the 1840s and 1850s on a new, historical approach to life. He had been moving from the study of (...) plant and animal forms in the abstract towards placing them into geological and biogeographical context, analyzing patterns of progress and adaptation, explaining species diversity and individual variation, and applying biological insights to practical problems such as artificial breeding. Even though Bronn never fully accepted the idea of species transformation, he saw Darwin's theory as a bold new move toward his own goal of establishing a comprehensive, historical science of life, and he presented it as such in his translation and commentary. Thus Darwin's ideas gained a quick and generally favorable hearing in Germany not because of their easy assimilability into an older tradition, but because of their appeal to the innovative Bronn. (shrink)

It is argued that the narrow concept of selection used since the time ofDarwin is only concerned with the relation between organism and its environment . It did not include the organism itself, which was the object of the pre-phylogenetic idealistic morphology. An adequate understanding of the mechanism of evolution dispenses with the concept of morphology as the basis of phylogeny.Es wird aufgezeigt, da\ der aufDarwin selbst zurückgehende eingeengte Gebrauch des Selektionskonzeptes auf die Beziehung zwischen Organismus und (...) Umwelt die biologische Konstruktion der vorphylogenetischen idealistischen Morphologie überlassen hat. Ein zutreffendes VerstÄndnis des Evolutionsmechanismus begreift aber die biologische Apparatur ein, entzieht der Morphologie, soweit sie sich als Vorbedingung phylogenetischen Arbeitens versteht, den Boden. (shrink)

The German synthesis of evolutionary theory that grew out of opposition to idealistic morphology has been anchored in the systematic work at the species level and below pursued by the Berlin School around Erwin Stresemann (involving Bernhard Rensch and Ernst Mayr), in the 1939 German translation of Dobzhansky’s Genetics and the Origin of Species, and in a 1943 anthology on evolution edited by Gerhard Heberer. The latter volume opened with a philosophical essay written by Hugo Dingler that was (...) intended to provide the theoretical foundation for the theory of descent. Dingler and Heberer not only shared a commitment to the Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection, but also drew from Darwinism the justification for racial hygiene and eugenics. Dingler’s “unequivocal-methodological system” is a meta-scientific construct that offers no ontological grounding of evolutionary theory. Dingler’s voluntarism is subjectivist and stipulative and for those reasons ineffective in a critique of idealistic morphology. Dingler claimed descent with modification as a historical fact, but dealt only marginally with evolutionary mechanisms, and did not touch on issues of phylogeny reconstruction. (shrink)

Pavel Florenskij's (1882-1937/summarily executed in GULAG) conception of the personality is connected to considerations of antinomies. The personality remains trapped in contradictions and gains completion only in relation to the Absolute, whereas the individual, the sociological entity, is metaphysically neutral. Florenskij attempts to link the individual and the personality by means of the concept of substance (ousia). "In man oύσiα and ύπόστασις exist together. Ousia (...) posits the Individual and in society endows him with form as a selfsufficient centre. The (...) hypostasis, by contrast, is the personal idea of Man". For Florenskij personality evinces an epistemological analogy to other central terms in his philosophy, in particular Truth and Love as well as to his theory of language and symbols. For him, each personality comprises a distinctive principle growth (a notion evidently taken from the idealistic morphology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) that determines its growth potential. (shrink)

The Ontogenesis can be explained in a double way: historically: it runs from the past to the present. idealistically: it runs from the general to the special. The development of the dimorphism of sex tells against the historical and for the idealistical perception. Therefore the idealistical morphology has to be put in the place of the phylogenetical. Idiogenesis and Morphogenesis are going analogically from the general to the special. There exists parallelism of the order of thinking and being. L'ontogenèse (...) peut être expliquée de deux manières différentes: historiquement; elle se passe du passé au présent. idéalistiquement; elle se passe de l'universel au particulier. Le développement du dimorphisme du sexe est contradictoire à l'interprétation historique et affirme la conception idéalistique. Par conséquent il faut remplacer la morphologie phylogénétique par l'idéalistique. De façon analogue l'idiogenèse et la morphogenèse se passent de l'universel au particulier. Il existe un parallélisme de l'ordre d'existence et de l'ordre des pensées. (shrink)

