It is not justifiable to accuse Darwin of conscious or unconscious plagiarism. This charge is contrary to the historical evidence and to the extensive information that we have about his character. When Darwin listed the writers on the origin of species by natural selection before himself, he did not mention Blyth, and this omission did not disturb the cordial relations between Darwin and Blyth. Blyth continued to supply Darwin with information which Darwin used in his later publications with due acknowledgment (...) to Blyth. For example, in The Descent of Man, Darwin cited Blyth: “Mr. Blyth, as he informs me, saw Indian crows feeding two or three of their companions which were blind.”63 Blyth felt no resentment. If he did, he would have so informed Darwin. Blyth did not regard himself as in any sense a predecessor of Darwin and he certainly did not resent Darwin as a plagiarizer of himself. Moreover, Darwin went to a great deal of trouble to find his own predecessors and to give them proper credit.64After Darwin had completed his work on natural selection, he wrote a letter to the Reverend Baden Powell in which he clearly showed recognition of the contribution of others to his own work:No educated person, not even the most ignorant, could suppose I mean to arrogate to myself the origination of the doctrine that species had not been independently created. The only novelty in my work is the attempt to explain how species became modified, and to a certain extent how the theory of descent explains certain large classes of facts; and in these respects I received no assistance from my predecessors.65 *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A8402011 00002. (shrink)

