I deny that the world is fundamentally causal, deriving the skepticism on non-Humean grounds from our enduring failures to find a contingent, universal principle of causality that holds true of our science. I explain the prevalence and fertility of causal notions in science by arguing that a causal character for many sciences can be recovered, when they are restricted to appropriately hospitable domains. There they conform to loose and varying collections of causal notions that form folk sciences of causation. This (...) recovery of causation exploits the same generative power of reduction relations that allows us to recover gravity as a force from Einstein's general relativity and heat as a conserved fluid, the caloric, from modern thermal physics, when each theory is restricted to appropriate domains. Causes are real in science to the same degree as caloric and gravitational forces. (shrink)

The traditional (Leibnizian) reading of Descartes on mind-body interaction is given a more rigorous reformulation, explaining how Descartes could assert that the mind while not affecting the quantity of motion in the world could change its direction. It is shown, contrary to the trend in recent literature, that this reading has a reliable textual base, and it is argued that it attributes to Descartes a philosophical position of more substance and interest. The kind of interpretation favored depends on the status (...) that the reader attributes to the assertion of the causal closer of the material world. (shrink)

In the early nineteenth century, a group of German biologists led by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer initiated a search for laws of biological organization that would explain the phenomena of form and function and establish foundations for a unified theory of life. The tradition spawned by these efforts found its most important spokesman in Karl Ernst von Baer. Timothy Lenoir chronicles the hitherto unexplored achievements of the practitioners of this research tradition as they aimed to place functional (...) morphology at the heart of a new science, which they called "biology." Strongly influenced by Immanuel Kant, the biologists’ approach combined a sophisticated teleology with mechanistic theories and sparked bitter controversies with the rival programs, mechanistic reductionism and Darwinism. Although temporarily eclipsed by these two approaches, the morphological tradition, Lenoir argues, was not vanquished in the field of scientific debate. It contributed to pathbreaking research in areas such as comparative anatomy, embryology, paleontology, and biogeography. Preface Introduction 1. Vital Materialism 2. The Concrete Formulation of the Program: From Vital Materialism to Developmental Morphology 3. Teleomechanism and the Cell Theory 4. The Functional Morphologists 5. Worlds in Collision 6. Teleomechanism and Darwin’s Theory Epilogue Notes Name Index Index. (shrink)