@gregpriest
PhD in history and philosophy of science (also JD and MLA), Stanford. Biology, complexity, diagramming. Philosophy of history. Curates these BlueSky feeds: History and Philosophy of Biology Complexity Science Philosophy of History and Historiography
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/...
New study finds that some dogs are able to learn new words from overhearing conversations not directed at them, with a facility comparable to that of 18-month old human infants.
🧪🐋🌱
“Reality, in its quantitative aspect, must be considered as a system of populations.… The general study of the equilibria and dynamics of populations … has probably reached its highest development in the biological study known as 'ecology,' [and] this name may well be given to it.”
🌱🐋 #philsci 🧪🌎🦋🦫
View of Earth as photographed by the Apollo 8 astronauts during their lunar orbit mission. NASA, via Wikimedia Commons.
Kenneth Boulding—philosopher, #complexity theorist, and mystic—was born OTD in 1910.
“The earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything … and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system.”
🌱🐋 #philsky #philsci 🧪🌎 #STS
“Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.”
#philsky #booksky
Ernest Shepard, Pen and ink on board, "Pooh and Piglet walked home thoughtfully together in the golden evening, and for a long time they were silent," original signed artwork from A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh. Bonham’s. “Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.” #philsky #booksky
AA Milne was born on this day in 1882.
“Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That's the problem.”
🌱🐋🧪#PhilSci #booksky
Photo of Weinberg. Photographer unknown.
OTD 1908 Willhelm Weinberg gave a talk to the Society for the Natural History of the Fatherland in Württemberg giving the population genetics equations GH Hardy would independently publish 5 months later. It was 35 years before his work was recognized in the Anglophone world.
🐋🌱🥢🧪 #EvoBio #HistSTM
Photo of Feyerabend, www.pkfeyerabend.org.
Paul Feyerabend was born OTD in 1924.
Knowledge is not a body of consistent theories converging on truth. It is “an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible … alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth … forcing the others into greater articulation.”
🧪🦋🦫 #PhilSci #STS
Mine too. He kind of still is. Dreamy!
1865 photo of James taken on an expedition to the Amazon under Louis Agassiz. MS Am 1092 (1185), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
William James was born OTD in 1842.
As important as “pragmatism” to understanding James is “meliorism,” the idea that improving the world is possible, but not assured. We have to fight for it.
“We receive in short the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.”
#philsky
An ecologist “lives alone in a world of wounds…. [He] must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
🌱🐋🌎🧪
Photo of Leopold in horseback. The Wilderness Society.
Aldo Leopold was born OTD in 1887.
“We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
#HpBio #HistSTM 🌎 #philsci #STS 🧪
Caricature of Wallace, including the words “After you, Mr. Darwin, kind sir.” By David Hughes for the New Yorker.
Alfred Russel Wallace born OTD in 1823.
He said he shared with Darwin “an intense interest in … the variety [of living things] that catches the eye of the observer even among those which are very much alike, but which are soon found to differ in several distinct characters.”
🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio
Wegener's (1915) depiction of the breakup of Pangaea. (a) the Carboniferous, (b) the Eocene, (c) today.
OTD in 1912, Alfred Wegener delivered a lecture propounding the theory that our modern continents were formed by the splitting and drifting apart of an ancient supercontinent, which he named Pangea.
Due to his failure to offer a plausible mechanism, he was widely ridiculed.
🧠🗃️⚒️ 🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci
Arthur Danto, Spinoza as a Young Man 2011. Woodcut. Credit: Wayne State University Art Collection.
Arthur Danto was born Jan 2, 1924
To call a car “dented” is to implicitly refer to an earlier undented state.
Stories “have a beginning, a middle, and an end. An [historical] explanation then consists in filling in the middle between the temporal end-points of a change.”
🧠🗃️ 🦋🦫 #PhilSsci #PhilSky
Thanks for the feed boost!
Photo of Fred Korematsu, and a copy of FDR’s internment order.
OTD in 1944, in Korematsu v. US, SCOTUS upheld the constitutionality of FDR’s order that US citizens of Japanese descent be involuntarily interned.
The decision has come to be seen as one of the lowest moments in the Supreme Court’s history.
Cartoon by Wilkins on our failure to reconcile science and religion.
Maurice Wilkins was born OTD in 1916. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the structure of DNA using X-ray crystallography.
He did not start out in biochemistry. He changed fields after being disillusioned by his work on the Manhattan Project.
🐋🌱 #HistSTM #STS 🧪 🐡