Human Nature and Natural Knowledge: Essays Presented to Marjorie Grene on the Occasion of Her Seventy-Fifth Birthday

379 Pages·1985·16.699 MB·English

by  Fred R. Berger (auth.), Alan Donagan, Anthony N. Perovich Jr., Michael V. Wedin (eds.)

HUMAN NATURE AND NATURAL KNOWLEDGE
BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
EDITED BY ROBERT S. COHEN AND MARX W. WARTOFSKY
VOLUME 89
HUMAN NATURE AND
NATURAL KNOWLEDGE
Essays Presented to Marjorie Grene
on the Occasion ofH er Seventy-Fifth Birthday
Edited by
ALAN DONAGAN
California Institute of Technology
ANTHONY N. PEROVICH, JR.
Hope College
and
MICHAEL V. WEDIN
University of California at Davis
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
A MEMBER OFTHE KUJWER __ ACADEMIC PUBLiSHERS GROUP
DORDRECHT I BOSTON I LANCASTER I TOKYO
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Human nature and natural knowledge.
(Boston studies in the philosophy of science; v. 89)
Bibliography: p.
Includes indexes.
1. Philosophical anthropology-Addresses, essays,
lectures. 2. Rationalism-Addresses, essays,
lectures. 3. Philosophy-Addresses, essays, lectures. 4. Grene,
Marjorie Glicksman, 1910- . I. Grene, Marjorie Glicksman,
1910- . II. Donagan, Alan. III. Perovich, Anthony N.
(Anthony Novak), 1951- IV. Wedin, Michael V. (Michael
Vernon), 1943- . V. Series.
Q174.B67 vol. 89 [BD450] 128 85-24459
ISBN-13: 978-94-0 I 0-8859-6 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-5349-9
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-5349-9
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.
Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada
by Kluwer Academic Publishers,
190 Old Derby Street, Hingham, MA 02043, U.S.A.
In all other countries, sold and distributed
by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group,
P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland.
All Rights Reserved
© 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1986
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner
FOR MARJORIE GRENE
MARJORIE GRENE
MARJORIE GRENE
T ABLE OF CONTENTS
EDITORIAL PREFACE ix
PREFACE X 111
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XVll
PART I: SELF AND SOCIETY
FRED R. BERGER / Love, Friendship, and Utility: On Practical
Reason and Reductionism 3
RICHARD M. BURIAN / The "Internal Politics" of Biology and
the Justification of Biological Theories 23
HARRY G. FRANKFURT / Two Motivations for Rationalism:
Descartes and Spinoza 47
IAN HACKING / The Invention of Split Personalities 63
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE / Positivism, Sociology, and Practical
Reasoning: Notes on Durkheim's Suicide 87
PART II: INTERPRETING THE TRADITION
JANET BROUGHTON / Adequate Causes and Natural Change
in Descartes' Philosophy 107
DOROTHEA FREDE / Heidegger and the Scandal of Philosophy 129
RUTH BARCAN MARCUS / Spinoza and the Ontological Proof 153
MICHAEL V. WEDIN / Tracking Aristotle's Nails 167
PART III: SCIENCE AND EXPLANATION
NANCY CARTWRIGHT / Two Kinds of Teleological Explana-
tion 201
MICHAEL FREDE / Philosophy and Medicine in Antiquity 211
GEORGE GALE / Anthropocentrism Reconsidered 233
Vlll TABLE OF CONTENTS
ROM HARRE / Location and Existence 243
WILLIAM C. WIMSATT / Forms of Aggregativity 259
PARTIV:RENCONTRE
LESLEY COHEN / Descartes and Merleau-Ponty on the Cogito
as the Foundation of Philosophy 295
ALAN DONAGAN / The Worst Excess of Cartesian Dualism 313
ANTHONY N. PEROVICH, JR. / Genius, Scientific Method, and
the Stability of Synthetic A Priori Principles 327
RICHARD RORTY / Should Hume Be Answered or Bypassed? 341
PART V: REFLECTIONS
MARJORIE GRENE / In and On Friendship 355
THE PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES OF MARJORIE GRENE 369
THE PUBLICATIONS OF MARJORIE GRENE 371
INDEX OF NAMES 375
INDEX OF SUBJECTS 380
EDITORIAL PREFACE
Everybody knows Marjorie Grene. In part, this is because she is a
presence: her vividness, her energy, her acute intelligence, her
critical edge, her quick humor, her love of talking, her passion
for philosophy - all combine to make her inevitable. Marjorie
Grene cannot be missed or overlooked or undervalued. She is there