It should be clear that Lyell's scientific contemporaries would hardly have agreed with Robert Munro's remark that Antiquity of Man created a full-fledged discipline. Only later historians have judged the work a synthesis; those closer to the discoveries and events saw it as a compilation — perhaps a “capital compilation,”95 but a compilation none the less. Its heterogeneity made it difficult to judge as a unity, and most reviewers, like Forbes, concentrated on the first part of Lyell's trilogy. The chapters (...) on glaciation were admired by Lyell's friends but had relatively little appeal to more general readers. His discussion of the species question hedged far too much to please those who accepted the cogency of Darwin's evidence and arguments. This last section of the book blatantly lacks originality or commitment and certainly has no claim to classical status in anthropology.We are left, then, with the first twelve chapters, for it was this portion that dictated the book's title and that amassed the available evidence favoring the antiquity of the human species. Did it do anything more than marshall the evidence that others had discovered? I think not. Lyell could write with style and verve. Principles of Geology is a remarkably readable book. But Antiquity is the work of a geologist, not of a systematic student of man. Despite its occasional touches of power, it never captures the freshness and immediacy of Lubbock's Pre-historic Times nor the theoretical brilliance of E. B. Tylor's Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865).96 Antiquity utilizes little of the comparative method whereby Lyell's contemporaries used data from modern “savagery” to elaborate the possible social functions of the prehistoric remains being uncovered. It contains little social theory and has virtually no integrated framework. Even the first twelve chapters do not really hang together. As Hooker, commenting to Darwin on Lubbock's review, sadly wrote: “Lubbock in [the] N[atural] H[istory] Review, had in a note called attention to Lyell's ... ‘doing injustice’ to Prestwich & Falconer. I modified this expression ‘injustice’ in Lubbock's paper (which was friendly and apologetic). I am deeply sorry for it, but what can one do? I do think Lyell's first XII chapters a complete mess.”97 In another letter to Darwin, Hooker described this first portion of Antiquity as “confused and confusing.”98Part of the problem, of course, lay in the subject's novelty for Lyell and for most of his contemporaries. At a deeper level, however, I believe that the book accurately reflects Lyell's uncertainties about Darwin's work and its implications for man.99 Leonard Wilson's edition of Lyell's Scientific Journals provides a unique insight into Lyell's mind during the years just before he began to write Antiquity.100 Preoccupied with the human implications of evolutionary biology, Lyell was not clear how many of those implications were compatible with his deep convictions about the dignity of man's place in the cosmos. With a certain naiveté, Lyell complained in 1873 that many of his readers had failed to see the “natural connections” among the three portions of Antiquity.101 Connections could indeed be drawn between man's antiquity and his evolutionary origins; Lyell's private Scientific Journals movingly demonstrate that he was well aware of this fact. But he never fully made the connections in his published writings. Antiquity of Man is more appropriately seen as the last gasp of the heroic period in British geology than as the opening salvo in a new, post-Darwinian anthropological synthesis. Between the founding of the Geological Society of London in 1807 and the middle of the nineteenth century, geology was recognized as one of the most exciting and innovative scientific fields in Britain.102 Lyell himself had contributed much to that drama, and by the 1860's he was a public figure of venerable proportions. More then any other man he represented a geology that had extended the boundaries of process, time, and life. The fundamental achievements of Lyell and his colleagues had been assimilated into the wider Victorian consciousness, yet the earlier public debates about “genesis and geology” had left untouched in its essentials the concept of Man as a moral, responsible, created being.103Lyell never abandoned this view of his own species, and in 1863 it was a completely responsible creature which, under the weight of empirical evidence, Lyell admitted had lived on earth far longer than had previously been thought. Certainly this more generous allowance for human existence was constitutive to what Burrow calls the evolutionary social theory of midcentury Britain.104 Unlike Lyell, the younger representatives of this anthropology quietly accepted both man's antiquity and his aboriginal animality. Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology (1855), as well as the other volumes of his grand Synthetic Philosophy, presented as part of the cosmic process the development of human from prehuman beings.105 Tylor's discussion of what in his Researches (1865) he called the “gesture-language” presupposed the gradual and de novo origin of language in early human populations.106 Lubbock's young and polished mind was untroubled by the human implications of Darwin's work, and he cast his Prehistoric Times into such a perfect mold that it and its companionpiece (On the Origin of Civilization, 1870) went through seven editions each between 1865 and World War I, with their original theoretical structures intact. In a way that Lyell could not grasp, Lubbock was intrigued by questions concerning the origins of moral and religious beliefs and did not flinch at the thought of an amoral, atheistic creature as an ancestor.107 Indeed, as the German naturalist Carl Vogt pointed out in his Lectures on Man, translated into English the year after Antiquity, both Darwin's theories and the primitive flint knives of the Stone Age bore witness to a time beyond that imaginable from the condition of the lowest present-day “savage”:From such a low condition [little better than anthropomorphous apes], compared to which that of the so-called savages of the old and new world is a refined civilisation, has the human species gradually extricated itself, in a bitter struggle for existence, which it was well able to maintain, by being gifted with a larger amount of brain and intelligence than that possessed by the surrounding animal world.108The easy integration of biological and social themes was perhaps the distinguishing hallmark of Victorian anthropology of the 1850's and 1860's. After his fashion, Lyell got both themes into Antiquity, but he carefully separated them with a seven-chapter wall of glacial ice. Lyell's anthropology was not that of a thoroughgoing evolutionist like Lubbock, Tylor, or Spencer. For Lyell prehistoric man was not a product of biological evolution. Rude and superstitious he may have been, but he possessed ritual and a belief in a future state, and thus deserved “the epithet of ‘noble,’ which Dryden gave to what he seems to have pictured to himself as the primitive condition of our race: as Nature first made man/when wild in woods the noble savage ran.”109As a systematic argument, Lyell's book was at best a significant failure. As a popularization, it was a success — largely because of the personal stature of its author and the particular moment of its appearance. It helped establish the fact of man's antiquity with a wider Victorian audience, in itself no mean achievement. But Lyell was unable to exploit the fuller implications of his material in the service of a secular science of man. Ironically, he exploited only his colleagues' discoveries. Though the aging Lyell, with failing eyesight but unfailing mental powers, can still be seen as a man of considerable importance, his Antiquity belongs to the carefully circumscribed world of British geology rather than to the less disciplined world of Victorian anthropology. (shrink)

