Three early 20th-century attempts at unifying separate areas of biology, in particular development, genetics, physiology, and evolution, are compared in regard to their success and fruitfulness for further research: Jacques Loeb’s reductionist project of unifying approaches by physico-chemical explanations; Richard Goldschmidt’s anti-reductionist attempts to unify by integration; and Sewall Wright’s combination of reductionist research and vision of hierarchical genetic systems. Loeb’s program, demanding that all aspects of biology, including evolution, be studied by the methods of the experimental sciences, (...) proved highly successful and indispensible for higher level investigations, even though evolutionary change and properties of biological systems up to now cannot be fully explained on the molecular level alone. Goldschmidt has been appraised as pioneer of physiological and developmental genetics and of a new evolutionary synthesis which transcended neo-Darwinism. However, this study concludes that his anti-reductionist attempts to integrate genetics, development and evolution have to be regarded as failures or dead ends. His grand speculations were based on the one hand on concepts and experimental systems that were too vague in order to stimulate further research, and on the other on experiments which in their core parts turned out not to be reproducible. In contrast, Sewall Wright, apart from being one of the architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s, opened up new paths of testable quantitative developmental genetic investigations. He placed his research within a framework of logical reasoning, which resulted in the farsighted speculation that examinations of biological systems should be related to the regulation of hierarchical genetic subsystems, possibly providing a mechanism for development and evolution. I argue that his suggestion of basing the study of systems on clearly defined properties of the components has proved superior to Goldschmidt’s approach of studying systems as a whole, and that attempts to integrate different fields at a too early stage may prove futile or worse. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. (shrink)

Historically, the scientific method has been said to require proposing a theory, making a prediction of something not already known, testing the prediction, and giving up the theory (or substantially changing it) if it fails the test. A theory that leads to several successful predictions is more likely to be accepted than one that only explains what is already known but not understood. This process is widely treated as the conventional method of achieving scientific progress, and was used throughout the (...) twentieth century as the standard route to discovery and experimentation. But does science really work this way? In Making 20th Century Science, Stephen G. Brush discusses this question, as it relates to the development of science throughout the last century. Answering this question requires both a philosophically and historically scientific approach, and Brush blends the two in order to take a close look at how scientific methodology has developed. Several cases from the history of modern physical and biological science are examined, including Mendeleev's Periodic Law, Kekule's structure for benzene, the light-quantum hypothesis, quantum mechanics, chromosome theory, and natural selection. In general it is found that theories are accepted for a combination of successful predictions and better explanations of old facts. Making 20th Century Science is a large-scale historical look at the implementation of the scientific method, and how scientific theories come to be accepted. (shrink)

From reviews of the hardback edition: a deep study of 20th century field ... of the conceptual origins and development of twentieth century field theories, ...

Includes: Gunther Anders, "Victims of Aggression"; Hannah Arendt, "From the Life of the Mind; " Ernst Bloch, "On Fine Arts in the Machine Age, From "The ...

My analysis here is an attempt to bring out the main through-line in the development of Bulgarian philosophy of law today. A proper account of Bulgarian philosophy of law in the 20th century requires an attempt to find, on the one hand, a solution to epistemological and methodological problems in law and, on the other, a clear-cut influence of the Kantian critical tradition. Bulgarian philosophy of law follows a complicated path, ranging from acceptance and revision of Kantian philosophy (...) to the development of interesting theories on the logic of legal reasoning. (shrink)

Written by one of Italy's leading contemporary thinkers and available in English for the first time, this book surveys the key themes in Continental aesthetics.