- Dasein personified. It is an honor to present a Festschrift to
her. It honors philosophy to honor her.
Professor Grene has shaped American philosophy in her distinc
tive way (or, we should say, in distinctive ways). She was among
the first to introduce Heidegger's thought ... critically ... to
the American and English philosophical community, first in her
early essay in the Journal of Philosophy (1938), and then in her
book Heidegger (1957). She has written as well on Jaspers and
Marcel, as in the Kenyon Review (1957). Grene's book Dreadful
Freedom (1948) was one of the most important and influential
introductions to Existentialism, and her works on Sartre have been
among the most profound and insightful studies of his philosophy
from the earliest to the later writings: her book Sartre (1973), and
her papers 'L'Homme est une passion inutile: Sartre and Heideg
ger' in the Kenyon Review (1947), 'Sartre's Theory of the Emo
tions' in Yale French Studies (1948), 'Sartre: A Philosophical
Study' in Mind (1969), 'The Aesthetic Dialogue of Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty' in the initial volume of the Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology (1970), 'On First Reading L'Idiot de
la famille' in the California Quarterly (1972), the splendid Pre
sidential Address to the Pacific Division of the American Philo
sophical Association on 'Sartre and the Other' (1972), and 'Sartre
and the Tradition' in the Philosophical Quarterly (1981). Few who
were present at the Presidential Address or have read the pub
lished essay (Proc. A.P.A., 1973) will forget her vivid treatment
of Merleau-Ponty.
Throughout her philosophical life a deep student of Aristotle,
ix
x EDITORIAL PREFACE
in her essays and her book, Portrait of Aristotle (1963), Professor
Grene offered an original understanding of his metaphysics, his
logic, and his philosophy of biology. Her works range over much
else in the historical development of Western philosophy, with
informative and critical interpretive papers on Plato, Descartes,
Leibniz, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard. But far
more, and beyond these historically situated studies, there is a
central theme in Marjorie Grene's work that establishes her intel
lectual leadership. There is a whole field of philosophical thought
which derives its principal character and importance within Anglo
American philosophy of science from her work. This must be
seen as philosophy of biology and philosophical anthropology and
theory of knowledge, but only if one understands the deep in
tegration of these disparate fields in Professor Grene's approach.
The key figures here include both leading working biologists in
evolutionary theory (in which Grene's scientific competence is
extraordinarily high) and philosophical thinkers: Plessner, Port
mann, Mayr, Gould, and others. And as one focus, there is the
profound teaching of Michael Polanyi, her colleague and friend
of many years, in Grene's relentless and persuasive critique of
reductionism, whether in epistemology or in biology proper.
Thus, in her books - The Knower and the Known (1966),
Approaches to a Philosophical Biology (1969), The Understanding
of Nature: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Boston Studies
vol. 23, 1974), and the edited volumes, The Anatomy of Know
ledge (1969), Knowing and Being (1969), Interpretations of
Life and Mind (1971), and Topics in the Philosophy of Biology
(with Everett Mendelsohn, Boston Studies vol. 27, 1975) - as
well as in many essays, Professor Grene has set forth a complex,
systematic and clarifying philosophy of man in nature. With
Polanyi and against Aristotle, Grene places 'potency before
actuality' (The Knower and the Known, 250). With Plessner,
she develops the idea of the achievement of personhood in its
ordered relation to "an artifact - the social world of a culture"
('People and Other Animals' in The Understanding of Nature,
357). And she goes on a page or two later to say what being
human should mean: "Man's so-called rationality resides, not in
his grasp of some transcendent truths, but in his power to doubt,
to criticize, to ignore or deny the actual in favor of the barely