Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud Revolutions in the History and Philosophy of Science

by Weinert, Friedel

• ISBN13: 9781405181846
• ISBN10: 1405181842
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-10
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Using Copernicanism, Darwinism, and Freudianism as examples of scientific traditions, Copernicus, Darwin and Freud takes a philosophical look at these three revolutions in thought to illustrate the connections between science and philosophy. Shows how these revolutions in thought lead to philosophical consequences Provides extended case studies of Copernicanism, Darwinism, and Freudianism Integrates the history of science and the philosophy of science like no other text Covers both the philosophy of natural and social science in one volume

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. x
Introduction	p. 1
Nicolaus Copernicus: The Loss of Centrality	p. 3
Ptolemy and Copernicus	p. 3
A Clash of Two Worldviews	p. 4
The geocentric worldview	p. 5
Aristotle's cosmology	p. 5
Ptolemy's geocentrism	p. 9
A philosophical aside: Outlook	p. 14
Shaking the presuppositions: Some medieval developments	p. 17
The Heliocentric Worldview	p. 20
Nicolaus Copernicus	p. 21
The explanation of the seasons	p. 25
Copernicus and the Copernican turn	p. 28
A philosophical aside: From empirical adequacy to theoretical validity	p. 32
Copernicus consolidated: Kepler and Galileo	p. 32
Copernicus was not a Scientific Revolutionary	p. 37
The Copernican method	p. 39
The relativity of motion	p. 42
The Transition to Newton	p. 43
On hypotheses	p. 45
Some Philosophical Lessons	p. 47
The loss of centrality	p. 48
Was Copernicus a realist?	p. 51
Lessons for instrumentalism and realism	p. 52
Modern realism	p. 55
The underdetermination of theories by evidence	p. 58
The Duhem-Quine thesis	p. 59
The power of constraints	p. 61
Theories, models, and laws	p. 64
Theories and models	p. 64
Laws of nature, laws of science	p. 68
Philosophical views of laws	p. 69
The inference view	p. 69
The regularity view	p. 70
The necessitarian view	p. 73
The structural view	p. 75
Copernicus and Scientific Revolutions	p. 77
The Anthropic Principle: A Reversal of the Copernican Turn?	p. 83
Reading List	p. 87
Essay Questions	p. 91
Charles Darwin: The Loss of Rational Design	p. 93
Darwin and Copernicus	p. 93
Views of Organic Life	p. 94
Teleology	p. 94
The Great Chain of Being	p. 97
Design arguments	p. 99
Jean Baptiste Lamarck	p. 104
Fossil Discoveries	p. 106
Of bones and skeletons	p. 108
The antiquity of man	p. 110
Darwin's Revolution	p. 112
The Darwinian view of life	p. 114
Principles of evolution	p. 116
The descent of man	p. 119
Philosophical Matters	p. 124
Philosophical presuppositions: Mechanical worldview, determinism, materialism	p. 125
From biology to the philosophy of mind	p. 129
Empiricism	p. 129
Philosophy of mind	p. 132
Emergent minds	p. 134
The loss of rational design	p. 136
Intelligent design (ID)	p. 139
A Question of Method	p. 143
Darwinian inferences	p. 143
Philosophical empiricism	p. 147
Some principles of elimination	p. 149
Essential features of eliminative induction	p. 150
Falsifiability or testability?	p. 155
Explanation and prediction	p. 157
Some models of scientific explanation	p. 159
Hempel's models	p. 160
Functional models	p. 161
Causal models	p. 163
A counterfactual-interventionist account	p. 163
A conditional model of causation	p. 165
Structural explanations	p. 169
A brief return to realism	p. 172
Darwin and scientific revolutions	p. 174
Philosophical consequences	p. 176
Reading List	p. 177
Essay Questions	p. 183
Sigmund Freud: The Loss of Transparency	p. 185
Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud	p. 185
Some Views of Humankind	p. 187
Enlightenment views of human nature	p. 188
Nietzsche's view of human nature	p. 190
Scientism and the Freudian Model of Personality	p. 191
Freud's model of the mind	p. 192
A summary of psychoanalytic theory	p. 192
Analogy with physics	p. 195
Freud as an Enlightenment thinker	p. 200
The scientific status of the Freudian model	p. 202
Freud's methods	p. 202
The method of eliminative induction, again	p. 205
Freud stands between the empirical and the hermeneutic models	p. 208
The role of mind in the social world	p. 209
The Social Sciences beyond Freud	p. 210
Two standard models of the social sciences - some history	p. 210
The naturalistic model	p. 211
The hermeneutic model	p. 213
Essential features of social science models	p. 218
Essential features of the naturalistic model	p. 218
Essential features of the hermeneutic model	p. 221
Questions of methodology	p. 224
What is Verstehen?	p. 225
Weber's methodology of ideal types	p. 229
Verstehen and objectivity	p. 234
Causation in the social sciences	p. 236
Weber on causation	p. 236
On the existence of social laws	p. 239
Explanation and prediction in the social sciences	p. 242
Underdetermination	p. 243
Realism and relativism	p. 244
Reductionism and functionalism	p. 248
Evolution and the Social Sciences	p. 253
Sociobiology - the fourth revolution?	p. 254
Evolutionary psychology	p. 257
Freud and Revolutions in Thought	p. 261
Revolutions in thought vs. revolutions in science	p. 263
Reading List	p. 263
Essay Questions	p. 269
Name Index	p. 271
Subject Index	p. 274
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