Second Annual Mexican Philosophers' Conference
Rasmus Winther (homepage) Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther did graduate work in philosophy, philosophy of science, and biology at Stanford University and Indiana University. He was a professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, UNAM in Mexico City and is now at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work focuses on the philosophical concept of abstraction. It is precisely because of its ubiquity that a systematic study of abstraction provides a valuable entry point into understanding key philosophical problems, including realism, inference, reductionism, mereology, as well as the structure, function, and reification of theories. Thus, the study of abstraction relates philosophical issues in science to Metaphysics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, and Philosophy of Mind. |
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Abstract: Is there a core Darwinian theory? If so, what might its axioms be? In the contemporary biological sciences, (1) evolutionary genetics, (2) historical-comparative biology, and (3) evolutionary developmental biology are versions-of and components-of core Darwinian theory. They are, respectively, theories of the selective function, contingent history, and self-organizing structure of biological systems. Darwinism includes each, essentially and irreducibly. Darwinism also seems to apply to the mind, emotions, and social organization of cognitively sophisticated creatures in two ways: (1) it is a theory about the biological hardware with which higher-level functions must work, (2) it is an abstract, "substrate-neutral" theory about higher-level dynamics of function, history, and structure (e.g., evolution of linguistic capacities; cultural evolution). In short, Darwinism is a biological theory that also (partly?) explains our mental, linguistic, emotive, and social landscapes. How true is this picture? And how might hierarchical and integrative Systems Thinking nuance it? |
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