Table Of Content

Neo- Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science The last two decades have seen two significant trends emerging within the philosophy of science: the rapid development and focus on the philosophy of the specialised sciences, and a resurgence of Aristotelian metaphysics, much of which is concerned with the possibility of emergence, as well as the ontological status and indispensability of dispositions and powers in science. Despite these recent trends, few Aristotelian metaphysicians have engaged directly with the philosophy of the specialised sciences. Additionally, the relationship between fundamental Aristotelian concepts—such as “hylomorphism”, “substance”, and “faculties”—and contemporary science has yet to receive a critical and systematic treatment. Neo- Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science aims to fill this gap in the literature by bring- ing together essays on the relationship between Aristotelianism and science that cut across interdisciplinary boundaries. The chapters in this volume are divided into two main sections covering the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of the life sciences. Featuring original contributions from distin- guished and early career scholars, this book will be of interest to specialists in analytical metaphysics and the philosophy of science. William M.R. Simpson is a Research Associate at the University of St Andrews, UK, and a postgraduate student of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, UK. He was formerly a Research Fellow in Theoretical Phys- ics at the Weizmann Institute, Israel. Robert C. Koons is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Nicholas J. Teh is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, USA. He was formerly a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK. Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7 Popper’s Critical Rationalism A Philosophical Investigation Darrell Rowbottom 8 Conservative Reductionism Michael Esfeld and Christian Sachse 9 Models, Simulations, and Representations Paul Humphreys and Cyrille Imbert 10 Platonism, Naturalism, and Mathematical Knowledge James Robert Brown 11 Thought Experiments in Science, Philosophy, and the Arts Edited by Mélanie Frappier, Letitia Meynell, and James Robert Brown 12 Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Revisited Edited by Vasso Kindi and Theodore Arabatzis 13 Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications Edited by Bana Bashour and Hans D. Muller 14 Science after the Practice Turn in Philosophy, History, and the Social Studies of Science Edited by Léna Soler, Sjoerd Zwart, Vincent Israel-J ost, and Michael Lynch 15 Causation, Evidence, and Inference Julian Reiss 16 Conceptual Change and the Philosophy of Science Alternative Interpretations of the A Priori David J. Stump 17 Neo- Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science Edited by William M.R. Simpson, Robert C. Koons and Nicholas J. Teh Neo- Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science Edited by William M. R. Simpson, Robert C. Koons and Nicholas J. Teh First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978- 0- 415- 79256- 1 (hbk) ISBN: 978- 1- 315- 21162- 6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Acknowledgements vii Foreword ix JOHN HALDANe Introduction: Reflections on Contemporary Science and the New Aristotelianism 1 ROBeRT C. KOONS, WILLIAM M. R. SIMPSON, AND NICHOLAS J. TeH PART 1 The Philosophy of Physics 13 1 Dodging the Fundamentalist Threat 15 XAVI LANAO AND NICHOLAS J. TeH 2 Actuality, Potentiality, and Relativity’s Block Universe 35 eDWARD FeSeR 3 The Many Worlds Interpretation of QM: A Hylomorphic Critique and Alternative 61 ROBeRT C. KOONS 4 A Traveling Forms Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics 105 ALeXANDeR R. PRUSS 5 Half- Baked Humeanism 123 WILLIAM M. R. SIMPSON 6 Disentangling Nature’s Joints 147 TUOMAS e. TAHKO vi Contents PART 2 The Philosophy of the Life Sciences 167 7 Structural Powers and the Homeodynamic Unity of Organisms 169 CHRISTOPHeR J. AUSTIN AND ANNA MARMODORO 8 A Biologically Informed Hylomorphism 185 CHRISTOPHeR J. AUSTIN 9 The Great Unifier: Form and the Unity of the Organism 211 DAVID S. ODeRBeRg 10 Action, Animacy, and Substance Causation 235 JANICe CHIK BReIDeNBACH 11 Psychology Without a Mental- Physical Dichotomy 261 WILLIAM JAWORSKI 12 Hylomorphism and the New Mechanist Philosophy in Biology, Neuroscience, and Psychology 293 DANIeL D. De HAAN About the Contributors 327 Index 331 Acknowledgements William Simpson would like to acknowledge a number of institutions for financial support at different stages of this project, including his college, Peterhouse (Cambridge), the Institute for the Study of Philosophy, Politics, and Religion (Cambridge), and the John Templeton Foundation, which sup- ported him through the Scientists in Congregations programme in Scotland. He would also like to thank the Harvey Fellows programme for financial support during part of his studies. Robert Koons would like to acknowledge the support during the 2014– 15 academic year of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University (for a Visiting Fellowship) and the University of Texas at Austin (for a faculty research grant). He would also like to thank Anna Marmodoro and the Power Structuralism and Ancient Ontologies project for their support for his visit to Oxford in October of 2016. Nicholas Teh would like to acknowledge the support during the 2016–17 academic year of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame (for an Integrative Scholarship grant to organize activities at the intersection of philosophy, mathematics, and physics). He would also like to thank Brian Pitts and CamPOS for organizing his visit to Cambridge in spring 2016. Foreword John Haldane* I Reading the essays in this collection, several thoughts come to mind. First, one of congratulations to the editors for gathering such an interesting, timely, well- informed and rigorously argued set of essays. Second, recog- nition of the confidence displayed by the authors. I mean, this not as a matter of personal temperament or psychology, but of a shared sense that Aristotelian ideas have much to offer in the effort to understand the things, processes and events that are the focus of the natural sciences, especially physics and biology, and to recognise the scope for, but also the limits of cross- categorical explanations: the inanimate, the non-r ational animate, the minded. Fifty years ago, such confidence would have seemed eccentric, for the tide of reductionism in the philosophy of science was then strong and high, and the presumption was that by stages, and perhaps increasingly rapidly, psychology would reduce to biology, that to chemistry and that, in turn, to physics. given the prevailing conception of chemical and physical systems this implied a ‘mechanistic’ view of living organisms. Additionally, it was assumed that causal explanations are law- like, or presuppose law- like gen- eralisations, and that talk of causation as expressing the powers and thereby the essential nature of an agent is at best a façon de parler and at worst the effect of fallaciously inferring the existence of non-c ontingent relations in nature from conceptually linked modes of description in which antecedent conditions are redescribed in terms of consequent ones. Thus, from ‘sugar was placed in water and dissolved’, one moves to ‘water caused the sugar to dissolve’ and from that proceeds to ‘a solvent caused the sugar to dissolve’ thence to ‘water has a power to dissolve sugar’ and finally to ‘it is part of the intrinsic nature of water to dissolve sugar’. By means of analyses of this sort, applied in reverse, it seemed easy to dismiss any talk of natures and causal powers as a projection of certain modes of description, and not as indicating the possibility of non- contingent connections between things themselves. In much the same way, talk of natural processes serving and occurring for the sake of some end, typically an end beneficial to the subject of that process,