Thought-provoking list. Welcome to Gene Expression, Union Jack.

History of Science has always fascinated me as well. In this regard, I should be most interested in your reaction to my attempt to identify a certain phenomenology of philosophy as operant in evolutionary theory. Please see:

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/000178.html

and the subject of Cannibalism.
David Yeagley

Welcome, David. Sounds like you and Razib will have lots to talk about. I like your list of heroes and villains as well (though I am not familiar with all of them by any means), though I would have given the title 'Boldest of all Sceptics' to Nietzsche (or were you using 'Sceptic' in some specific sense?). At any rate I am starting to feel like I will have to go back and read some Hume - I have only read a few excerpts, and tended to dismiss the man, but with recommendations from you and Razib perhaps a second look is in order...

Thanks for the welcome!

I don't know why the text of my post came out ragged. I pasted it in from a WP file (obviously), but it looked OK when I previewed it. Any hints on how to avoid this?

I will reply to comments later.

Not one genuine physical scientist amongst your heroes and villains. Don't they count?

Have you ever heard of Charles Sanders Peirce?

David,

Welcome! I think it's exciting that you have published work. Also, your insightful conversation over group selection was certainly a highlight of my blog experience the other week.

ah jeez,
David why couldn't you have been there 6 years ago so I would not have wasted hundreds of $ of "History of Philosophy, 19th century thinkers".
Also, Hume is good, but isn't he generally considered to have killed the empiricist movement started by Locke. And I would probably have a heart attack if I heard a mainstream college actually teaching Hayek, in leftist acedemic circles he's considered no better than Ayn Rand (who is a good writer and makes some good points but is WAY over the top)

Hobbes was a schlemiel, a total barbarian. His argument for social cooperation was essentially, "we'll kill you if you don't work with us."

i think you should have your current enemies in focus more than your dead heros. Your heros aren't here to help you, and the current enemies, though intellectually inferior to such luminaries as Darwin and James, are more fruitful concepts.
Think of those who argue the axiom of equality of all ethnicities in every dimension, a very weak position but also a very popular one. Jared Diamond, the position of the NYTimes, most essayists. This site a rare place to read nonidiological (eg, no nazis, white supremacists, etc) discussions on how genetics relates to other phenomenon, so carry the torch well (don't exaggerate!). You will be labeled a racist by most casual observers, however, so have a thick skin. Remember, one can't get upset by those who retort that 2+2=5, or with an anecdote.

Just one quick explanation, in reply to Timegrid - I didn't include physical scientists among my 'heroes' because I was focusing, for the purposes of this forum, on those who have contributed to the understanding of evolution and human nature. In a wider list of my 'heroes' I would certainly include Galileo, Newton, Faraday and Helmholtz, as well as pure mathematicians like Gauss and Euler (not that I can really claim to understand them). Oh, and I should include some historians like Gibbon, Burkhardt, Maitland...

Yes, I have heard of C S Peirce, but again, I'm not sure he is so relevant to the issues discussed here. And why not add Frege, Cantor, Poincare...!

I will come back to other comments eventually.

Hayek is one of the main stars in the PBS series "Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy", which one of my college's economics professors purchased for the school library and which our political economy club (The Worldly Philosophers' and Dismal Scientists' Society) has started showing on a quarterly basis.

You can watch the series online at:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/

It's really good! And it has a happy ending!

In his later career Watson went into advertising and industrial psychology. (He left academic life because of a messy divorce; times have changed). He was quite successful, as I understand. He definitely does not belong on anyone's list of ivory tower academics. So there was something in what he said; this does not of course validate his overall theory.

Besides blank-slate behaviorism, Watson is equally important for anti-mentalist views of psychology.

I promised to reply to comments, so:

Duende: thanks for the welcome

David Yeagley: I think your earlier posts were concerned with the role of disease in evolution. That's a big subject, and I don't know much about it. The late W D Hamilton thought that the need to generate genetic variety to resist disease was the main reason for sexual reproduction - in which case, three cheers for disease! On prion diseases specifically, which you mentioned, I don't think they are more likely than other diseases to cross species boundaries. Sheep and cows live on the same farms, but cows don't get scrapie. Also, the risk of humans getting variant-CJD from eating BSE-infected beef is now thought to be slight. Public health experts in Britain think the number of deaths from variant-CJD has already peaked at about 20 a year (out of an at-risk population of at least 20 million). You are more likely to die by falling down in your bath-tub.

bbartley: I find it difficult to compare Hume and Nietzsche - different counties, different centuries, different styles. Hume was primarily a pure philosopher, Nietzsche primarily a critic of the culture and values of his time. I admire both of them for their intellectual courage.

[cont. in next post]

[cont. from previous post]

Timegrid: see my earlier comment. Sorry I misspelled Burckhardt.

