Dear Cambridge philosophers of science,
CamPoS continues tomorrow, Wednesday 30 May, as usual at 1 p.m. in the
HPS department in seminar room 2. This will be the last talk this year.
(For next year, Matt Farr will be convening CamPoS.)
We will have Mazviita D. Chirimuuta from Pittsburgh (visiting Birmingham
this term), speaking on 'Constructing the Organism in the Age of
Abstraction.' She kindly rescheduled her talk from Lent during the
strike. Note that this is a new title. Her abstract is below.
Sincerely,
J. Brian Pitts
Abstract:
This paper examines the mutual influence between Ernst Cassirer
(1874-1945) and his cousin, the neurologist Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965).
For both Cassirer and Goldstein, views on the nature of human cognition
were fundamental to their understanding of scientific knowledge, and
these were informed both by philosophical theorising and empirical
research on pathologies of the nervous system. Between the wars,
Goldstein published a series of famous case studies on brain damaged WW1
veterans with the Gestalt psychologist Adhémar Gelb. This activity
culminated in the book published by Goldstein in exile, Der Aufbau des
Organismus: Einführung in die Biologie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung
der Erfahrungen am kranken Menschen (translated for publication as, The
Organism: A holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data
in Man).
In contrast to Harrington (1996), I argue that Goldstein’s
methodological prescriptions are not straightforwardly holistic, but
require the biologist to alternate between holistic and “dissective”
ways of characterising living organisms (Goldstein 1934/1995, p.316).
Following Cassirer, and in agreement with the contemporary logical
empiricists, Goldstein held that the physical sciences had progressed by
arriving at abstract, mathematical forms to take the place of
qualitative characterisations of empirical reality. Unlike the logical
empiricists, Goldstein was not sanguine about the fruitfulness of the
abstractive approach in biology. An interesting point of comparison is
with the other famous Aufbau treatise of the era, Carnap’s Der Logische
Aufbau der Welt. Whereas Carnap constructed the scaffolding for a
unified science operating according to mathematical and logical
principles, Goldstein argued that biology must retain descriptions of
the “qualities” that are excluded by mathematical abstractions
(Goldstein 1934/1995, p.315).
According to Friedman (2000, p.155-6), the rejection of mathematical
logic as the unifying language for natural and human sciences motivated
Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms as a means to provide a
systematic epistemology for the non-mathematical disciplines. Friedman
points to Cassirer’s failure to buttress his claims for the “underlying
unity” of the symbolic forms in human cognition as the reason for the
failure of his programme. I examine the ways in which the neurological
writings of Goldstein offer insights into Cassirer’s unificatory
project, where the bio-medical sciences take an intermediate position
between the human and the physical sciences.
J. Brian Pitts
Senior Research Associate
Faculty of Philosophy
University of Cambridge
[email protected]
Ph.D., Philosophy/History & Philosophy of Science, University of Notre
Dame
Ph.D., Physics, University of Texas at Austin
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