By John S. Wilkins
The complicated suggestion of "species" has developed over the years, but its which means is way from resolved. This complete paintings takes a clean examine an concept imperative to the sphere of biology via tracing its heritage from antiquity to at the present time. John S. Wilkins explores the essentialist view, a staple of common sense from Plato and Aristotle in the course of the center a long time to rather fresh instances, and considers the assumption of species in traditional history--a notion frequently hooked up to copy. Tracing "generative conceptions" of species again via Darwin to Epicurus, Wilkins presents a brand new point of view at the courting among philosophical and organic techniques to this idea. He additionally studies the array of present definitions. Species is a benchmark exploration and rationalization of an idea primary to the previous, current, and way forward for the usual sciences.
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Extra info for Species: A History of the Idea (Species and Systematics)
Sample text
The work was a deliberately theological Christian work, in which each animal illustrated vices or virtues. Another source was Isidore of Seville’s [2005] Etymologiae (c. 630), which purported to give the linguistic origins of the names of beasts and all other matters, to make a theological point [Stresemann 1975: 8]. As Wirtjes, the translator of the Middle English edition, says [pp. lxviii–lxxix], bestiaries were intended to show Nature as a second Book of God alongside the Bible, to show the Christian how to live morally.
That this happened to him [Epicurus], and to others, because they thought, through inexperience in logical argument, that everything they comprehended in reasoning occurred also in things themselves. This is surely a great error; for in reasoning it is not as in numbers. For in numbers whatever has come out in computing the digits correctly, must without doubt also eventuate in the things themselves, so that if by calculation there should happen to be a hundred, there must also be a hundred things subject to that number.
In On Interpretation 17a–17b [Edghill translation, Barnes 1984; see also Prior Analytics, 24a], he says, “Some things are universal, others individual. By the term ‘universal’ I mean that which is of such a nature as to be predicated of many subjects, by ‘individual’ that which is not thus predicated. ” A universal need not therefore be something that is literally universally true, but a general term that is predicated of many things. It is important to bear this in mind when discussing the “universals debate” and the question of the individuality of species.