Darwin's Argument by Analogy

From Artificial to Natural Selection

Roger M. White, M. J. S. Hodge, Gregory Radick (Autoren)

Buch | Hardcover

260 Seiten

2021
Cambridge University Press (Verlag)
978-1-108-47728-4 (ISBN)

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This book sets out an original perspective on the argument for one of the most important theories in the history of science: Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. The book will appeal to students, scholars and scientists interested in Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin put forward his theory of natural selection. Conventionally, Darwin's argument for this theory has been understood as based on an analogy with artificial selection. But there has been no consensus on how, exactly, this analogical argument is supposed to work – and some suspicion too that analogical arguments on the whole are embarrassingly weak. Drawing on new insights into the history of analogical argumentation from the ancient Greeks onward, as well as on in-depth studies of Darwin's public and private writings, this book offers an original perspective on Darwin's argument, restoring to view the intellectual traditions which Darwin took for granted in arguing as he did. From this perspective come new appreciations not only of Darwin's argument but of the metaphors based on it, the range of wider traditions the argument touched upon, and its legacies for science after the Origin.

Roger M. White is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. He is an analytic philosopher whose books include The Structure of Metaphor (1996) and Talking About God: The Concept of Analogy and the Problem of Religious Language (2010). M. J. S. Hodge is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Origins and Species (1991), Before and After Darwin (2008) and Darwin Studies (2009), and co-editor with Gregory Radick of The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge, 2009). Gregory Radick is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. His books include The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (2007) and, as co-editor with Jonathan Hodge, The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge, 2009).

Introduction; 1. Analogy in classical Greece; 2. Analogy in the background to the Origin; 3. Darwin's analogical theorising before the Origin; 4. The 'one long argument' of the Origin; 5. An analysis of Darwin's argument by analogy; 6. Darwin's use of metaphor in the Origin; 7. Rebuttals of the revisionists; 8. Wider issues concerning Darwinian science.

Erscheinungsdatum	25.10.2021
Zusatzinfo	Worked examples or Exercises
Verlagsort	Cambridge
Sprache	englisch
Maße	158 x 236 mm
Gewicht	530 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Erkenntnistheorie / Wissenschaftstheorie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit
	Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Evolution
ISBN-10	1-108-47728-3 / 1108477283
ISBN-13	978-1-108-47728-4 / 9781108477284
Zustand	Neuware