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Greetings,
I've been lurking on this list for a month or two
now, prodded in this direction at the behest of my friend Dan Fiscus. I
thought I'd put in my two cents worth on these recent topics. Forgive me
if this ends up going all over the place.
A brief introduction is in order, I suppose.
I teach philosophy of science and physics at Iowa State University, but my
research specialty is philosophy of ecology and philosophies of
complexity. I, Dan and another young systems ecologist, Brian Fath,
have been working on an NSF grant proposal for a workshop studying the issue of
holism and reductionism in theories of ecological succession. I'll be
starting a paper in the next two months or so on arguments for the
noncomputability of (M,R)-systems for a philosophy of mathematics conference
I'll be attending in April. I'll be looking primarily at Rosen's papers on
(M,R)-systems up to the early 70s. This will be my first paper on Rosenean
concepts, though not my first paper on the distinctive features of complex
networks.
I've never met anyone in any philosophy department
I've worked at who has even heard of Robert Rosen, and this includes
the graduate school I attended, University of Western Ontario, which has a very
strong program in the philosophy of science. Even among my fellow grad
students working on issues in the philosophy of the life sciences, I was the
only student who'd run across his work. There are philosophers who are
familiar with his work, of course, but they are few and far between. I was
lucky enough to be in a grad program where our resident logican was a category
theorist too, and my exposure to category theory helped draw my attention
to Rosen's work.
On the issue of resistance in the
university:
- were I to volunteer to give a talk on Rosen to
our department, I'm sure it would be greeted with interest. I can't
imagine a philosophy department that wouldn't at least recognize the
philosophical interest of Rosen's work. I couldn't get away, though, with
presenting Rosen strictly in Rosen's terms; I'd have to make an effort to
connect Rosen to problems and traditions that are familiar to
philosophers. I'm aware that this can sound odd to fans of Rosen's work
(how could anyone not see the relevance of his views to classic philosophical
problems?), but it's a bit of myth that philosophers engage directly with
archetypical philosophical problems. It's more accurate to say that
philosophers engage with philosophical problems as they have come to be
understood within certain traditions, where the touchstones are lineages of
persons rather than the concepts themselves (e.g. the tradition of philosophy of
language identified by Frege, Russell, early Wittgenstein, Kripke, early Putnam,
Boyd, ...). It's often been said that Rosen wrote primarily for himself,
and while this may be the source of much of his originality, it's also partially
responsible for his failure to make any significant impact on
philosophy. Academic philosophy has been, and continues to be,
a quintessentially peer-involving activity, both synchronically
and diachronically. Rosen's lack of interest in argumentative
engagement with others who may be interested in similar topics, or who
may have objections to his way of understanding things, is, I think, the
main reason for his relative invisibility among philosophers. Anyone who
wants to bring Rosen's work to the attention of others must (as has
been said before in this thread) learn to communicate with the "other" in a
language that is meaningful to them.
[Anecdote: I lent a copy of Life Itself to
the aforementioned category theorist at my grad school, to see what he thought
of it. He said he found the book both fascinating and very difficult to
get a handle on. Now, this is a guy who thinks in morphisms and forgetful
functors, and is well schooled in the history and philosophy of mathematics and
logic, and is himself a holder of some unorthodox philosophical
views. And he couldn't get a handle on Rosen or the significance of his
thinking for foundational issues in philosophy. I think this is a
testament not to the fact that Rosen wasn't really interested in writing for
other people. Those of us interested in Rosen really need to
reconceptualize Rosen for different audiences and different contexts.]
- On the issue of the
Dawkins-Dennett/Lewontin-Gould debate as the fulcrum for philosophical
discussions in biology, it's certainly false to say that philosophers
of biology are solely interested in this argumentative tradition (not that
I'm implying that anyone here has said that). Discussions of "function",
for example, have a long history in the philosophy of biology, and are standard
topics in undergraduate and graduate textbooks. This is certainly an area
where one could offer a Rosenean alternative to the standard
approaches (in fact, I've been thinking of writing something on Rosen's
concept of function and making it connect with the (vast) literature on
biological function). However, outside of serious philosophy of
biology, I would agree that, when philosophers (ethicists, epistemologists,
political theorists, etc.) are exposed to issues in biology, they tend to be on
topics related to adaptationism and altruism where the terms of the debate are
framed by D-D/L-G.
- we have a graduate program here at ISU on complex
adaptive systems, and I've given the odd talk to the faculty and students who
comprise this group. Almost none of them have heard of Rosen either.
There are schools of complexity theory, as we all know. This group is
familiar with Sante Fe-style complexity theory (Kauffman, Holland, Bak, etc.)
and computational complexity (polynomial, exponential, np-hard, etc.), but not
much else. They would be happy to hear something about Rosen, I'm
sure. A lot of these folks, I think, are also congenial to the notion that
complexity theory may have revolutionary,
paradigm-busting implications. I'm sure I'll give a version of my
(M,R)-systems paper to this group some time in the future.
- I have taught, and will be teaching regularly in
the future, a graduate course on the history and philosophy of ecology for the
graduate program in Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology at ISU. My
dealings with this crowd have been cordial, but here it's become clear that
there are deep resistances among many of the faculty to holistic approaches in
ecology and evolutionary theory. This is not atypical for departments of
biology and ecology in the US, though. They are, however, quite to open to
presenting the debate between holists and reductionists as an effective
teaching tool for students, and as an important component of the
intellectual history of ecology and the life sciences. So, in a course
like this I can get away with a lot more than would an actual professor of
ecology teaching a course in ecological restoration or whatnot.
Ah, time's up for me. Judith, I'd appreciate
a copy of those Rosen biographical materials that you're offering to list
members, if you would be so kind. Thanks,
Kevin
Kevin deLaplante
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy and Religious
Studies
Iowa State University
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