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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy of Science
Aspects Of Biological Explanation, Derek J. Skillings
Aspects Of Biological Explanation, Derek J. Skillings
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation is an evaluation of some strategies used for understanding the biological world. It argues that the complexity of living systems challenges the adequacy of traditional approaches to scientific explanation. An examination of the empirical details—especially those at the microscopic and nano scales—highlights the limitations of mechanistic explanation, common habits of causal reasoning, and theories of individuality. According to this analysis, starting with broad generalizations of how the world is, or a single universal theory of how it ought to be investigated or explained, has things entirely backwards. Instead, we ought to start by looking at the important processes, …
Darwinian Evolutionary Theory And Constructions Of Race In Nazi Germany: A Literary And Cultural Analysis Of Darwin’S Works And Nazi Rhetoric, Emily M. Wollmuth
Darwinian Evolutionary Theory And Constructions Of Race In Nazi Germany: A Literary And Cultural Analysis Of Darwin’S Works And Nazi Rhetoric, Emily M. Wollmuth
Departmental Honors Projects
First published in 1856, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is one of the most impactful scientific writings in history. While the influence of Darwinian evolutionary theory on historical events has been widely studied, no single work of scholarship has previously combined close reading of Origin’s representations of “race” with analysis of how those constructions of “racial” difference are (mis)translated across the cultural discourses of the eugenics movement and Nazi Germany. Through comparative cultural studies and close literary analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Darwin’s works—including Origin, Descent of Man, and Voyage of the Beagle, this paper examines how evolutionary …
Phylogeny, Psychology, And The Vicissitudes Of Human Development: The Anxiety Of Atavism, Frank Pittenger
Phylogeny, Psychology, And The Vicissitudes Of Human Development: The Anxiety Of Atavism, Frank Pittenger
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This cross-disciplinary dissertation provides a missing intellectual history of an ostensibly dead idea. Once widely held and no less elegant for its obsolescence, the principle of biogenetic recapitulation is best remembered by its defining mantra, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Among psychologists and sociologists as well as embryologists, the notion that the development of any individual organism repeats in compressed, miniaturized form the entire history of its species enjoyed broad (if not uncontested) acceptance through the early twentieth century. The author reexamines the origins of this theory in the work of Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel, and traces its influence in psychology …
In Theory, There's Hope: Queer Co-(M)Motions Of Science And Subjectivity, Cordelia Sand
In Theory, There's Hope: Queer Co-(M)Motions Of Science And Subjectivity, Cordelia Sand
Masters Theses
Given the state of the planet at present —specifically, the linked global ecological and economic crises that conjure dark imaginings and nihilistic actualities of increasing resource depletion, poisonings, and wide-scale sufferings and extinctions—I ask What might we hope now? What points of intervention offer possibility for transformation? At best, the response can only be partial. The approach this thesis takes initiates from specific pre-discursive assumptions. The first understands current conditions as having been produced, and continuing to be so, through practices that enact and sustain neoliberal relations. Secondly, these practices are expressive of a subjectivity tied to a Cartesian worldview, …
Aristotle's View Of Biological Evolution: A Study Of The Presuppositions Of Aristotle's Biology And Their Influence On His Biological Inquiries, Howard J. Sherman
Aristotle's View Of Biological Evolution: A Study Of The Presuppositions Of Aristotle's Biology And Their Influence On His Biological Inquiries, Howard J. Sherman
Philosophy ETDs
It is the purpose of this study to describe Aristotle's "set of presuppositions" as they relate to one science--biology--to lay bare, as it were, the framework within which biological knowledge for Aristotle is to be understood. It shall assume that Aristotle, like any philosopher, has two kinds presuppositions, each of which properly understood may serve to elucidate the other.