Ernst Haeckel formulated his biogenetic law, famously stating that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, in 1872. The Russian evolutionist Alexei Sewertzoff, and the Swiss-born zoologist Adolf Naef were among those who revised Haeckel’s law, thus changing the course of evolutionary theory and of developmental biology. Although Sewertzoff and Naef approached the problem in a similar way and formulated similar hypotheses at a purely descriptive level, their theoretical viewpoints were crucially different. While Sewertzoff laid the foundations for a Darwinian evolutionary morphology and (...) is regarded as a forerunner of the modern synthesis, Naef was one of the most important figures in “idealistic morphology”, which is usually seen as a type of anti-Darwinism. Both Naef and Sewertzoff aimed to revise Haeckel’s biogenetic law and came to comparable conclusions at the empirical level. This paper is an attempt to explain how their fundamentally different theoretical backgrounds influenced their views on the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny. (shrink)

Recent historiography of 19th century biology supports the revision of two traditional doctrines about the history of biology. First, the most important and widespread biological debate around the time of Darwin was not evolution versus creation, but biological functionalism versus structuralism. Second, the idealist and typological structuralist theories of the time were not particularly anti-evolutionary. Typological theories provided argumentation and evidence that was crucial to the refutation of Natural Theological creationism. The contrast between functionalist and structuralist approaches to biology continues (...) today, and the historical misunderstanding of 19th century typological biology may be one of its effects. This historical case can shed light on current controversies regarding the relevance of developmental biology to evolution. (shrink)

Against the background of the many attacks on the school as being outdated, alienating, ineffective and reproducing inequalities we offer a morphological understanding of the school as distinguished from functionalist understandings and idealistic understandings. Our educational morphology approaches the school as a particular scholastic ‘form of gathering’ i.e. a particular time–space–matter arrangement that deals in a specific way with the new generation, allows for a particular relation to the world, and for a particular experience of potentiality and of (...) commonality. We elucidate how this form performs particular operations of suspension, profanation and formation of attention and how these operations imply a slowing down and an opening of future. Finally, we emphasise the potenti.. (shrink)

Homology is among the most important comparative concepts in biology. Today, the evolutionary reinterpretation of homology is usually conceived of as the most important event in the development of the concept. This paradigmatic turning point, however important for the historical explanation of life, is not of crucial importance for the development of the concept of homology itself. In the broadest sense, homology can be understood as sameness in reference to the universal guarantor so that in this sense the different concepts (...) of homology show a certain kind of “metahomology”. This holds in the old morphological conception, as well as in the evolutionary usage of homology. Depending on what is (or was) taken as a guarantor, different types of homology may be distinguished (as idealistic, historical, developmental etc.). This study represents a historical overview of the development of the homology concept followed by some clues on how to navigate the pluralistic terminology of modern approaches to homology. (shrink)

The historical continuity of spinal catastrophism, traced across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology. Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is (...) a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal. Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and "organic memory" that fueled early psychoanalysis, back into idealism, nature philosophy, and romanticism, and across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology, Thomas Moynihan reveals the historical continuity of spinal catastrophism. From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from "railway spine" to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought. Moynihan demonstrates that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history. (shrink)

Many revolutionary proposals entered the biological disciplines during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, theories that provided the foundations for today’s science and gave structure to its various branches. Cell theory, evolutionary theory, and genetics achieved their modern form during this earlier time. The period also saw a variety of new, auxiliary hypotheses that supplied necessary supports for the more comprehensive theories. These included ideas in morphology, embryology, systematics, language, and behavior. These scientific developments forced a reconceptualization of nature (...) and the place of human beings therein. The legacy for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been a materialization and mechanization of the most fundamental processes of life. From our current perspective, it’s easy to look back and assume that the foundational ideas of our contemporary science must have had the same character as they now seem to manifest. I think a closer inspection of biological science of this earlier period will reveal a discipline whose philosophic assumptions are quite different from those of its present incarnation. This becomes especially vivid when 1 we focus on the contributions of German Idealism and Romanticism to the biology of the earlier dispensation. (shrink)

