PHIL 110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Gregor Mendel, Erasmus Darwin, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
Document Summary
Philosophy looks for the conditions of intelligibility (reasonableness and meaning) of things, addressing itself to all aspects of the world, the people in it and our understanding of it. So, among other things, it addresses itself to the living things in the world, and also to our study of them. The theoretical aspect involves epistemology, and the practical aspect involves ethics and cosmology. Physics (as we saw on tuesday) involves laws, as well as mechanics. " (what counts as a machine shifts throughout history. ) Modern biology is launched by darwin"s theory of natural selection in the 19th c. , which in the 20th c. is then integrated with mendelian genetics and molecular biology (dna, rna, protein structure). The great chain of being (derived from plato, aristotle and neo-platonism) in the middle ages. Biological classification: of kingdom, class, order, genus, species. The influence of paley, malthus and lyell; and darwin"s study of breeding.