Moody ends his provocative article on `Conversations with zombies' by raising the possibility that `We might, after all, be zombies'. By zombies he means creatures who appear to act intelligently, like us, but who have no internal experience of consciousness. My basic point in this brief commentary will be to note as a basic observation that we are indeed, as a matter of verifiable fact, like zombies most of the time but we have a possibility of becoming conscious. The consequences (...) of this observable and testable reality are of enormous importance for the development of a fuller understanding of consciousness and its possibilities. (shrink)

As an introduction to this cluster of four essays on Buddhist ethics contributed by David Chappell, Charles Hallisey and Anne Hansen, Damien Keown, and Joe Bransford Wilson, I offer an overview of the developing scholarship in the field of Buddhist ethics, suggest the benefits of a shift- ing attention away from the vinaya tradition toward a fuller consideration of sila and its applications, and offer some summary comments concerning the contribution made by each of the essays that follow.

Scholars generally dismiss the ideas of the eighteenth-century founder of the Royal Irish Academy, Charles Vallancey, who argued for links between ancient Irish, Phoenician, and Scythian languages and cultures. Vallancey's antiquarian writings were widely known at the time and impacted upon thinkers such as William Jones, who first correctly articulated the links between Indo-European languages. Earlier, Vallancey had hypothesized similar links and a “common source” of world languages, relying on Irish origin legends and supposed similarities between Ireland and the (...) “Orient.” Though inaccurate, his ideas spurred fuller investigations, prompting philologers in new directions. The father of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce, argued for the value of speculative reasoning, outlining the logic of discovery. For Peirce “abduction” is the beginning of the scientific method, the formation of a hypothesis. Reading Vallancey's speculations as abductive suggestions accounts for his prominence at the time and asserts his influence in the history of philology and linguistics. (shrink)

This anthology on creativity represents a lifetime of reading and study by the late Charles Dewey Tenney, a philosopher who had been a student of Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard. In a series of fourteen essays Tenney considers the various factors that can be identified in creativity, followed by the recorded testimony of philosophers, artists, historians, explorers, scientists and others, both theorists and practitioners. The contributors extend in time from Aristotle and Sophocles to Buckminster Fuller and May Sarton. (...) They include such diverse thinkers as Martin Luther, Karl Marx, Lewis Carroll, Julian Huxley, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Gertrude Stein, Henry Nelson Wieman and Alfred North Whitehead. In all, more than 300 of the world's most creative individuals are included. Contents: Discovery, Invention and Creation; Roots of Discovery; Environs of Discovery; Agents of Discovery; Hinderances to Discovery; Observation and Discovery; Reason in Discovery; Reverie Discovery; Imagination in Discovery; Sensibility and Discovery; Method in Discovery; Artistry in Discovery; Diffusion; and Foresight and Discovery. (shrink)

Since its inception in 1926 the American Catholic philosophical Association has furthered the collective research of Catholic philosophers and has greatly stimulated their influence and individual competence in the process. It now reflects an independent thoroughness of thinking among American Christians, which respects philosophy as an autonomous study while fruitfully exemplifying its open relation to divine revelation for a fuller understanding of man and his life. Since December 1930 Doctor Hart has been the responsible secretary, who unselfishly dedicates his (...) precious time and talents to organizing the Association on both national and regional bases, the indefatigable editor of its annual Proceedings and special Studies and a constant contributor to its official quarterly journal. He has thus reared a full generation within the Association—apart from his thirty-four years of professorial service in Washington and elsewhere, and many other academic and religious activities. (shrink)

