Copernicus, Darwin, & Freud
"Why is Darwin less the Copernicus than the Kepler of biology? What are good criteria for scientific revolutions? Shift of perspective? Replacement of paradigms? Reweaving conceptual networks? Explanatory gain? Restructuring the constraint space? Threatening worldviews? Whoever wants to learn more about these and many other important issues of history and philosophy of science will have to read on!"
Klaus Hentschel, University of Stuttgart
"Friedel Weinert has done a rare and excellent thing in this book: he has shown how the philosophy of science is intimately connected with the development of physical, biological, and social sciences and that argument concerning the foundations of these sciences cannot be advanced without reference to philosophy. It is a clearly written and engaging book that will be informative for teachers, students, and the lay public alike."
Robert Nola, University of Auckland
Autorentext
Friedel Weinert is Professor of Philosophy at Bradford University and a former Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the LSE in London. He holds a PhD in Philosophy, a BA in Sociology, and a BSc in Physics. Dr. Weinert is the editor of Laws of Nature (1995), the author of The Scientist as Philosopher (2004) and chief editor of the forthcoming Compendium of Quantum Physics: Concepts, Experiments, History and Philosophy.
Klappentext
Why is Darwin less the Copernicus than the Kepler of biology? What are good criteria for scientific revolutions? Shift of perspective? Replacement of paradigms? Reweaving conceptual networks? Explanatory gain? Restructuring the constraint space? Threatening worldviews? Whoever wants to learn more about these and many other important issues of history and philosophy of science will have to read on!
Klaus Hentschel, University of Stuttgart
Friedel Weinert has done a rare and excellent thing in this book: he has shown how the philosophy of science is intimately connected with the development of physical, biological, and social sciences and that argument concerning the foundations of these sciences cannot be advanced without reference to philosophy. It is a clearly written and engaging book that will be informative for teachers, students, and the lay public alike.
Robert Nola, University of Auckland
Zusammenfassung
Copernicus, Darwin, & Freud
Why is Darwin less the Copernicus than the Kepler of biology? What are good criteria for scientific revolutions? Shift of perspective? Replacement of paradigms? Reweaving conceptual networks? Explanatory gain? Restructuring the constraint space? Threatening worldviews? Whoever wants to learn more about these and many other important issues of history and philosophy of science will have to read on!
Klaus Hentschel, University of Stuttgart
Friedel Weinert has done a rare and excellent thing in this book: he has shown how the philosophy of science is intimately connected with the development of physical, biological, and social sciences and that argument concerning the foundations of these sciences cannot be advanced without reference to philosophy. It is a clearly written and engaging book that will be informative for teachers, students, and the lay public alike.
Robert Nola, University of Auckland
Inhalt
Preface ix
Acknowledgments x
Introduction 1
I Nicolaus Copernicus: The Loss of Centrality 3
1 Ptolemy and Copernicus 3
2 A Clash of Two Worldviews 4
2.1 The geocentric worldview 5
2.2 Aristotle's cosmology 5
2.3 Ptolemy's geocentrism 9
2.4 A philosophical aside: Outlook 14
2.5 Shaking the presuppositions: Some medieval developments 17
3 The Heliocentric Worldview 20
3.1 Nicolaus Copernicus 21
3.2 The explanation of the seasons 25
3.3 Copernicus and the Copernican turn 28
3.3.1 A philosophical aside: From empirical adequacy to theoretical validity 32
3.4 Copernicus consolidated: Kepler and Galileo 32
4 Copernicus was not a Scientific Revolutionary 37
4.1 The Copernican method 39
4.2 The relativity of motion 42
5 The Transition to Newton 43
5.1 On hypotheses 45
6 Some Philosophical Lessons 47
6.1 The loss of centrality 48
6.2 Was Copernicus a realist? 51
6.2.1 Lessons for instrumentalism and realism 52
6.3 Modern realism 55
6.4 The underdetermination of theories by evidence 58
6.4.1 The DuhemQuine thesis 59
6.4.2 The power of constraints 61
6.5 Theories, models, and laws 64
6.5.1 Theories and models 64
6.5.2 Laws of nature, laws of science 68
6.5.3 Philosophical views of laws 69
6.5.3.1 The inference view 69
6.5.3.2 The regularity view 70
6.5.3.3 The necessitarian view 73
6.5.3.4 The structural view 75
7 Copernicus and Scientific Revolutions 77
8 The Anthropic Principle: A Reversal of the Copernican Turn? 83
Reading List 87
Essay Questions 91
II Charles Darwin: The Loss of Rational Design 93
1 Darwin and Copernicus 93
2 Views of Organic Life 94
2.1 Teleology 94
2.1.1 The Great Chain of Being 97
2.1.2 Design arguments 99
2.1.3 Jean Baptiste Lamarck 104
3 Fossil Discoveries 106
3.1 Of bones and skeletons 108
3.2 The antiquity of man 110
4 Darwin's Revolution 112
4.1 The Darwinian view of life 114
4.1.1 Principles of evolution 116
4.2 The descent of man 119
5 Philosophical Matters 124
5.1 Philosophical presuppositions: Mechanical worldview, determinism, materialism 125
5.2 From biology to the philosophy of mind 129
5.2.1 Empiricism 129
5.2.2 Philosophy of mind 132
5.2.3 Emergent minds 134
5.3 The loss of rational design 136
5.4 Intelligent design (ID) 139
6 A Question of Method 143
6.1 Darwinian inferences 143
6.2 Philosophical empiricism 147
6.3 Some principles of elimination 149
6.4 Essential features of eliminative induction 150
6.5 Falsifiability or testability? 155
6.6 Explanation and prediction 157
6.7 Some models of scientific explanation 159
6.7.1 Hempel's models 160
6.7.2 Functional models 161
6.7.3 Causal models 163
6.7.3.1 A counterfactual-interventionist account 163
6.7.3.2 A conditional model of causation 165
6.7.4 Structural explanations 169
6.8 A brief return to realism 172
6.9 Darwin and scientific revolutions 174
6.9.1 Philosophical consequences 176
Reading List 177
Essay Questions 183
III Sigmund Freud: The Loss of Transparency 185
1 Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud 185
2 Some Views of Humankind 187
2.1 Enlightenment views of human nature 188
2.2 Nietzsche's view of human nature 190
3 Scientism and the Freudian Model of Personality 191
3.1 Freud's model of the mind 192
3.1.1 A summary of psychoanalytic theory 192
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