This book presents an alternative view of cosmopolitanism, citizenship and modernity in early 20th-century India through the multiple lenses of mysticism, travel, friendship, art, and politics.It makes a key intervention in the understanding of cosmopolitan modernity based on the lives and experiences of Rabindranath Tagore, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Sri Aurobindo, Mirra Alfassa, James Cousins, Paul Richard, Dilip Kumar Roy, and Taraknath Das. Using archival texts and photographs, Mohanty interrogates the ideas of tradition and modernity, the local and the global, (...) and Self and the world as integral to the conception of a cosmopolitan world order. The volume will interest scholars and students of modern Indian history, comparative literature, cultural studies, Indian philosophy, and South Asian studies and the general reader. (shrink)

This article traces the history of hypnotherapies in Hungary by exploring and interpreting the work of Ferenc (András) Völgyesi, a controversial physician, psychiatrist and forensic expert who gained remarkable fame in and beyond Hungary. It explores his work and its reception in the context of the complex, changing trends in European psychology between the 1920s and 1950s, drawing on published sources in a range of languages, and the archives of the Hungarian State Security. It uncovers experiments in human and animal (...) hypnosis; Völgyesi’s engagement with the Hungarian psychoanalytic community; and the cultural, scientific, and esoteric, networks from which theories and practices of hypnosis emerged. This reminds us also that the development of psychotherapy in Europe cannot be disentangled from the history of parapsychology and western esotericism. The article also examines allegations of ethical abuses of hypnosis, and the shortcomings of Völgyesi’s theoretical and practical claims. It argues that this case illustrates how the history of European psychotherapy in the 20th century cannot be fully understood without taking into account the enduring fascination with hypnotherapies into the postwar period – re-inscribed, in this case, through Pavlovian theories. (shrink)

The author argues that Thomas Hobbes anticipates a set of questions about meaning and semantic order that come to fuller expression in the 20th century, in the writings of W.V.O. Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty. Despite their different points of departure, these 20th-century writers pose a number of profound questions about the conditions for the stability of meaning, and about the conditions that govern the use of the term “language” itself. Though (...) the more recent debate benefits from a set of philosophical tools unavailable in the seventeenth century, the author further argues that Hobbes performs a number of maneuvers in his texts from which his 20th-century successors would profit. (shrink)

Contrary to its heaping disasters, various actors and interpreters viewed the 20th century as the century of progress. This was as true of certain Marxists, or communists, as it was of Americanists such as Parsons. The temptation was to view the century, even in progress, as result, to view change as the precondition rather than as the process. Capitalism and modernity live on, rather, in the permanent revolution of liquid modernity. Capitalist, or at least liberal-democratic, and (...) socialist utopias nevertheless behaved as though perpetual peace was possible, if not impending. Uncertainty and contingency reigned in everyday life, if not in intellectual or progressive culture. Only now does the serpent again have its tail in its mouth. (shrink)

The central thesis of this article is that by anchoring bioethics' core conceptual armamentarium in a four-principled theory emphasizing autonomy and treating justice as a principle of allocation, theorists inadvertently biased 20th-century bioethical scholarship against addressing such subjects as ableism, anti-Black racism, classism, and other forms of discrimination, placing them outside of the scope of bioethics research and scholarship. It is also claimed that these scope limitations can be traced to the displacement of the nascent concept of respect (...) for persons—a concept designed to address classist and racist discrimination—with the morally solipsistic concept of autonomy. (shrink)

As indicated by its title, this book provides an overview of philosophy of science in the twentieth century. It focuses mostly on post-WWII philosophy of science, but it discusses earlier developme...

The great revolutions of modern times have been analysed from various angles, but their civilizational aspects and contexts have on the whole been neglected. More specifically, the major 20th-century revolutions can be seen as particularly important cases of intercivilizational encounters. They represent different responses to the ascendant and challenging civilization of the West. The Western civilizational trajectory (or set of trajectories), based on a shift from fideism to empiricism and on multiple social dynamics fuelled by this cultural reorientation (...) (such as those of the capittalist economy and the one-nation-state), is selectively appropriated by non-Western societies which at the same time reject the less adaptable parts of the West in the name of traditional or invented alternatives. Russia, China, Turkey and Iran are analysed as variations of this recurrent pattern. At one end of the spectrum, the Russian revolution aspired to transcend Western models on the basis of a more radical interpretation of their own principles; at the other, the Iranian revolution, made up of several episodes with intervals in between, has been characterized by an exceptionally tenacious - and in some ways inventive - defence of a pre-existing civilizational identity. (shrink)