A comprehensive and systematic reconstruction of the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, perhaps America's most far-ranging and original philosopher, which reveals the unity of his complex and influential body of thought. We are still in the early stages of understanding the thought of C. S. Peirce (1839-1914). Although much good work has been done in isolated areas, relatively little considers the Peircean system as a whole. Peirce made it his life's work to construct a scientifically sophisticated and logically rigorous (...) philosophical system, culminating in a realist epistemology and a metaphysical theory ("synechism") that postulates the connectedness of all things in a universal evolutionary process. In The Continuity of Peirce's Thought, Kelly Parker shows how the principle of continuity functions in phenomenology and semeiotics, the two most novel and important of Peirce's philosophical sciences, which mediate between mathematics and metaphysics. Parker argues that Peirce's concept of continuity is the central organizing theme of the entire Peircean philosophical corpus. He explains how Peirce's unique conception of the mathematical continuum shapes the broad sweep of his thought, extending from mathematics to metaphysics and in religion. He thus provides a convenient and useful overview of Peirce's philosophical system, situating it within the history of ideas and mapping interconnections among the diverse areas of Peirce's work. This challenging yet helpful book adopts an innovative approach to achieve the ambitious goal of more fully understanding the interrelationship of all the elements in the entire corpus of Peirce's writings. Given Peirce's importance in fields ranging from philosophy to mathematics to literary and cultural studies, this new book should appeal to all who seek a fuller, unified understanding of the career and overarching contributions of Peirce, one of the key figures in the American philosophical tradition. (shrink)

Almost any modern reader's first encounter with Darwin's writing is likely to be the "Historical Sketch," inserted by Darwin as a preface to an early edition of the Origin of Species, and having since then appeared as the preface to every edition after the second English edition. The Sketch was intended by him to serve as a short "history of opinion" on the species question before he presented his own theory in the Origin proper. But the provenance of the "Historical (...) Sketch" is somewhat obscure. Some things are known about its production, such as when it first appeared and what changes were made to it between its first appearance in 1860 and its final form, for the fourth English edition, in 1866. But how it evolved in Darwin's mind, why he wrote it at all, and what he thought he was accomplishing by prefacing it to the Origin remain questions that have not been carefully addressed in the scholarly literature on Darwin I attempt to show that Darwin's various statements about the "Historical Sketch," made primarily to several of his correspondents between 1856 and 1860, are somewhat in conflict with one another, thus making problematic a satisfactory interpretation of how, when, and why the Sketch came to be. I also suggest some probable resolutions to the several difficulties. (shrink)

There is a genre of contemporary philosophy that fits neatly neither the “analytic” nor the “continental” style but straddles both, seeking to combine the former’s rigor of analysis and argument with the latter’s breadth of historical and cultural perspective. Its practitioners emerge from both traditions and tend to be regarded by the more orthodox as out of the mainstream of each. In this regard, the three subjects of Gutting’s study—Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor—have more in common with (...) analytically inclined continental philosophers like Jürgen Habermas than they do with more conventional analytic philosophers. But this is a book addressed chiefly to readers in the analytic tradition, and its careful reconstructions and assessments of its subjects’ views are pitched in that direction; their deep indebtedness to such thinkers as Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Humboldt, Heidegger, and Derrida remains in the background. Moreover, Gutting is not interested so much in presenting exhaustive accounts of their views as in using his discussions of them to construct and defend a philosophical position of his own, which he calls “pragmatic liberalism.” Because that position is closest to Rorty’s, he begins with an extended discussion of the latter’s “epistemological behaviorism” and “liberal ironism,” employing accurate reconstructions and cogent criticisms to develop his own views. MacIntyre and Taylor are then discussed as raising challenges to those views, particularly to the “ethical naturalism” that Gutting shares with Rorty. This approach means that Rorty’s views receive a fuller airing than do MacIntyre’s or, especially, Taylor’s. (shrink)

This book offers an historical and critical guide to the concepts of the post-modern and the post-industrial. It brings admirable clarity and thoroughness to a discussion of the many different uses made of the term post-modern across a number of different disciplines (including literature, architecture, art history, philosophy, anthropology and geography). It also analyses the concept of the post-industrial society to which the concept of the post-modern has often been related. Dr Rose discusses the work of many theorists in the (...) area, including Hassan, Lyotard, Jameson and the architectural historian Charles Jencks, and also looks at analyses and uses of the concepts of the post-modern and post-industrial by Frampton, Portoghesi, Peter Fuller and others. (shrink)

PRINCIPLES OF PHILOSOPHY" CHAPTER 1 LESSONS FROM THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY §1. NOMINALISM* 15. Very early in my studies of logic, before I had really been ...

