[lit-ideas] Grice on Darwin (Was: Popper on Darwin)
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 26 May 2013 11:05:50 -0400 (EDT)
Not much.
Note that "Grice on Darwin" has to be understood as "what Grice said on
Darwin", rather than having "on" DIRECTLY applied to both (Grice and Darwin).
A natural consequence of this implicatural reading is made obvious by the
fact that while
Grice is on Darwin
ENTAILS
Darwin is under Grice
it would be odd to read "Darwin under Grice" as the subject-line of stuff
(as opposed to "Darwin under Grice's Consideration").
Grice wrote briefly (unlike Popper) on Darwin.
On an airline sick bag (now in The Grice Collection, Bancroft Library),
Grice wrote during a flight from Berkeley to Oxford:
"Must read Chimp Literature"
-- and right he was for he had found that an education at Clifton and
Oxford (Corpus Christi, major in classics) had left him rather wanting to
_learn_ more about 'stuff' ("Only the poor learn at Oxford").
In general, the word 'learn' is misused:
The Toad, having finished his breakfast, picked up a stout stick and swung
it vigorously, belabouring imaginary animals. `I'll learn 'em to steal my
house!' he cried. `I'll learn 'em, I'll learn 'em!'
`Don't say "learn 'em," Toad,' said the Rat, greatly shocked. `It's not
good English.'
`What are you always nagging at Toad for?' inquired the Badger, rather
peevishly. `What's the matter with his English? It's the same what I use
myself, and if it's good enough for me, it ought to be good enough for you!'
`I'm very sorry,' said the Rat humbly. `Only I THINK it ought to be "teach
'em," not "learn 'em."'
`But we don't WANT to teach 'em,' replied the Badger. `We want to LEARN
'em--learn 'em, learn 'em! And what's more, we're going to DO it, too!'
`Oh, very well, have it your own way,' said the Rat. He was getting rather
muddled about it himself, and presently he retired into a corner, where he
could be heard muttering, `Learn 'em, teach 'em, teach 'em, learn 'em!'
till the Badger told him rather sharply to leave off.
Cheers,
Speranza
---
Subj: Talk: Lennox on Darwin (Oslo)
James G. Lennox, «The Inductive Origins of Darwin's Origin»
Place: Oslo, Blindern, Vilhelm Bjerknes hus, Aud. 4
Time: Friday 31. May, 18.00
It is an unfortunate fact that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by
natural selection is typically discussed either as a speculative leap of
genius or as the inevitable product of various sorts of religious,
political, scientific and philosophical influences on him. In this
lecture I will present Darwin’s discoveries in a very different light,
as the product of Darwin constantly asking questions and pursuing long
and complex chain of inductive reasoning in which his ability to
integrate apparently unrelated abstractions —“large classes of facts” as
he sometimes refers to them in On the Origin of Species—plays the key
role. To explore these aspects of Darwin’s research I rely on the large
mass of unpublished notes, notebooks and correspondence (now available
online) for it is here that one sees Darwin’s uncommon powers of
inductive reasoning at work.
James G. Lennox is professor of history and philosophy of science at
the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of Aristotle’s Philosophy of
Biology (2001) and Aristotle on the Parts of Animals I–IV (2001) and
coeditor of Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology (1987),
Concepts, Theories, and Rationality in the Biological Sciences (1995),
Being, Nature and Life in Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf
(2010) and Metaethics, Egoism and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand’s
Normative Theory (2011). Currently he is working on a book on
Aristotle’s norms of inquiry and collaborating on a translation and
commentary of Aristotle’s Meteorology IV.
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