Poincaré’s conventionalism has thoroughly transformed both the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics. Not only proponents of conventionalism, such as the logical positivists, were influenced by Poincaré, but also outspoken critics of conventionalism, such as Quine and Putnam, were inspired by his daring position. Indeed, during the twentieth century, most philosophers of mathematics and of science engaged in dialogue with conventionalism. As is often the case with such complex clusters of ideas, there is no consensus about the (...) meaning of conventionalism in general, and Poincaré’s original version of it, in particular. Nonetheless, notions such as the under-determination, empirical equivalence, implicit definition, holism and conceptual relativity, all of which can be linked to Poincare's writings have become central to philosophy. This essay explores the impact of some of these notions on twentieth century philosophy of science. In addition to inspiration based on Poincare's actual views, it emphasizes directions based on misreading and unjustified appropriations of Poincaré. (shrink)

Sanchez and Sanchez have selected, edited, translated, and introduced some of the most influential texts in Mexican philosophy, which constitute a unique and robust tradition that will challenge and complicate traditional conceptions of philosophy. The texts collected here are organized chronologically and represent a period of Mexican thought and culture that emerged from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and which culminated in la filosofia de lo mexicano (the philosophy of Mexicanness). Though the selections reflect on a variety of philosophical questions, (...) collectively they represent a growing tendency to take seriously the question of Mexican national identity as a philosophical question--especially given the complexities of Mexico's indigenous and European ancestries, a history of colonialism, and a growing dependency on foreign money and culture. More than an attempt to describe the national character, however, the texts gathered here represent an optimistic period in Mexican philosophy that aimed to affirm Mexican culture and philosophy as a valuable, if not urgent, contribution to universal culture. (shrink)

Please see the extended abstract in the attached file.

INTRODUCTION This work follows the recent publication of the landmark study edited by Leon Dyczewski of the Catholic University of Lublin entitled, ...

This article is based on a discussion held in Athens in April 2002, in the framework of a research visit, supported by the National Technical University of Athens, among the following participants: Alexander Pavlovits Ogurtsov (APO), Svetlena Sergeevna Neretina (SSN), and Michalis Assimakopoulos (MA) who translated and annotated the Russian text. The later wishes to thank his Russian teachers in philosophy, E.A. Mamchur and language, A.A. Nekrasova The translation was reviewed and emended by E.M. Swiderski, editor of SEET.Svetlana Neretina is (...) senior researcher in the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), doctor of philosophy, titled professor for medieval philosophy, author of: The Conceptualism of Peter Abelard (1994), Believing Reason (1995), Tropes and Concepts (1999), Time of Culture (2000, with A. Ogurtsov), articles and translations on Philosophy of culture, email, neretina@iph.ras.ru. (shrink)

In the 20th century the infiltration of scientific elements into philosophical currents not only reached its maximum, but also science itself became a "philosophical factor". We look at these processes in physics starting from the fall of mechanistic philosophy. The advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics has changed physics as science and raised a host of philosophical questions. Traditionally philosophical questions concerning space, time and causality cannot be any longer considered with no help of these theories. Relativistic (...) cosmology and its observational successes in the last decades of the century, for the first time in the history of human thought, provided a global framework for both science and philosophy. And the current search for the final unifying theory of physics leads directly to the most foundational questions of an ontological character. We argue that the success of the 20th century physics strongly suggests a kind of structuralist ontology. /// No século XX, a infiltração de elementos científicos nas correntes filosóficas não só alcançou o seu máximo, mas também é verdade que a própria ciência se tornou um "factor filosófico". O presente artigo considera estes processos na física, a começar com a decadência da filosofia mecanicista. O advento da teoria da relatividade e da mecânica quântica transformou a física enquanto ciência e levantou uma plêiade de questões filosóficas. Questões tradicionais acerca do espaço, do tempo e da causalidade não podem mais ser consideradas sem o contributo destas teorias. A cosmologia relati-vista e os seus sucessos observacionais nas últimas décadas do século passado, e isso pela primeira vez na história do pensamento humano, fornecem um esquema global tanto para a ciência como para a filosofia. Além disso, a busca corrente de uma última teoria unificadora da física conduz directamente às questões mais fundacionais de carácter ontológico. O autor do artigo defende que os sucessos da física do século XX sugerem fortemente uma espécie de ontologia estruturalista. (shrink)