Alexander Moritzi is one of the most obscure figures in the early history of evolutionary thought. Best known for authoring a flora of Switzerland, Moritzi also published Réflexions sur l’espèce en histoire naturelle, a remarkable book about evolution with an overtly materialist viewpoint. In this work, Moritzi argues that the generally accepted line between species and varieties is artificial, that varieties can over time give rise to new species, and that deep time and turnover of species in the fossil record (...) clearly support an evolutionary interpretation of biological diversity. Moritzi was also a gradualist and viewed relationships between taxa as best represented by a ramifying tree. Although Réflexions was the first full book to be written on the topic of evolution following Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique, Moritzi’s evolutionist contribution was stillborn, read by almost no one in his lifetime and ultimately absent from the many historiographies of evolutionary thought. This is unfortunate since many of the arguments Moritzi marshaled on behalf of an evolutionary explanation of life can be found in subsequent transmutationist writings by Frédéric Gérard, Robert Chambers, Henri Lecoq, Baden Powell, Charles Naudin, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Charles Darwin—none of whom is likely to have ever known of the existence of Réflexions. Finally, Moritzi’s arguments, along with those found in Darwin’s private essay on evolution of the same year, provide an excellent window into the state of evolutionary thought and debate over the nature of species at the beginning of the 1840s. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance and impact of terminology used to describe corporate social responsibility (CSR). Through a review of key literature and concepts, we uncover how the economic business case has become the dominant driver behind CSR action. With reference to the literature on semiotics, connotative meaning and social marketing we explore how the terminology itself may have facilitated this co-opting of an ethical concept by economic interests. The broader issue of moral muteness and (...) its relation to ethical behaviour is considered. We conclude by proposing a number of important attributes for any proposed terminology relating to ethical/socially responsible/sustainable business. (shrink)

The experimental turn in philosophy has reached several sub-fields including ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. This paper is among the first to apply experimental techniques to questions in the philosophy of law. Specifically, we examine Lon Fuller's procedural natural law theory. Fuller famously claimed that legal systems necessarily observe eight principles he called "the inner morality of law." We evaluate Fuller's claim by surveying both ordinary people and legal experts about their intuitions about legal systems. We conclude that, (...) at best, we should be skeptical of Fuller's inner morality of law in light of the experimental data. (shrink)

I. Introduction, notes, and appendix -- II. A facsimile of the first edition, 1642, reduced in size.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is unquestionably one of the chief landmarks in biology. The Origin (as it is widely known) was literally only an abstract of the manuscript Darwin had originally intended to complete and publish as the formal presentation of his views on evolution. Compared with the Origin, his original long manuscript work on Natural Selection, which is presented here and made available for the first time in printed form, has more abundant examples and illustrations (...) of Darwin's argument, plus an extensive citation of sources. (shrink)

This work discusses whether Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was revolutionary. Steve Fuller argues that Kuhn held a profoundly conservative view of science and how one ought to study its history.

Thomas Kuhn's _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ is one of the best known and most influential books of the twentieth century. Whether they adore or revile him, critics and fans alike have tended to agree on one thing: Kuhn's ideas were revolutionary. But were they? Steve Fuller argues that Kuhn actually held a profoundly conservative view of science and how one ought to study its history. Early on, Kuhn came under the influence of Harvard President James Bryant Conant, who (...) had developed an educational program intended to help deflect Cold War unease over science's uncertain future by focusing on its illustrious past. Fuller argues that this rhetoric made its way into _Structure,_ which Fuller sees as preserving and reinforcing the old view that science really is just a steady accumulation of truths about the world. Fuller suggests that Kuhn, deliberately or not, shared the tendency in Western culture to conceal possible negative effects of new knowledge from the general public. Because it insists on a difference between a history of science for scientists and one suited to historians, Fuller charges that _Structure_ created the awkward divide that has led directly to the "Science Wars" and has stifled much innovative research. In conclusion, Fuller offers a way forward that rejects Kuhn's fixation on paradigms in favor of a conception of science as a social movement designed to empower society's traditionally disenfranchised elements. Certain to be controversial, _Thomas Kuhn_ must be read by anyone who has adopted, challenged, or otherwise engaged with _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions._ "Structure will never look quite the same again after Fuller. In that sense, he has achieved one of the main aims of his ambitious and impressively executed project."—Jon Turney, _Times Higher Education Supplement_ "Philosophies like Kuhn's narrow the possible futures of inquiry by politically methodizing and taming them. More republican philosophies will leave the future open. Mr. Fuller has amply succeeded in his program of distinguishing the one from the other."—William R. Everdell, _Washington Times_. (shrink)