In this paper I claim that the metaphysical concept of culture has come to an end. Among the European authors Georg Simmel is the foremost who has deconstructed the myth of culture as a substantial totality beyond relations or prior to them. Two tenets of research have prepared the end of all-inclusive culture: First, Simmel's formal access that considers society as the modality of interactions and relations between individuals, thus overcoming the social evolutionism of Auguste Comte; second, his critical exegesis (...) of idealistic philosophy of history, thus leaving behind the Hegelian tradition. Although Simmel adheres in some statements to the outdated idea of morphological unity, his sociological and epistemological thinking paved the way for the concept of social identity as a network of series connected loosely by contiguity. This type of connection is confirmed by the present feeling of life as individual self-invention according to changing situations. (shrink)

In recent years, the question of national styles in science has received increasing attention. The different forms of Darwinism that emerged in the nineteenth century provide an impressive example of the role of non-scientific factors in the development of scientific ideas. Although the reception of Darwinian theory has been acknowledged to differ according to distinct national traditions even in Darwin's time, there have been few systematic efforts to understand the underlying causal factors. Usually these explanations have conceived of the relationship (...) of science to its social and political context as a distortion of science by ideology. In contrast to this picture, I attempt to demonstrate here how a scientific research program was situated in a concrete historical context. The German tradition of Darwinism in the nineteenth century will be described as a coalition of political liberalism, materialism, and morphology. Whereas the liberals used Darwinism to give their anti-religious and progressive program a naturalistic foundation, the morphologists appreciated that Darwinian theory allowed them to dispense with the idealistic origins of their research program, and the materialists were provided with a naturalistic explanation of the origin of organic form. (shrink)

As late as 1870 a Toronto professor, William Hincks, schooled pupils in a circular system of classification. Although his system was derived from Macleay's quinarianism of the 1820s, Hincks had altered it in several ways, influenced by botanical morphology. He persistently promoted it throughout the 1860s as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.

This volume is the reprint of perhaps the best study of Goethe's philosophy. Its importance lies in its method. Instead of trying only to collect material pertaining to traditional, philosophical problems, it makes a deep-reaching attempt to grasp and to extricate the metaphysical foundations and basic themes of Goethe's Weltanschauung. There is a thoroughgoing analysis of his "morphological" method and excellent, long passages on his magnificent studies of the life and the structure of plants. The culmination of the whole work (...) is its third part: on the symbol considered what it truly is, not a merely esthetical [[sic]], but an essentially metaphysical notion. The book is not easy to read and it does presuppose a certain familiarity with Goethe's whole oeuvre. Those interested in the history of German idealism will certainly appreciate the parallels with Kant, but unfortunately Weinhandl omits the important parallels with Schelling.—M. J. V. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy has become the dominant philosophical tradition in the English-speaking world. This book illuminates that tradition through a historical examination of a crucial period in its formation: the rejection of Idealism by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the subsequent development of Russell's thought in the period before the First World War.

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

In historical literature, Edouard van Beneden is mostly remembered for his cytological discoveries. Less well known, however, is that he also introduced evolutionary morphology – and indeed evolutionary theory as such – in the Belgian academic world. The introduction of this research programme cannot be understood without taking both the international and the national context into account. It was clearly the German example of the Jena University that inspired van Beneden in his research interests. The actual launch of evolutionary (...) morphology at his University of Liège was, however, also connected with the dynamic of Belgian university reforms and the local rationale of creating a research “school.” Thanks to his networks, his mastering of the rhetoric of the “new” biology, his low ideological profile and his capitalising on the new academic élan in late-19th century Belgium, van Beneden managed to turn his programme into a local success from the 1870s onwards. Two decades later, however, the conceptual underpinnings of evolutionary morphology came under attack and the “Van Beneden School” lost much of its vitality. Despite this, van Beneden’s evolutionary morphology was prototypical for the research that was to come. He was one of the first scientific heavyweights in Belgium to turn the university laboratory into a centre of scientific practice and the hub of a research school. (shrink)

