Abstract

Start with descriptive sketches of the epistemologies and ontological underpinnings of the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant, as they form the point of departure for the modern reductionistic and mechanistic paradigm of scientific explanation—the thesis is modified in the case of Kant, a transitional figure, who did emphasize the notion of agency, but still as fitted into the Cartesian, dualistic framework—and as they provide the locus of return, with important modifications, to teleological, emergentistic, and holistic frameworks of explanation. Add a pluralistic ontology of "comprehensive entities," which relies heavily on M. Polanyi's conceptions of "personal knowledge," "tacit knowing," and the "unexpected-range-of-possibilities" criterion for assessing degrees of reality of grades of being. Blend the former two ingredients with clear and cogent argumentation as well as a skillful handling of some of the recent sources in biology as they bear on the problem of deciding whether emergence and telism are irreducible features of even a rationally reconstructed framework of experience, and one has the makings of a challenging book by Marjorie Grene. Grene is anything but heavy-handed in her treatment of the devil of reductionism which she has located; but it is doubtful that she has given him his full due—insofar as she has concentrated her fire on an older style of behaviorism and mechanism that itself often has difficulty recognizing its rapidly matured and much more sophisticated progeny, scientific realism.—E. A. R.