What was historical about natural history? Contingency and explanation in the science of living things

Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Peter Harrison

Abstract

There is a long-standing distinction in Western thought between scientific and historical modes of explanation. According to Aristotle's influential account of scientific knowledge there cannot be an explanatory science of what is contingent and accidental, such things being the purview of a descriptive history. This distinction between scientia and historia continued to inform assumptions about scientific explanation into the nineteenth century and is particularly significant when considering the emergence of biology and its displacement of the more traditional discipline of natural history. One of the consequences of this nineteenth-century transition was that while modern evolutionary theory retained significant, if often implicit, historical components, these were often overlooked as evolutionary biology sought to accommodate itself to a model of scientific explanation that involved appeals to laws of nature. These scientific aspirations of evolutionary biology sometimes sit uncomfortably with its historical dimension. This tension lies beneath recent philosophical critiques of evolutionary theory and its modes of explanation. Such critiques, however, overlook the fact that there are legitimate modes of historical explanati...Continue Reading

References

Aug 22, 1973·Journal of Theoretical Biology·M Ruse
Dec 1, 1992·British Journal for the History of Science·J Topham
Dec 17, 2009·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Simon Conway Morris
Jul 28, 2010·IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine : the Quarterly Magazine of the Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society·Michael McSheaEric Silfen

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Citations

Jan 4, 2019·History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences·Fridolin GrossRobert Meunier

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