My post was not intended to suggest that the fact that Darwin did not recant his theory is evidence in its favor or is that his failure to embrace Christianity is evidence of its falsity. Just relevant to an understanding of his thought and legacy.
Darwin’s last publication was about sexual, not natural, selection: “After having carefully weighed to the best of my ability the various arguments which have been advanced against the principle of sexual selection, I remain firmly convinced of its truth."
🦋🦫🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #PhilSci
Charles Darwin died OTD in 1882.
Stories of a deathbed renunciation of his doubts about Christianity and recantation of his theory circulated widely (mostly in the US, predictably). They were, however, lies.
He was buried in Westminster Abbey, next to John Herschel.
🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #PhilSci
There is “a kind of human truth, poised between fact and fiction, which a biographer can make as he tells the story of another’s life, and thereby make it both his own (like a friendship) and the public’s (like a betrayal). It asks what we can know, what we can believe, and finally what we can love”
I’ve finished Richard Holmes’s biography of Tennyson. One of the great literary biographers.
Pure coincidence, but I also just finished Ian McEwan’s novel What We Can Know. M’s epigraph comes from H’s joint biography of Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage meditating on the biographer’s art.
#BookSky
Vincent Van Gogh, Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers (1889)
Vincent Van Gogh was born OTD in 1853.
“Oh yes! He loved yellow, did good Vincent, the painter from Holland, gleams of sunlight warming his soul, which detested fog. A craving for warmth.”
—Paul Gauguin
Caricature of W by David Levine for the New York Review of Books.
Tennessee Williams was born OTD in 1911.
“Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”
#Booksky
And Descartes just makes me tired.
For myself, I’m with Toulmin. I admire Newton’s achievements. I *love* Montaigne and Shakespeare. For my sins, I have to admit a lack of real familiarity with Rabelais.
Ring-orous, maybe.
I own every one of those as well, both as standalone volumes and in the wonderful two-volume annotated edition of the complete canon.
Artist’s rendering of the One Ring, via Wikipedia.
On this day of the Third Age of Middle Earth, the One Ring was cast into the depths of Sammath Naur, the Chambers of Fire of Orodruin, destroying it, and with it Sauron’s power.
#BookSky
Photo of T from Wikipedia.
Stephen Toulmin was born OTD 1922.
If we get to Heaven and are offered eternal residence with Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Montaigne, few of us will ask instead to join Descartes, Newton, and “the exact-thinking but darker-souled geniuses of the 17th century.”
#Philsci #HistSTM 🦋🦫 #Booksky
I am a huge Woodhouse fan. Have copies of over 100 of his books. Genius!
Patrick Suppes was born OTD in 1922.
One of the great 20th century philosophers of science, Pat was an early critic of the semantic conception of theories, believing that theories are best conceived as sets of models.
He was also accomplished in both empirical science and business.
🦋🦫 #PhilSci
You’ll note that I credited Cameron in the alt text.
Photographic portrait of H by Julia Margaret Cameron. Wikipedia.
John Herschel was born OTD in 1792.
His 1831 Preliminary Discourse launched a flowering of reflection on the aims and methods of science among British thinkers that was so rich and influential that Charles Sanders Peirce would later dub it “the Age of Method.”
🧪#HistSTM #PhilSci 🐋🌱
Thanks! I focused on James, but as you say, could just as easily have talked about Dewey.
Here’s a link to the full article (paywall):
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/676147/pdf
#HistSTM 🌱🐋 #evobio #philsci 🦫🦋
Darwin’s Descent of Man launched OTD in 1871. In it, D finally made explicit what had been obvious, if unstated, in the Origin: humans had evolved.
And not merely bodily. Our minds, even our moral codes, evolved from animal sources.
#HistSTM 🌱🐋 #evobio #philsci 🦫🦋
“[T]he very phenomenon being investigated may be changed by the inquiry itself. It is as if there were a principle of human indeterminacy at work.”
“Each of us becomes a new person as we redescribe the past.”
#PhilSci #HistSTM 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧪🗃️🧠
Caricature of Hacking by David Levine for @nybooks.com.
Ian Hacking was born OTD in 1936.
“There is no canonical way to think of our own past. In the endless quest for order and structure, we grasp at whatever picture is floating by and put our past into its frame.”
#PhilSci #HistSTM 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧪🗃️🧠
Caricature of Hacking by David Levine for @nybooks.com.
Ian Hacking was born OTD in 1936.
“There is no canonical way to think of our own past. In the endless quest for order and structure, we grasp at whatever picture is floating by and put our past into its frame.”
#PhilSci #HistSTM 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧪🗃️🧠
“Human creativity stems from the ability to combine and recombine existing ideas in novel ways.”
#Complexity #HistSTM #PhilSci 🧪
Caricature of H by Dan Williams for The Economist.
Douglas Hofstadter was born OTD in 1945.
“It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order—and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”
#Complexity #HistSTM #PhilSci 🧪
I take him to be suggesting that a search for invariance is in a sense a search for essence, and that undertaking such a search implies a belief that the essence thus discovered is in some sense more fundamental than the “accidental” sources of variation. Sounds a bit Platonic to me.
Plate of iguanodon teeth from Gideon Mantell, “Notice on the Iguanodon, a newly discovered fossil reptile, from the sandstone of Tilgate Forest, in Sussex,”Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 115 (1825), p. 186.
Gideon Mantell published his description of the iguanodon OTD in 1825.
He had originally thought that the fossil teeth on which he based his description were those of a giant crocodile, but later determined that the creature was an enormous herbivore.
🐋🌱🗃️❤️🧪 #HistSTM
Photo of Monod. Maker unknown. From Wikipedia.
Jacques Monod was born OTD in 1910.
“In science there is and will remain a Platonic element which could not be taken away without ruining it. Among the infinite diversity of singular phenomena science can only look for invariants.”
🐋🌱 🦫🦋 #Philsci #HistSTM #evobio
Final stanza of the poem: If you catch him, hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil, an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips. Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.
Elizabeth Bishop was born OTD in 1911.
She wrote the best poem ever inspired by a typo in a newspaper article—“man-moth,” when what was intended was “mammoth.”
#booksky #poetry
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47537/...