Several tasks in artificial intelligence require the ability to find models about knowledge dynamics. They include belief revision, fusion and belief merging, and abduction. In this paper, we exploit the algebraic framework of mathematical morphology in the context of propositional logic and define operations such as dilation or erosion of a set of formulas. We derive concrete operators, based on a semantic approach, that have an intuitive interpretation and that are formally well behaved, to perform revision, fusion and abduction. (...) Computation and tractability are addressed, and simple examples illustrate the main results. (shrink)

Ce travail étudie les formes de société politique et les contraintes qu'elles rencontrent pour produire leur unité collective. Il interroge le politique comme un schème générateur de toute dimension collective. Ces formes de société sont considérées depuis les enseignements apportés par l'oeuvre de Marcel Gauchet. Ses travaux ont approfondi différents modes de structuration collective, selon le déploiement des communautés humaines dites autonomes, par extraction hors de l'hétéronomie. Etudier de telles transformations internes peut se faire par un angle dynamique, en poursuivant (...) la pensée morphologique de René Thom. Un problème se découvre alors : le déploiement des collectivités humaines dans l'immanence (et non plus dans la transcendance), l'organisation symbolique de la dimension historique qui les traverse, toutes ces modifications incitent à questionner " l'historicité " interne des collectivités selon des morphologies de processus, génératrices de leur réflexivité historique. Les éclairages apportés par ces morphologies de processus indiquent l'effectivité d'un travail de la forme. Ce travail permet dès lors de scruter les morphologies du politique. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to argue against the claim that morphological computation is substantially different from other kinds of physical computation. I show that some (but not all) purported cases of morphological computation do not count as specifically computational, and that those that do are solely physical computational systems. These latter cases are not, however, specific enough: all computational systems, not only morphological ones, may (and sometimes should) be studied in various ways, including their energy efficiency, cost, reliability, (...) and durability. Second, I critically analyze the notion of “offloading” computation to the morphology of an agent or robot, by showing that, literally, computation is sometimes not offloaded but simply avoided. Third, I point out that while the morphology of any agent is indicative of the environment that it is adapted to, or informative about that environment, it does not follow that every agent has access to its morphology as the model of its environment. (shrink)

The emerging contemporary natural philosophy provides a common ground for the integrative view of the natural, the artificial, and the human-social knowledge and practices. Learning process is central for acquiring, maintaining, and managing knowledge, both theoretical and practical. This paper explores the relationships between the present advances in understanding of learning in the sciences of the artificial, natural sciences, and philosophy. The question is, what at this stage of the development the inspiration from nature, specifically its computational models such as (...) info-computation through morphological computing, can contribute to machine learning and artificial intelligence, and how much on the other hand models and experiments in machine learning and robotics can motivate, justify, and inform research in computational cognitive science, neurosciences, and computing nature. We propose that one contribution can be understanding of the mechanisms of ‘learning to learn’, as a step towards deep learning with symbolic layer of computation/information processing in a framework linking connectionism with symbolism. As all natural systems possessing intelligence are cognitive systems, we describe the evolutionary arguments for the necessity of learning to learn for a system to reach humanlevel intelligence through evolution and development. The paper thus presents a contribution to the epistemology of the contemporary philosophy of nature. (shrink)

