Abstract
In our current philosophical culture, we well understand that the full meaning of the natural sciences does not lie in their theoretical and experimental contents alone. We readily admit (indeed insist) that what is conveyed by the concept of an “electron,” for example, or a “gene” or a “cognitive process,” needs to be elucidated within the full context of the historically developed, investigative practices — the theoretical and experimental research programs, together with the logical and epistemological assumptions — that lie behind their use. In short, we suppose that any putative scientific knowledge must be interpreted within the ongoing project of a critical philosophy of science.
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Notes
From, respectively, Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986 ) and Walter J. Freeman, Societies of Brains ( Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1995 ).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception,tr. by Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), viii.
Hilary Putnam, “Two Philosophical Perspectives,” in Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Ch. 3.
Patrick H. Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley and Los Angeles,: University of California Press, 1983), 197–200. And also see his “Nature and its Transformations,” Theological Studies, Vol. 33 (1972): 486–502.
For a more extended discussion of this point, see my “Some Contributions of Existential Phenomenology to the Philosophy of Natural Science,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 2, April 1988, 99–113 (reprinted in Lawrence Hass and Dorothea Olkowsky, eds., Rereading Merleau-Ponty ( Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000 ).
See my “Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Nature,” Man and World (now Review of Continental Philosophy),Vol. 21 (1988): 65–89, and “Reinventing the Philosophy of Nature,” The Review of Metaphysics,Vol. 23, No. 1 (September, 1979).
See Marjorie Grene, The Understanding of Nature (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Co., 1974) and my “Marjorie Grene and the Phenomenon of Life,” in Peter Asquith and Philip Kitcher, eds., Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association ( East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association, 1985 ), 354–64.
For example, James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), Adolph Portmann, Animals as Social Beings, tr. O. Coburn (London: Hutchinson, 1961 ), and Marian Stamp Dawkins, Through Our Eyes Only? ( Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 ).
For example, Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error (New York: Avon Books, 1994); David LaBerge, Attentional Processing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995 ); and Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind ( Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991 ).
To my knowledge, the clearest philosophical exposition of a methodology for inquiry that combines insistence on respect for the phenomenology of consciousness as well as on the perspectives of cognitive science and neuro-physiology is by Owen Flanagan, in his Consciousness Reconsidered ( Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992 ).
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Compton, J.J. (2002). Toward a Phenomenological Philosophy of Nature. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 225. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_16
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