Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-767nl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-10T02:37:01.875Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Limits of Explanation: Limited Explanations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

When I was first approached to read a paper at the conference from which this volume takes its beginning I expected that Flint Schier, with whom I had taught a course on the Philosophy of Biology in my years at Glasgow, would be with us to comment and to criticize. I cannot let this occasion pass without expressing once again my own sense of loss. I am sure that we would all have gained by his presence, and hope that he would find things both to approve, and disapprove, in the following venture.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Veyne, Paul, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths?, trans. Wissing, P. (University of Chicago Press, 1988), 118.Google Scholar

2 Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker (London: Longman, 1986)Google Scholar. See my review article, Times Literary Supplement 4356 (26 09 1986), 1047–9Google Scholar. The same point was made by J. J. C. Smart after the opening paper of the conference.

3 Hume, D. ‘Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’, in Hume on Religion, Wollheim, R. (ed.) (London: Fontana, 1963), 99ff.Google Scholar

4 Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Pears, D. F. and McGuinness, B. F. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 6.371.Google Scholar

5 Chesterton, G. K., Orthodoxy (London: Fontana, 1961), 50f (first published 1908).Google Scholar

6 C. S. Peirce, writing in Science (1900), 620f. I should add that I myself think there might be other ways of vindicating humanity.

7 Aristotle, , Metaphysics, 1.983a11ff.Google Scholar

8 Plato, , Timaeus, 29.Google Scholar

9 Augustine, , Confessions, 11.30.Google Scholar

10 Plato, , Phaedrus, 265.Google Scholar

11 Cleanthes speaks: Hume, , Dialogues, 133.Google Scholar

12 See Ames, Van Meter, ‘No Separate Self’, in Philosophy ofG. H. Mead, Corti, W. R. (ed.) (Amrisweiler Bucherei: Amriswil, 1973), 43.Google Scholar

13 I must at once remind my readers that ‘the Theory of Forms’, so called, is not exhausted by a few remarks in Plato's Meno, Phaedo and Republic. A good introduction to what I intend by the theory is Findlay, J. N., Ascent to the Absolute (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970).Google Scholar

14 Prior, A., Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 59ff.Google Scholar

15 See The Color of Magic, et al.: the Disc-world rests on the back of four elephants who are standing on a giant turtle swimming through interstellar space.

16 Armstrong, D. M., Universals and Scientific Realism Vol. I: Nominalism and Realism (Cambridge University Press, 1978), 18ff.Google Scholar

17 See Trigg, R., Reality at Risk (Brighton: Harvester, 1980).Google Scholar

18 Al-Farabi, , On the Perfect State, trans. Walzer, R. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 99.Google Scholar

19 Koestler, A., The Invisible Writing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954), 353.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., 354.

21 Nieli, R., Wittgenstein: from Mysticism to Ordinary Language (State University of New York Press, 1987), 125.Google Scholar

22 See Holbrook, C. A., The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards (University of Michigan Press, 1973), 102f.Google Scholar

23 Berkeley, G., ‘Alciphron’, in Collected Works Vol. 3, Luce, A. A. and Jessop, T. E. (eds) (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 19481956), 297.Google Scholar

24 Compton, J. J., ‘Science and God's Action in Nature’, in Earth Might Be Fair, Barbour, I. G. (ed.) (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 3347, 39.Google Scholar

25 Kohak, E., The Embers and the Stars (University of Chicago Press, 1984), 185.Google Scholar

26 Papineau, D., Reality and Representation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 160fGoogle Scholar. Compare similarly unargued and dismissive comments in Mackie, J. L., Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1976), 48, 230ff.Google Scholar

27 These and related issues are discussed in Regis, E. Jr. (ed.), Extraterrestrials: Science and Alien Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

28 Cf. Chesterton, G. K., ‘God must love common things; He made so many of them’.Google Scholar

29 See Puccetti, R., Persons (London: Macmillan, 1968)Google Scholar, Morris, T. W., The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, and my Limits and Renewals Vol. III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar