Philosophy of Science Commons^™

Articulating The World: Conceptual Understanding And The Scientific Image, Joseph Rouse

Joseph Rouse

The most difficult challenge for naturalists in philosophy is accounting for scientific understanding of nature as itself a scientifically intelligible natural phenomenon. This book advances naturalism with a novel response to this challenge, drawing upon the philosophy of scientific practice and interdisciplinary science studies, philosophical work on the normativity of conceptual understanding, and new developments in evolutionary biology. The book’s two parts develop complementary, mutually supporting revisions to familiar accounts of conceptual understanding and of Sellars’s “scientific image” of ourselves-in-the-world. The first part shows how language and scientific practices exemplify the evolutionary process of niche construction. Conceptual capacities arise from …

Has God Said?: Scripture, The Word Of God, And The Crisis Of Theological Authority, John Morrison

John D. Morrison

No abstract provided.

Knowledge Of The Self-Revealing God In The Thought Of Thomas Forsyth Torrance, John Morrison

John D. Morrison

No abstract provided.

The Philosophy Of Biology: An Episodic History, David Depew, Grene Marjorie

David J Depew

No abstract provided.

Evolution And Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered, David Depew, Bruce Weber

David J Depew

The role of genetic inheritance dominates current evolutionary theory. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, several evolutionary theorists independently speculated that learned behaviors could also affect the direction and rate of evolutionary change. This notion was called the Baldwin effect, after the psychologist James Mark Baldwin. In recent years, philosophers and theorists of a variety of ontological and epistemological backgrounds have begun to employ the Baldwin effect in their accounts of the evolutionary emergence of mind and of how mind, through behavior, might affect evolution.

The essays in this book discuss the originally proposed Baldwin effect, how it …

Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics And The Genealogy Of Natural Selection, David Depew, Bruce Weber

David J Depew

Darwinism Evolving examines the Darwinian research tradition in evolutionary biology from its inception to its turbulent present, arguing that recent advances in modeling the nonlinear dynamics of complex systems may well catalyze the next major phase of Darwinian evolutionism.While Darwinism has successfully resisted reduction to physics, the authors point out that it has from the outset developed and applied its core explanatory concept, natural selection, by borrowing models from dynamics, a branch of physics. The recent development of complex systems dynamics may afford Darwinism yet another occasion to expand its explanatory power.Darwinism's use of dynamical models has received insufficient attention …

Entropy, Information, And Evolution: New Perspectives On Physical And Biological Evolution, David Depew, Bruce Weber

David J Depew

Can recent developments in thermodynamics and information theory offer a way out of the current crisis in evolutionary theory? One of the most exciting and controversial areas of scientific research in recent years has been the application of the principles of nonequilibrium thermodynamics to the problems of the physical evolution of the universe, the origins of life, the structure and succession of ecological systems, and biological evolution. These sixteen original essays by evolutionists, ecologists, molecular biologists, physical chemists, physicists, and philosophers of science provide the best current summary of this developing research program.Chapters in the book's first part - by …

Evolution At A Crossroads: The New Biology And The New Philosophy Of Science, David Depew, Bruce Weber

David J Depew

No abstract provided.