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Philosophy

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David J Depew

2010

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Incidental Causation, Spontaneous Generation, And Homonymous Predication In Aristotle’S Physics Ii And Other Texts, David Depew Dec 2009

Incidental Causation, Spontaneous Generation, And Homonymous Predication In Aristotle’S Physics Ii And Other Texts, David Depew

David J Depew

How did Aristotle, the founder of scientific biology, define life? In this volume, which collects the contributions to a conference held in 2006, philologists, philosophers and biologists approach this question. They study how Aristotle's concept of the soul relates to his perception of life; how he evaluates the different criteria that, according to him, constitute life; how he uses those criteria to define different organic structures; whether there exists a unified definition of life in Aristotle's philosophy; aspects of procreation and ontogenesis; the relationship between individuals and species; the reception of Aristotle's theories. German text.


Darwinian Controversies: An Historiographical Recounting, David Depew Dec 2009

Darwinian Controversies: An Historiographical Recounting, David Depew

David J Depew

This essay reviews key controversies in the history of the Darwinian research tradition: the Wilberforce-Huxley debate in 1860, early twentieth-century debates about the heritability of acquired characteristics and the consistency of Mendelian genetics with natural selection; the 1925 Scopes trial about teaching evolution; tensions about race, culture, and eugenics at the 1959 centenary celebration Darwin’s Origin of Species; adaptationism and its critics in the Sociobiology debate of 1970s and, more recently, Evolutionary Psychology; and current disputes about Intelligent Design. These controversies, I argue, are etched into public memory because they occur at the emotionally charged boundaries between public-political, technical-scientific, and …