Philosophy of Science Commons^™

Staffan Müller-Wille And Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, A Cultural History Of Heredity, Charles H. Pence

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Women's Use Of Violence: An Ecological Systems Model, Sara Byczek

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

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The Correspondence Of Attachment Dimensions To Prayer Styles Among Undergraduate Students, Nathaniel Aaron Lamkin

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

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The Implications Of Merleau-Ponty For The Human Sciences, Ryan Marcotte

Senior Honors Projects

The Implications of Merleau-Ponty for the Human Sciences Ryan Marcotte Cobb Faculty Sponsor: Galen Johnson, Philosophy The American Anthropology Association (AAA) made headlines in November 2010 due to a controversial change in their 'Long-Range Plan.' The revised AAA mission statement omits all mention of the word 'science' and this omission has sparked a fierce debate within the anthropology community. The debate reveals that the study of social phenomena can be approached from two competing points of view – a scientific and a non-scientific perspective.  This project is concerned with the historical and intellectual developments that led to this competition between …

The Economics Of The Atomic Bomb: Cost And Utilization, Jonathan M. Davis Mr.

Senior Honors Theses

Few moments in human history can be compared to the culmination of events that brought the atomic bomb into creation.  It is incredible to contemplate that while a nation was fighting a two front war that spanned from Europe into the Pacific, that the United States was able to utilize the time, energy, brains, materials, manpower, and capital to complete a project in four years. That under any other circumstances would have taken greater than half a century to complete.

First, this thesis will discuss breakthroughs in research that led scientists to believe that the atomic weapons could be built, …

A Sharp Eye For Kinds: Collection And Division In Plato's Late Dialogues, Devin Henry

Data and Test Instruments

This paper focuses on two methodological questions that arise from Plato’s account of collection and division. First, what place does the method of collection and division occupy in Plato’s account of philosophical inquiry? Second, do collection and division in fact constitute a formal “method” (as most scholars assume) or are they simply informal techniques that the philosopher has in her toolkit for accomplishing different philosophical tasks? I argue that Plato sees collection and division as useful tools for achieving two distinct goals – generating real definitions and discovering the basic natural kinds of a given domain of knowledge – both …

Aristotle's Pluralistic Realism, Devin Henry

Data and Test Instruments

In this paper I explore Aristotle’s views on natural kinds and the compatibility of pluralism and realism, a topic that has generated considerable interest among contemporary philosophers. I argue that, when it came to zoology, Aristotle denied that there is only one way of organizing the diversity of the living world into natural kinds that will yield a single, unified system of classification. Instead, living things can be grouped and regrouped into various cross-cutting kinds on the basis of objective similarities and differences in ways that subserve the explanatory context. Since the explanatory aims of zoology are diverse and variegated, …

Elliott Sober: Did Darwin Write The Origin Backwards? Philosophical Essays On Darwin’S Theory, Charles H. Pence, Hope Hollocher, Ryan Nichols, Grant Ramsey, Edwin Siu, Daniel John Sportiello

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“Describing Our Whole Experience”: The Statistical Philosophies Of W.F.R. Weldon And Karl Pearson, Charles H. Pence

Faculty Publications

There are two motivations commonly ascribed to historical actors for taking up statistics: to reduce complicated data to a mean value (e.g., Quetelet), and to take account of diversity (e.g., Galton). Different motivations will, it is assumed, lead to different methodological decisions in the practice of the statistical sciences. Karl Pearson and W. F. R. Weldon are generally seen as following directly in Galton’s footsteps. I argue for two related theses in light of this standard interpretation, based on a reading of several sources in which Weldon, independently of Pearson, reflects on his own motivations. First, while Pearson does approach …

Nietzsche’S Aesthetic Critique Of Darwin, Charles H. Pence

Faculty Publications

Despite his position as one of the first philosophers to write in the “post- Darwinian” world, the critique of Darwin by Friedrich Nietzsche is often ignored for a host of unsatisfactory reasons. I argue that Nietzsche’s critique of Darwin is important to the study of both Nietzsche’s and Darwin’s impact on philosophy. Further, I show that the central claims of Nietzsche’s critique have been broadly misunderstood. I then present a new reading of Nietzsche’s core criticism of Darwin. An important part of Nietzsche’s response can best be understood as an aesthetic critique of Darwin, reacting to what he saw as …

Early Continental Philosophy Of Science, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Das ‚Problem Der Wissenschaft‘ Oder Nietzsches Philosophische Kritik Wissenschaftlicher Vernunft, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Invariance: A Tale Of Intellectual Migration, Steven Gimbel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The plotline of the standard story told about the development of intellectual history at the end of the 19th/turn of the 20th century follows the move from absolutism to perspectivalism. The narrative takes us, on the one hand, from the scientism of late Enlightenment writers like Voltaire, Mill, D’Alebert, and Comte and the historical determinism of Hegel, all of which were based upon a universal picture of rationality, to, on the other hand, the relativistic physics of Einstein, the perspectival art of Picasso, and the individualism of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard leading to the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger to and …

How Sexist Is Aristotle's Developmental Biology?, Devin Henry

Data and Test Instruments

No abstract provided.

