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28The term “race” and its equivalent in several languages gained currency in the seventeenth century to describe descendents of the same family or house. The word was also used to refer to a tribe or nation, as in the Germanic races. Only in the nineteenth century did the term take on the taxonomic meaning of a distinctive group or variety within a human or animal species.
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28Quite early in the construction of his theory, Darwin realized that he had to explain the distinctive features of the human animal to forestall the return of the Creator. For most British intellectuals, what distinguished man from animals was not reason, an operation in which faint sensory images followed the rules of association, but moral judgment. Thus, shortly after he first formulated the principle of natural selection in the fall of 1838, Darwin began a decades-long struggle to bring human…Read more
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24In late winter of 1864, Charles Darwin received two folio volumes on radiolarians, a group of one-celled marine organisms that secreted siliceous skeletons of unusual geometry. The author, the young German biologist Ernst Haeckel (fig. 1), had himself drawn the figures for the extraordinary copper-etched illustrations that filled the second volume.1 The gothic beauty of the plates astonished Darwin (fig. 2 ), but he must also have been drawn to passages that applied his theory to construct the d…Read more
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21In a late reminiscence, Goethe recalled that during his close association with the poet Friedrich Schiller, he was constantly defending “the rights of nature" against his friend's “gospel of freedom.”1 Goethe’s characterization of his own view was artfully ironic, alluding as it did to the French Revolution's proclamation of the "Rights of Man." His remark implied that values lay within nature, values that had authority comparable to those ascribed to human beings by the architects of the Revolu…Read more
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20The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of GoetheUniversity of Chicago Press. 2002."All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both th…Read more
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18The Nature and Necessity of Cultural History of ScienceModern Schoolman 76 (2-3): 221-233. 1999.
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15Birth, death, and resurrection of evolutionary ethicsIn Matthew Nitecki & Doris Nitecki (eds.), Evolutionary Ethics, Suny Press. pp. 113--131. 1993.
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11Charles Darwin, the descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. 2nd edition of 1874. With an introduction by James Moore and Adrian Desmond. Penguin classics. London: Penguin, 2004. Pp. lxvi+791. Isbn 0-140-43631-6. £9.99 (review)British Journal for the History of Science 39 (4): 615-617. 2006.
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10Is Science Sexist? And Other Problems in the Biomedical Sciences by Michael Ruse (review)Isis 74 422-423. 1983.
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9Darwin's Romantic Biology. The Foundation of His Evolutionary Ethics'In Jane Maienschein & Michael Ruse (eds.), Biology and the foundation of ethics, Cambridge University Press. pp. 113--53. 1999.
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9Goethe's Use of Kant in the Erotics of NatureIn Philippe Huneman (ed.), Understanding purpose: Kant and the philosophy of biology, University of Rochester Press. pp. 8--137. 2007.
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9The Emergence of Evolutionary Biology of Behaviour in the Early Nineteenth CenturyBritish Journal for the History of Science 15 (3): 241-280. 1982.The sciences of ethology and sociobiology have as premisses that certain dispositions and behavioural patterns have evolved with species and, therefore, that the acts of individual animals and men must be viewed in light of innate determinates. These ideas are much older than the now burgeoning disciplines of the biology of behaviour. Their elements were fused in the early constructions of evolutionary theory, and they became integral parts of the developing conception. Historians, however, have…Read more
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8Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions at fifty: reflections on a science classic (edited book)University of Chicago Press. 2016.Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a watershed event when it was published in 1962, upending the previous understanding of science as a slow, logical accumulation of facts and introducing, with the concept of the “paradigm shift,” social and psychological considerations into the heart of the scientific process. More than fifty years after its publication, Kuhn’s work continues to influence thinkers in a wide range of fields, including scientists, historians, and sociolo…Read more
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8Darwinian Heresies (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2004.In Darwinian Heresies, which was originally published in 2004, prominent historians and philosophers of science trace the history of evolutionary thought, and challenge many of the assumptions that have built up over the years. Covering a wide range of issues starting in the eighteenth century, Darwinian Heresies brings us through the time of Charles Darwin and the Origin, and then through the twentieth century to the present. It is suggested that Darwin's true roots lie in Germany, not his nati…Read more
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7The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (review)British Journal for the History of Science 39 (4): 615-617. 2006.
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6Origin’s Chapter III: The Two Faces of Natural SelectionIn Maria Elice Brzezinski Prestes (ed.), Understanding Evolution in Darwin's “Origin”: The Emerging Context of Evolutionary Thinking, Springer. pp. 237-244. 2023.Chapter III contains several puzzles and unexpected features. The first puzzle regards the chapter’s relationship to Chapter IV: Natural Selection. Both chapters treat of natural selection, so what distinguishes them? Is it that Chapter IV indicates the intelligence behind nature’s selections and Chapter III introduces the analog of intelligence? And is it that Chapter III suggests that natural selection performs an eliminative function, while Chapter IV shows the positive impact of selection? I…Read more
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6Was Hitler a Darwinian?: disputed questions in the history of evolutionary theoryUniversity of Chicago Press. 2013.Darwin's theory of natural selection and its moral purpose -- Appendix 1: the logic of Darwin's long argument -- Appendix 2: the historical ontology and location of scientific theories -- Darwin's principle of divergence: why Fodor was almost right -- Darwin's romantic quest: mind, morals, and emotions -- Appendix: assessment of Darwin's moral theory -- The relation of Spencer's evolutionary theory to Darwin's -- Ernst Haeckel's scientific and artistic struggles -- Haeckel's embryos: fraud not p…Read more
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4A Defense of Evolutionary EthicsIn Michael Ruse (ed.), Philosophy After Darwin: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Princeton University Press. pp. 388-410. 2009.
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1The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of GoetheJournal of the History of Biology 36 (3): 618-619. 2002.
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The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's TheoryJournal of the History of Biology 26 (1): 153-156. 1993.
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Substantive and Methodological Teleology in Aristotle and Some Logical EmpiricistsThe Thomist 37 (4): 702. 1973.
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The beautiful skulls of Schiller and the Georgian girl : quantitative and aesthetic scaling of the races, 1750-1850In Nicolaas A. Rupke & Gerhard Lauer (eds.), Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: race and natural history, 1750-1850, Routledge. 2018.
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The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's TheoryPhilosophy of Science 61 (4): 672. 1994.
Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Aesthetics |
Philosophy of Biology |
19th Century Philosophy |