In 1935, A. G. Tansley, who was knighted later, proposed the ecosystem concept. Nevertheless, this concept was not without predecessors. Why did Tansley’s ecosystem prevail and not one of its competitors? The purpose of this article is to pin the distinguishing features of Tansley’s ecosystem down, as far as the published record allows. It is an exercise in finding the difference that made a difference. Besides being a pioneering ecologist, Tansley was an adept of psychoanalysis. His interest even led him (...) to visit Sigmund Freud in Vienna for a while. Psychologists had to regard the mind as an entity in its own right, while knowing that it truly was part of a larger whole (body + mind), because the causal relation between body and mind was unknown. This lead Tansley to conclude that psychologists must not objectify the system under study, have to search for causes within their own field, and must not speculate unless this serves a scientific purpose. In 1925, Tansley defended psychoanalysis in a prolonged controversy against a concerted attack criticizing its speculative content and poor scientific standing. This could have been the reason why Tansley kept his ecosystem free of speculative content and unscientific connotation. The competing ecosystem-like concepts, however, have contained philosophical speculation, non-deterministic properties like vitalism or entelechy, or have been burdened with unscientific connotations. Hence, rigorous restraint distinguished the ecosystem concept and made it ready for use by later researchers. (shrink)

Philosophy of Science, broadly construed, is as old as philosophy itself. It was only in the early twentieth century that it emerged as a distinct sub-discipline with its own professional standards and institutional structures, and it has come a long way since these pioneering days. During the century’s first four decades the focus was primarily on what nowadays would be referred to as Ôgeneral philosophy of science’, the study of problems that arise in all scientific disciplines alike. Since the 1960s (...) philosophers have increasingly paid attention to issues in particular sciences – at the beginning primarily in mathematics, physics and biology. Later on chemistry, economics, and the social sciences followed suit. And in the last few decades these so-called Ôphilosophies of the special sciences’ have reached unprecedented maturity. The 1960s saw another important development: the entry of history of science into philosophical debates, which led to a style of argument that based philosophical analysis on detailed historical case studies. In the 1980s, finally, sociological, and more generally humanities, perspectives on science entered the scene and contributed yet another way to approach the study of both the practices and the results of the sciences. This plenitude of schools, movements, and approaches can be bewildering, and keeping track of all of them is a Herculean task. So novices and seasoned practitioner alike may be grateful for a guiding hand, and that is what the new Routledge Companion to.. (shrink)

In this thesis, I argue that a good historical science will have the following characteristics: Firstly, it will seek to construct causal histories of the past. Secondly, the construction of these causal histories will utilise well-tested regularities of science. Additionally, well-tested regularities will secure the link between observations of physical traces and the causal events of interest. However, the historical sciences cannot use these regularities in a straightforward manner. The regularities must accommodate the idiosyncrasies of the past, and the degradation (...) of evidence over time. Through an examination of how the historical sciences work in practice, I show how they can confirm these unique causal histories, and the limits to their confirmatory strategies. (shrink)

The Renaissance architect, moral philosopher, cryptographer, mathematician, Papal adviser, painter, city planner and land surveyor Leon Battista Alberti provided the theoretical foundations of modern perspective geometry. Alberti’s work on perspective exerted a powerful influence on painters of the stature of Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci and Piero della Francesca. But his Della pittura of 1435–36 contains also a hitherto unrecognized ontology of pictorial projection. We sketch this ontology, and show how it can be generalized to apply to representative devices in (...) general, including maps and spatial and non-spatial databases. (shrink)