On 27th December 1831, HMS Beagle set out from Plymouth under the command of Captain Robert Fitzroy on a voyage that lasted nearly 5 years. The purpose of the trip was to complete a survey of the southern coasts of South America, and afterwards to circumnavigate the globe. The ship's geologist and naturalist was Charles Darwin. Darwin kept a diary throughout the voyage in which he recorded his daily activities, not only on board the ship but also during the (...) several long journeys that he made on horseback in Patagonia and Chile. His entries tell the story of one of the most important scientific journeys ever made with matchless immediacy and vivid descriptiveness. (shrink)

There is a genre of contemporary philosophy that fits neatly neither the “analytic” nor the “continental” style but straddles both, seeking to combine the former’s rigor of analysis and argument with the latter’s breadth of historical and cultural perspective. Its practitioners emerge from both traditions and tend to be regarded by the more orthodox as out of the mainstream of each. In this regard, the three subjects of Gutting’s study—Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor—have more in common with (...) analytically inclined continental philosophers like Jürgen Habermas than they do with more conventional analytic philosophers. But this is a book addressed chiefly to readers in the analytic tradition, and its careful reconstructions and assessments of its subjects’ views are pitched in that direction; their deep indebtedness to such thinkers as Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Humboldt, Heidegger, and Derrida remains in the background. Moreover, Gutting is not interested so much in presenting exhaustive accounts of their views as in using his discussions of them to construct and defend a philosophical position of his own, which he calls “pragmatic liberalism.” Because that position is closest to Rorty’s, he begins with an extended discussion of the latter’s “epistemological behaviorism” and “liberal ironism,” employing accurate reconstructions and cogent criticisms to develop his own views. MacIntyre and Taylor are then discussed as raising challenges to those views, particularly to the “ethical naturalism” that Gutting shares with Rorty. This approach means that Rorty’s views receive a fuller airing than do MacIntyre’s or, especially, Taylor’s. (shrink)

Scouting for Boys is the original blueprint and 'self-instructor' of the Boy Scout Movement. An all-time bestseller, it is both a handbook and a philosophy for a way of living that replaces self with service, puts country before individual, and duty above all. As well as practical instructions on how to light fires and stalk men and animals, it includes sections on chivalry, self-discipline, self-improvement and citizenship. This new edition reveals its maverick complexity and explores its contradictions about sexuality, the (...) environment, and the empire. (shrink)

Tthis book is likely to receive its warmest reception form advanced students of the philosophy of law, who will welcome the relief provided from the frequently sterile tone of much recent work in the field.

This is the first comprehensive evaluation of Charles Taylor's work and a major contribution to leading questions in philosophy and the human sciences as they face an increasingly pluralistic age. Charles Taylor is one of the most influential contemporary moral and political philosophers: in an era of specialisation he is one of the few thinkers who has developed a comprehensive philosophy which speaks to the conditions of the modern world in a way that is compelling to specialists in (...) various disciplines. This collection of specially commissioned essays brings together twelve distinguished scholars from a variety of fields to discuss critically Taylor's work. The topics range from the history of philosophy, to truth, modernity and postmodernity, theism, interpretation, the human sciences, liberalism, pluralism and difference. Taylor responds to all the contributions and re-articulates his own views. (shrink)