Jason Malloy: thanks for the kind words.

Scott: did Hume kill empiricism? I suppose that by showing the limits of what can be proved from experience he may have inadvertently induced Kant and others to promote non-empiricist alternatives, but he can hardly be blamed for the folly of his successors.

Otto Kerner: I won't defend the substance of Hobbes's doctrines, but I don't recognise your description. Hobbes believed that in a 'state of nature' men would fight each other, therefore they had to agree with each other to submit to be governed by a ruler (a sovereign individual or collective body, which might be a Parliament). Hobbes's view of the 'state of nature' has generally been regarded as too pessimistic, but looking at Iraq at the moment I am not so sure!

eric: good point. I may do another blog some time about some more recent 'villains'. Thanks for the warning about 'racism'. I am not personally very interested in race, except in so far as racial differentiation provides some evidence about the pattern of human evolution.

Jacqueline: glad someone is still interested in Hayek.

zizka: yes, Watson is also historically important for his anti-mentalism, but he went way over the top. Thinking as movements of the larynx, indeed! As was already pointed out in Waton's lifetime, this would be tough on people whose larynx had been surgically removed!

David, I don't have any disagreements with your heros (though their are a few I'm unfamiliar with, but I'd probably include some ancients as well as some cultural/artistic figures in my hero list. And what about Sartre as a villain. Not only was his philosophy more vile than the vague abstractions of Hegel, but I think there is a continuity between Sartre and today's idiotic left.

Kant say I've read much Kant, but from what I do know about him, I don't think I'd go as far as to call him a 'villain.'

Finally, I see a noticeable British/Continental split on hero/villain list. I too don't have much patience for too much abstract system building, but I've also noticed that there may be an advantage in that the continent seems to have given the world the greatest mathematicians. Descartes, Leibniz, Cauchy, Euler, Gauss, Cantor, Goedel, Poincare, Riemann, Hilbert, the Bernoullis, etc. are all from the continent. Newton of course is an example of a great English mathematician, but he seemed to invent calculus for the practical purpose of solving physical problems.

Justapolak: yes, Sartre makes a good villain.

I agree my list of heroes is rather Anglocentric. I was tempted to add de Tocqueville and Pareto, except for the embarrassing fact that I haven't read them!

I'm still inclined to 'villainise' Kant, because of his disastrous influence on German philosophy, and his deliberate creation of a whole new vocabulary of obscure jargon ('transcendental unity of apperception', and so on - and it don't think it is any clearer in German).

Good point about the relative lack of British mathematicians. Oddly, we were doing quite well in the 17th century, with Harriott, Napier, Wallis, and Newton himself, but after Newton it was all downhill (until recently?) Some would attribute this to the after-effects of the Newton-Leibnitz quarrel, as British mathematicians were isolated from Continental developments, but I don't think this is a full explanation.

David: the trouble with Hobbes is that he didn't want to allow people to agree to submit to a ruler -- submission was to be mandatory on pain of death. I believe he says this in so many words at some point in the Leviathan which I am too lazy to dig up and quote.

Once people have committed themselves to forming a Commonwealth, and to accept the decision of the majority in submitting to a sovereign, they cannot back out: if they try to back out, it would be 'just' for their fellow citizens to destroy them. And of course Hobbes thinks the sovereign him/her/itself must have very wide powers over the citizens, if there is to be peace and order. (Ans remember that the sovereign could be a collective body like a Parliament or Congress. Hobbes himself returned from France to England after Charles I was executed, and lived there during Cromwell's Protectorate.) I'm not saying that I agree with Hobbes. What I like about him is his lack of sentimentality and his rigour of argument. If you don't like his conclusions, it should be possible to say exactly where in the chain of argument you disagree with him. Just saying you don't like the conclusions is not good enough!

David, where would Stephen Jay Gould fall in your hero/villain spectrum?

David, where would Stephen Jay Gould fall in your hero/villain spectrum?

hehehe. . .

looking at his heroes and villians, it's as if we even need to ask. Now if they were reversed. . .

I think I'd put SJG in a new class - jester or perhaps pompous blowhard.

I'm ambivalent about SJG. Some of his essays are very enjoyable, and his book on 'Ontogeny and Phylogeny' is not bad at all.

The 'punctuated equilibrium' theory raised important issues, but spoiled things by setting up a straw man as an opponent.

On the other hand, 'The Mismeasure of Man' is a dishonest book, at least in the revised edition, where Gould had a chance to correct his errors but chose not to do so (see the references in Hamilton 'Narrow Roads', vol.2, p.505.)

What puzzles me is why Gould was always described as a paleontologist. As far as I can make out, Gould did virtually no first-hand research on fossils after his PhD on snails in the 1960s (and I have seen it claimed that that research wasn't very good either).