The emerging contemporary natural philosophy provides a common ground for the integrative view of the natural, the artificial, and the human-social knowledge and practices. Learning process is central for acquiring, maintaining, and managing knowledge, both theoretical and practical. This paper explores the relationships between the present advances in understanding of learning in the sciences of the artificial (deep learning, robotics), natural sciences (neuroscience, cognitive science, biology), and philosophy (philosophy of computing, philosophy of mind, natural philosophy). The question is, what at (...) this stage of the development the inspiration from nature, specifically its computational models such as info-computation through morphological computing, can contribute to machine learning and artificial intelligence, and how much on the other hand models and experiments in machine learning and robotics can motivate, justify, and inform research in computational cognitive science, neurosciences, and computing nature. We propose that one contribution can be understanding of the mechanisms of ‘learning to learn’, as a step towards deep learning with symbolic layer of computation/information processing in a framework linking connectionism with symbolism. As all natural systems possessing intelligence are cognitive systems, we describe the evolutionary arguments for the necessity of learning to learn for a system to reach human-level intelligence through evolution and development. The paper thus presents a contribution to the epistemology of the contemporary philosophy of nature. (shrink)

This article presents a systematic exposition of how the basic ideas of Construction Grammar and the Parallel Architecture of grammar provide the framework for a proper account of morphological phenomena, in particular word formation. This framework is referred to as Construction Morphology. As to the implications of CxM for the architecture of grammar, the article provides evidence against a split between lexicon and grammar, in line with CxG. In addition, it shows that the PA approach makes it possible to (...) be explicit about what happens on which level of the grammar, and thus to give an insightful account of interface phenomena. These interface phenomena appear to require that various types of information are accessible simultaneously, and it is argued that constructional schemas have the right format for expressing these mutual dependencies between different types of information. (shrink)

One foundational question in contemporarybiology is how to `rejoin evolution anddevelopment. The emerging research program(evolutionary developmental biology or`evo-devo) requires a meshing of disciplines,concepts, and explanations that have beendeveloped largely in independence over the pastcentury. In the attempt to comprehend thepresent separation between evolution anddevelopment much attention has been paid to thesplit between genetics and embryology in theearly part of the 20th century with itscodification in the exclusion of embryologyfrom the Modern Synthesis. This encourages acharacterization of evolutionary developmentalbiology as the marriage (...) of evolutionary theoryand embryology via developmental genetics. Butthere remains a largely untold story about thesignificance of morphology and comparativeanatomy (also minimized in the ModernSynthesis). Functional and evolutionarymorphology are critical for understanding thedevelopment of a concept central toevolutionary developmental biology,evolutionary innovation. Highlighting thediscipline of morphology and the concepts ofinnovation and novelty provides an alternativeway of conceptualizing the `evo and the `devoto be synthesized. (shrink)

One of the very few accounts in English of German idealism, this ambitious work advances and revises our understanding of both the history and the thought of the classical period of German philosophy. As he traces the structure and evolution of idealism as a doctrine, Frederick Beiser exposes a strong objective, or realist, strain running from Kant to Hegel and identifies the crucial role of the early romantics—Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis—as the founders of absolute idealism.

According to rationalism regarding the psychology of moral judgment, people’s moral judgments are generally the result of a process of reasoning that relies on moral principles or rules. By contrast, intuitionist models of moral judgment hold that people generally come to have moral judgments about particular cases on the basis of gut-level, emotion-driven intuition, and do so without reliance on reasoning and hence without reliance on moral principles. In recent years the intuitionist model has been forcefully defended by Jonathan Haidt. (...) One important implication of Haidt’s model is that in giving reasons for their moral judgments people tend to confabulate – the reasons they give in attempting to explain their moral judgments are not really operative in producing those judgments. Moral reason-giving on Haidt’s view is generally a matter of post hoc confabulation. Against Haidt, we argue for a version of rationalism that we call ‘morphological rationalism.’ We label our version ‘morphological’ because according to it, the information contained in moral principles is embodied in the standing structure of a typical individual’s cognitive system, and this morphologically embodied information plays a causal role in the generation of particular moral judgments. The manner in which the principles play this role is via ‘proceduralization’ – such principles operate automatically. In contrast to Haidt’s intuitionism, then, our view does not imply that people’s moral reason-giving practices are matters of confabulation. In defense of our view, we appeal to what we call the ‘nonjarring’ character of the phenomenology of making moral judgments and of giving reasons for those judgments. (shrink)