From a Biological Point of View Essays in Evolutionary Philosophy [Paperback]

Professor Sober shows how the worlds of philosophical and biological inquiry are interrelated.Appealing to a readership extending well beyond the frontiers of the philosophy of science, this new collection of essays shows how ideas in evolutionary biology influence traditional problems in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics.Appealing to a readership extending well beyond the frontiers of the philosophy of science, this new collection of essays shows how ideas in evolutionary biology influence traditional problems in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics.This new collection of essays will appeal to a readership that extends well beyond the frontiers of the philosophy of science. Sober shows how ideas in evolutionary biology bear in significant ways on traditional problems in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics. Among the topics addressed are psychological egoism, solipsism, and the interpretation of belief and utterance, empiricism, Ockham's razor, causality, essentialism, and scientific laws.Introduction; 1. Did evolution make us psychological egoists?; 2. Why not solipsism?; 3. The adaptive advantage of learning and a priori prejudice; 4. The primacy of truth-telling and the evolution of lying; 5. Prospects for an evolutionary ethics; 6. Contrastive empiricism; 7. Let's razor Ockham's razor; 8. The principle of the common cause; 9. Explanatory presupposition; 10. Apportioning casual responsibility; 11. Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism; 12. Temporally oriented laws; Index. The arguments in each essay are cogent and presented in a clear style....For those biologists interested in these basic issues (and that should be most of us!) and with an adequate background this book offers rich material. Patrick W. Colgan, The Canadian Field-Naturalist