Early 20th century evangelical mission organisations that emerged from the British Holiness Movement prioritised evangelism over social reform. Female missionaries, however, were often engaged in bringing social transformation. Even though women were the major workforce in overseas mission, leadership was always in male hands. This article discusses how even though women in the Japan Evangelistic Band were not in leadership positions, their initiative in social engagement enabled the Mission to participate in spiritual as well as social transformation, and (...) raise a generation of Japanese female leadership. (shrink)

Predenville discusses the historical, artistic, and critical contexts in which painting has taken a realist turn. Color illustrations.

The paper deals with the problem of human freedom and the freedom of person, as seen by Russian personalist philosophers of the 20th century in their Parisian exile - N. Berdyaev and N. Lossky, both of them influenced by F. M. Dostoyevsky. Their philosophical conceptions derive from existentialism, which is the existential-experiential source of the modern personalism in general. The Russian personalists saw human freedom as one of the absolute values and included its problematic together with the paradoxes (...) of the particularity of individual being into their sear_ching for the true essence of humans. In justifying freedom as the basic human right both thinkers combine their anthropocentric approach with the Christian doctrine. The free philosophy is religious and intuitive at the same time. (shrink)

Adorno, an important selection by Horkheimer and Adorno (from Dialectic of Enlightenment), as well as works by Walter Benjamin, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Norbert Elias, and Jurgen Habermas."--BOOK JACKET.

To many, chance and art are antagonistic terms. But a number of 20th century artists have turned this notion on its head by attempting to create artworks based on randomness. Among those, three in particular articulated a well-argued and thorough theory of the radical use of chance in art: André Breton (writer), John Cage (composer) and François Morellet (visual artist). The implications of such a move away from established aesthetics are far-reaching, as much in conceptual as in practical (...) terms, as this book hopes to make clear. Of paramount importance in this coincidentia oppositorum is the suggested possibility of a correlation between the artistic use of chance and a system of thought itself organised around chance. Indeed placing randomness at the centre of one’s art may have deeper philosophical consequences than just on the aesthetical level. (shrink)

A Reader of Philosophy from its Ancient Beginnings to the 20th Century.

The early 20th century a new style of Chinese women sector, is in the "revolution in the text," the social context, in Liang "new style" reality show ideas and writing demonstration, with the women's liberation movement since the commencement of the body into its . Revolution in women's Evans into the text, thus producing a unique application of magic; from the women's liberation movement of the actual needs, to break old stereotypes composition, heart open style, so that harvest (...) unprecedented in the history of Chinese literary masterpiece and a rare woman beauty of the text; the use of affinity with the woman in the language of expression, so that large group of women "do not have a magic." Women's world has become a new style of new literature written in accessible modern woman's "magic" of the bridge, it is not only acting on the Revolution of 1911 nation / state / women's liberation movement, but also for "54" period, even after the development of the modern women's writing laid the strong foundation. The new type of writing for the womenfolk in the early 20th century began with the liberation movement of the women in the social background of "Literature Revolutionary" which guided by the new type writing of Liang Qichao. There are several characteristics of the new type writing as following: Firstly, it was much attractive with the revolutionary of womenfolk; Secondly, many great literary works came out in Chinese literature history with breaking the old style of article; Thirdly, a loving and harmonious article style for women had been adopted which was attractive strongly for the womenfolk. Therefore, the new type of writing for the womenfolk just likes a bridge for the women modem new literature which not only acted on the liberation movement of the nation and women during the Xinhai Revolutionary period but also provided a stable base for the modem women literature during and afterwards May Fourth period. (shrink)