New entry on Mach in Stanford Encyclopedia 21 May 2008 Ernst Mach is one of the more interesting of the nineteenth century polymaths. A physicist, he also kicked off positivism, and (I did not previously know) was an evolutionary epistemologist: Mach is part of the empiricist tradition, but he also believed in an a priori. But it is a biologized a priori: what is a priori to an individual organism was a posteriori to its ancestors; not only does the a priori pre-form experience, but the a priori is itself formed from experience. It was simultaneously the contradiction and confirmation of Kantian epistemology. In as much as Kant used the a priori to explain how knowledge is possible, Mach uses the knowledge of the new sciences to explain how an a priori is possible. One more patch of philosophy, it was thought, yielded to science. I had thought the originator of that view was Konrad Lorenz, in his Russian manuscript. Anyway, a new article by Paul Pojman. It looks very comprehensive, as articles in the increasingly diverse online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy usually are. Pojman, Paul, “Ernst Mach”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2008/entries/ernst-mach/>. Uncategorized
Uncategorized Marjorie Grene dies 17 Mar 200918 Sep 2017 Marjorie Grene was a doyen of philosophy and history of biology, and I reviewed one of her last texts a while back and linked to an interview. She died yesterday, according to Leiter, aged 99. Read More
Uncategorized Cambrian fossils at Kangaroo Island 28 Aug 200818 Sep 2017 Kangaroo Island is a largish island off the coast of South Australia, famous for its wildlife and food. It also has some of the best preserved Ediacaran Cambrian fossils, on a par with the famous Burgess Shale. A report on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s TV show Catalyst recently showcased these,… Read More
Uncategorized Irony is alive 20 Mar 2008 PZ Mydfgsers tried to see Expelled, Ben Stein’s silly film about ID. He was asked to leave by some uniformed guard or policeman, as the producers had him on a Watch List or something. They let his family, and guest in, though. The guest was Richard Dawkins… Read More
Nice coincidence: > Mach uses the knowledge of the new sciences to explain how > an a priori is possible You posted that just 10 minutes after I’d written some lecture notes on the topic. I didn’t know it was due to Mach … fortunately, what I wrote was general enough that my ignorance didn’t matter. (I attributed it to the logical positivists in general, and I DID say that a lot of their views were due to Mach.)
Thanks for the interesting link. I too didn’t know that Mach was an early evolutionary epistemologist. I found a nice paper by the Hungarian philosopher Caba Pléh in which he nicely traces genealogy of some ideas of evolutionary epistemology from Ernst Mach to Dan Dennett. It appears that Ernst Mach’s train of thought influenced the German psychologist Karl Bühler (who’s mostly famous for his Organon-Model of Language). Bühler in turn was a teacher to both Konrad Lorenz and Karl Popper, who were inspired by his ideas in different ways. Popper, and in a weaker, indirect sense, Lorenz then influenced Dan Dennetts evolutionary reasoning about stances and Popperian creatures. http://www.cogsci.bme.hu/csaba/English/Publications/History%20and%20theory%20of%20cognition/MACH.DOC http://www.cogsci.bme.hu/csaba/English/index_angol.htm The site seems to be down at the moment, though