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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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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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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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18The Nature and Necessity of Cultural History of ScienceModern Schoolman 76 (2-3): 221-233. 1999.
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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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10Is Science Sexist? And Other Problems in the Biomedical Sciences by Michael Ruse (review)Isis 74 422-423. 1983.
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83A Defense of Evolutionary EthicsBiology and Philosophy 1 (3): 265-293. 1986.From Charles Darwin to Edward Wilson, evolutionary biologists have attempted to construct systems of evolutionary ethics. These attempts have been roundly criticized, most often for having committed the naturalistic fallacy. In this essay, I review the history of previous efforts at formulating an evolutionary ethics, focusing on the proposals of Darwin and Wilson. I then advance and defend a proposal of my own. In the last part of the essay, I try to demonstrate that my revised version of evolu…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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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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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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58Alan C. LoveDarwinian calisthenicsAn athlete engages in calisthenics as part of basic training and as a preliminary to more advanced or intense activity. Whether it is stretching, lunges, crunches, or push-ups, routine calisthenics provide a baseline of strength and flexibility that prevent a variety of injuries that might otherwise be incurred. Peter Bowler has spent 40 years doing Darwinian calisthenics, researching and writing on the development of evolutionary ideas with special attention to…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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37The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2017.Evolutionary ethics - the application of evolutionary ideas to moral thinking and justification - began in the nineteenth century with the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but was subsequently criticized as an example of the naturalistic fallacy. In recent decades, however, evolutionary ethics has found new support among both the Darwinian and the Spencerian traditions. This accessible volume looks at the history of thought about evolutionary ethics as well as current debates in the s…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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The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's TheoryPhilosophy of Science 61 (4): 672. 1994.
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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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104In 1971, Daniel Gasman saw published his Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, the dissertation he had produced at the University of Chicago two years before. That book argued that Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), the great champion of Darwinism in Germany, had special responsibility for contributing to Nazi extermination biology. Gasman stacked up the evidence: that Haeckel’s Darwinian monism (which held that no metaphysical distinct…Read more
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29accepted without a compelling materialistic mechnot add that some books might give you terminal anism. Charles Darwin provided this mechanism in..
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132Darwin's metaphysics of mindIn V. Hoesle & C. Illies (eds.), Darwin and Philosophy, Notre Dame University Press. pp. 166-80. 2005.Our image of Darwin is hardly that of a German metaphysician. By reason of his intellectual tradition—that of British empiricism—and psychological disposition, he was a man of apparently more stolid character, one who could be excited by beetles and earthworms but not, we assume, by abstruse philosophy. Yet Darwin constructed a theory of evolution whose conceptual grammar expresses and depends on a certain kind of metaphysics. During his youthful period as a romantic adventurer, he sailed to exo…Read more
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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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54In 1853, two decades after Goethe’s death, Hermann von Helmholtz, who had just become professor of anatomy at Königsberg, delivered an evaluation of the poet=s contributions to science.1 The young Helmholtz lamented Goethe=s stubborn rejection of Newton =s prism experiments. Goethe=s theory of light and color simply broke on the rocks of his poetic genius. The tragedy, though, was not repeated in biological science. In Helmholtz=s estimation, Goethe had advanced in this area two singular and “un…Read more
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36Instinct and intelligence in British natural theology: Some contributions to Darwin's theory of the evolution of behaviorJournal of the History of Biology 14 (2): 193-230. 1981.In late September 1838, Darwin read Malthus's Essay on Population, which left him with “a theory by which to work.”115 Yet he waited some twenty years to publish his discovery in the Origin of Species. Those interested in the fine grain of Darwin's development have been curious about this delay. One recent explanation has his hand stayed by fear of reaction to the materialist implications of linking man with animals. “Darwin sensed,” according to Howard Gruber, “that some would object to seeing …Read more
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171Darwin's principles of divergence and natural selection: Why Fodor was almost rightStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1): 256-268. 2012.In a series of articles and in a recent book, What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor has objected to Darwin’s principle of natural selection on the grounds that it assumes nature has intentions.1 Despite the near universal rejection of Fodor’s argument by biologists and philosophers of biology (myself included),2 I now believe he was almost right. I will show this through a historical examination of a principle that Darwin thought as important as natural selection, his principle of divergence. The p…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
Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Aesthetics |
Philosophy of Biology |
19th Century Philosophy |