-
44
-
36Evolutionary biology and the question of teleologyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 58 100-106. 2016.
-
29Are Pictures Really Necessary? The Case of Sewell Wright's "Adaptive Landscapes"PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1990. 1990.Philosophical analyses of science tend to ignore illustrations, implicitly regarding them as theoretically dispensible. If challenged, it is suggested that such neglect is justifiable, because the use of illustrations only leads to faulty reasoning, and thus is the mark of bad or inadequate science. I take as an example one of the most famous illustrations in the history of evolutionary biology, and argue that the philosophers' scorn is without foundation. I take my conclusions to be support for…Read more
-
27Critical Notice of Andrew Woodfield, Teleology, and Larry Wright, Teleological Explanations (review)Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (1): 191-203. 1978.
-
43Problems of scientific revolution: Progress and obstacles to progress in the sciences (review)Erkenntnis 13 (1): 407-416. 1978.
-
36Scott F. Gilbert—second to the right, straight on till morning (review)Biological Theory 2 (2): 182-182. 2007.
-
54William Whewell and The Argument from DesignThe Monist 60 (2): 244-268. 1977.The section on the Argument from Design in collections of readings in the philosophy of religion usually begins with an expository selection drawn from Archdeacon William Paley’s Natural Theology, and follows with a critical selection drawn from David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Only from the footnotes does the student learn that Hume’s Dialogues was published over twenty years before Paley’s Natural Theology. Probably the student will feel that Hume’s devastating critique of t…Read more
-
54Reduction in BiologyThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 10 43-50. 2001.In this paper I shall discuss the concept of reduction—ontological, methodological, and epistemological or theoretical—in the biological sciences, with special emphasis on genetics and evolutionary biology. I suggest that perhaps, because the biological world has a form different from the non-biological world, it is appropriate to think of terms or metaphors different from those we would use when trying to understand the inorganic world. As such, the attempt to show that the biological is simply…Read more
-
31Creationism and its critics in antiquity (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (3). 2009.he history of evolutionary theory is a little bit of a puzzle. Charles Darwin, the author of the Origin of Species in 1859, was the man who made evolutionary ideas reasonable—ideas that were generally accepted—and it was Darwin who provided the major mechanism of natural selection. He was not the first evolutionist, however. For at least one hundred and fifty years, starting with people like the French encyclopediast Denis Diderot, people had been speculating that organisms had a natural origin,…Read more
-
44Pat Duffy Hutcheon, Leaving the Cave: Evolutionary Naturalism in Social-Scientific ThoughtStudies in Philosophy and Education 17 (2/3): 155-158. 1998.
-
40Book Review:Darwinism and Human Affairs Richard D. Alexander (review)Philosophy of Science 48 (4): 627-. 1981.
-
19arly in December of 1981, the federal courtroom in Little Rock, Arkansas, was packed. It was the first week of a trial brought on by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the constitutionality of a state law passed earlier that year. The law mandated "balanced treatment," in the publicly supported schools, between evolutionary ideas and so-called Creation Science, better known as the early chapters of Genesis taken absolutely literally (Ruse 1988). By the end of the third day, the case…Read more
-
28Grünbaum on psychoanalysis: Where do we go from here?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9 (2): 256-257. 1986.
-
17Sociobiology, Sex, and Science (review)International Studies in Philosophy 29 (4): 121-122. 1997.
-
85Naturalism and the scientific methodIn Stephen Bullivant & Michael Ruse (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 383. 2013.Methodological naturalism is the claim that there is no need to invoke the supernatural, including God or gods, in giving scientific explanations. Metaphysical naturalism is the claim that there is no supernatural, including God or gods. Does methodological naturalism entail metaphysical naturalism? Many seem to think that it does, in practice if not in principle. This essay questions this assumption.
-
70Definitions of species in biologyBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 20 (2): 97-119. 1969.
-
37Review of Sober and Wilson, Unto Others: The evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior (review)Ethics 110 (2): 443-445. 2000.
-
39Bad arguments about DarwinismThink 3 (8): 41-46. 2004.In Think 7, philosopher Jenny Teichman accused the geneticist Professor Stephen Jones and other contemporary Darwinists of confusion and of overestimating Darwinism's explanatory power. Here, Micheal Ruse explains why he believes it is actually Teichman who is confused
-
12Social Darwinism updated? (review)Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33 (4): 753-760. 2002.
-
15Darwin and the philosophersIn Richard Creath & Jane Maienschein (eds.), Biology and epistemology, Cambridge University Press. pp. 3. 1999.
Tallahassee, Florida, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Religion |
Philosophy of Biology |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Religion |
Philosophy of Biology |