Nietzsche’S “Gay” Science, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Offers a reading of the allusion to the 'Provencal' in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, including the troubadour’s art (or 'technic') of poetic song, an art at once secret, anonymous and thus nonsubjective, but also including logical disputation, for which it is the model, and comprising, perhaps above all, the important ideal of action (and pathos) at a distance: l’amour lointain. But beyond the Provençal character and atmosphere of the troubadour, Nietzsche’s conception of a joyful science, Nietzsche's 'gay' science also adumbrates a critique of science understood as the collective ideal of scholarship, and including classical philology as much as logic, …

Aristotle On The Mechanisms Of Inheritance, Devin Henry

Data and Test Instruments

In this paper I address an important question in Aristotle’s biology, What are the causal mechanisms behind the transmission of biological form? Aristotle’s answer to this question, I argue, is found in Generation of Animals Book 4 in connection with his investigation into the phenomenon of inheritance. There we are told that an organism’s reproductive material contains a set of ‘‘movements’’ which are derived from the various ‘‘potentials’’ of its nature (the internal principle of change that initiates and controls development). These ‘‘movements,’’ I suggest, function as specialized vehicles for com- municating the parts of the parent’s heritable form during …

Understanding Aristotle's Reproductive Hylomorphism, Devin Henry

Data and Test Instruments

No abstract provided.

Unruly Complexity: Ecology, Interpretation, Engagement, Peter Taylor

Curriculum and Instruction Faculty Publication Series

Ambitiously identifying fresh issues in the study of complex systems, Peter J. Taylor, in a model of interdisciplinary exploration, makes these concerns accessible to scholars in the fields of ecology, environmental science, and science studies. Unruly Complexity explores concepts used to deal with complexity in three realms: ecology and socio-environmental change; the collective constitution of knowledge; and the interpretations of science as they influence subsequent research.

For each realm Taylor shows that unruly complexity-situations that lack definite boundaries, where what goes on "outside" continually restructures what is "inside," and where diverse processes come together to produce change-should not be suppressed …

Paradigm Shifts And New Worldviews: Kuhn, Laudan And Discovery In Molecular Biology, Priya Venkatesan

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The author poses an alternate set of ideas concerning paradigms, normal science, research traditions and scientific revolution on the basis of the unique and inherently distinctive development of molecular biology and genetics; for, a new set of conceptual tools concerning scientific progress are required for an adequate understanding of how biological processes were elucidated under the scientific auspices of the central dogma of the genetic code. This essay concentrates on a limited study of three aspects in genetics: the study of chromosome structure, dynamics and function, reverse transcriptases, and the discovery of RNA catalysts. In attempting to analyze …

The Geocentric Universe: The Making Of A Cultural Symbol, Kathleen M. Isaacson

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1980s, cultural history has applied the analysis of symbols to explain historical problems. Cultural historians such as Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, and Dominick LaCapra have completed significant work in this area. Using their models, this study defines a cultural symbol within the history of science: the geocentric universe. It examines the symbol's origin and evolution from a mere idea to that of a symbol of significance. Beginning with the ancient Greece of Aristotle and Plato through the Middle Ages of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri, the symbol's potent influence expanded via powerful narratives and beautiful works of …

Pauline N. King's Review Of Michael E. Hoare's Edition Of The Resolution Journal Of Johann Reinhold Forster, 1772-1775, Pauline N. King

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

"Is Human Understanding Finite?", Peter Brian Medawar

Special Collections: Oregon Public Speakers

No abstract provided.

The Reconciliation Of Science And Religion In Symbolo-Fideism, Shirley Brown Moon

Wayne State University Dissertations

From the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, religion was in open warfare against science. By the end of the century the war was not going well for religion. Biology, anthropology, archeology, the "higher criticism" united in an attack on Christian premises, while "applied science" — technology-provided, the materialistic comforts which made Christian promises utopian and unnecessary. The reaction of some Protestant and Catholic leaders to this threat from science was a retreat into funda­mentalism. Others hastened to show that the recent discoveries were not really in conflict with religious truths at …

The Personality Of Educable Mentally Retarded Children As Compared To A General Child Population, Miles Raymond Mciver

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

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A Survey Of The Mathematics And Science Programs For The Gifted Students In The Secondary City Schools Of Indiana, George E. Roach

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

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An Analysis Of The Philosophy In The Poetry Of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Jock Wilson

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

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An Analysis Of The Mathematical Vocabulary Essential For Reading General Science Textbooks In Indiana Junior High Schools, Leslie W. Felling

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An Analysis Of The Characteristics Of The Exceptional Child, Thomas Edward Jordan

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A Follow-Up Of The Graduates Of Newport High School From 1935-1949, John W. Park

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

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A Follow-Up Of The Graduates Of Newport High School From 1935-1949, John W. Park

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.