Two kinds of mechanical inexplicability in Kant and Aristotle

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Volumn 42, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 33-65

  Ginsborg, Hannah ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33751538977     PISSN: 00225053     EISSN: 15384586     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hph.2004.0005     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. Clark Zumbach, The Transcendent Science (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), especially 79-80;
2. Henry Allison, "Kant's Antinomy of Teleological Judgment," The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 30, Supplement (1991), especially 26-27 and 35;
3. and Michael Friedman, "Exorcising the Philosophical Tradition: Comments on John McDowell's Mind and World," The Philosophical Review 105 (1996), 439n15 and 448. As indicated below, I agree with McLaughlin and Allison that the assumption is mistaken.
4. and Myles Burnyeat, "Is an Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind Still Credible?" in Martha Nussbaum and Amélie Rorty, eds., Essays on Aristotle's De Anima (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 25-26.
5. A similar view is expressed by G.E.R. Lloyd, "Aristotle's Psychology and Zoology," in Nussbaum and Rorty, 164-65.
6. Thus Michael Behe, in Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1996), has tried to argue for creationism precisely on the basis of the complex machine-like structures revealed by biochemistry.
7. See, for example, the non-technical accounts given by A.G. Cairns-Smith, Seven Clues to the Origin, of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
8. and by John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
9. A convincing case against Behe's view is made by Niall Shanks and Karl H. Joplin "Redundant Complexity: A Critical Analysis of Intelligent Design in Biochemistry," Philosophy of Science, 66 (June 1999).