The Thomist 61 (1997): 625-40
ON WILLIAM A. WALLACE, O.P., THE MODELING OF NATURE(1)
Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., and Eric A. Reitan, O.P.
St. Louis University
St. Louis, Missouri
After half a century of logical reconstructionist philosophy of science, the academic iconoclast Paul Feyerabend declared in 1970 that the philosophy of science was "a discipline with a great past." In this masterful volume, after a lifetime of research, teaching, and writing in the history of science, philosophy, and theology, William A. Wallace shows that the philosophy of science may indeed be a discipline with a futureas long as it remains in contact with the actual historical episodes of real scientific achievement. By his many studies on the scientific methodology of Galileo(2) and its origins and by his important twovolume work, Causality and Scientific Explanation,(3) Wallace had laid the foundation for the present clearly written, eminently readable, and welldocumented volume, in which he presents and defends a realistic philosophy of nature and natural science. Basing his presentation on empirical common sense, a realist view of nature and causality, and on critically accepted scientific achievements, Wallace shows how a natural philosophy that does not presuppose but rather grounds a metaphysics, in concert with a realist interpretation of scientific methodology and scientific discovery, has in fact served as the
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foundation for the unique cumulative growth of scientific knowledge throughout the history of Western civilization.
Wallace divides his book into two main parts. In the first (chaps. 15) he discusses the fundamental concepts of the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, biology, and human psychology. In the second part (chaps. 610), using actual successful episodes from the history of science, he shows how a realistic scientific epistemology enables the human mind to acquire true scientific understanding of natural realities in terms of their real causes and natural properties. The first part is essentially a contemporary version of the first few books of Aristotle's Physics and De Anima, rewritten in light of modern scientific advances, with the aid of "modeling techniques."
Using the models (diagrams and schemas) that he has developed in major articles over the years, Wallace elucidates the Aristotelian concepts of "physical substance," "form," "matter," "nature," and cause" in order to present a holistic understanding of the physical realities that serve as the basis for both our common everyday experience and our sophisticated scientific theories. After a general discussion of "nature," "form," and "matter" (chap. 1), Wallace considers atoms and molecules and their compounds, as well as the processes of radioactive decay and chemical interaction, and even the distant realities of stars and planets in his discussion of the inorganic (chap. 2). Building on his discussion of the inorganic, Wallace considers living thingsplants and animalsin chapter 3, where he discusses the vital operations of metabolism and homeostasis, morphological development and growth, as well as DNA replication, and the animal activities of sensation and desire. In the next two chapters, he turns to a consideration of knowledge and human nature. Using some of the insights of contemporary cognitive science, along with recent researches involving Periplaneta computatrix (a computersimulated "insect"), as well as traditional concepts of sensation, perception, and intellection, the external and internal senses, and intentionality, Wallace presents an uptodate version of an essentially AristotelianThomistic theory of cognition (chap. 4). Then, by bringing together the principal concepts and insights
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of the first four chapters, he discusses the character of the human person and human nature, showing how the inorganic elements and the life functions of vegetative and sensory powers serve as the foundation in human nature for the emotional, appetitive, intellectual, and volitional activities of the human person (chap. 5). Though grounded in the actualization of "protomatter" by a "natural form" (the human soul) that is "essentially immaterial," the human being cannot ultimately be explained in terms of physical principles alone. This leads us, according to Wallace, from the empirical considerations of natural philosophy to the brink of metaphysics, without presupposing it.
In the second part of the book, Wallace argues that the physical realities we investigate and the concepts we derive from them are more fruitfully engaged by a realist methodology of science, based on the distinctions between formal and material logic, and between dialectical and demonstrative reasoning, than they are by the essentially mathematical and symbolic logic and socalled empirical concepts of the logical reconstructionist and neoempiricist philosophy of science of the twentieth century, which have never freed themselves from Kant's epistemology.
Using historical examples of significant scientific contributions, Wallace shows how eminent scientists used dialectical reasoning, based on sense experience, experiment, and measurement, to prepare the way for actual scientific demonstrations that greatly enhanced our understanding of phenomena as diverse as rainbows, planetary motions, circulation of the blood, and the structure of DNA. He begins this part of his book with an updated version (chap. 6) of his important article "Defining the Philosophy of Science,"(4) in which he surveys briefly the history of the development of the discipline of the philosophy of science from its modern roots in the thought of Descartes, Hume, and Kant, through its nineteenthcentury developments at the hands of Whewell and Mill, to the rise of logical reconstructionism (the "orthodox" or "received view") and the more recent critical assessments of Popper and Kuhn.
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After evaluating several Thomist interpretations of the philosophy of science, Wallace offers his own view, that the "Philosophy of science is a specialization or subdiscipline within the philosophy of nature," and as such does not differ formally and essentially from modern science itself nor from natural philosophy as understood within the AristotelianThomist tradition. The philosophy of science is a critical reflection on and analysis of the methods actually used by investigators of nature, whether natural philosophers or scientists, who have advanced our scientific knowledge of the world through valid insights and cogent arguments concerning physical phenomena, their causes, and their properties.
In order to articulate and defend this view of the philosophy of science, Wallace first discusses the probable and dialectical argumentation of the natural sciences (chap. 7). Critical of Hume's notion of causation and probability, and aware of the limitations of the hypotheticodeductive method, Wallace shows how physical concepts (observable, metrical, and theoretical) combined with mathematical concepts, can be applied dialectically to "topics," or problems of causeeffect, antecedentconsequent, and similaritydissimilarity, in order to arrive at reasonable principles or at least probable hypotheses from which a causal explanation of natural phenomena might be drawn. Often, he shows, these dialectical probings have historically led the way to more penetrating scientific analysis of those same realities, ultimately enabling us to understand the causes of those realities and demonstrate their essential properties.
Next Wallace considers this demonstrative argumentation as it is expressed in scientific syllogisms founded on indemonstrable first principles, arrived at through critical reflection and analysis of the data of our experience (chap. 8). He explains the "material" or content logic of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, addressing problems of definition, supposition, foreknowledge, and causal connection, all of which are necessary for "scientific knowledge" in the full sense of necessary knowledge through causes. The "certitude" in question is not Cartesian mathematical
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clarity, nor metaphysical necessity, but that proper to physical knowledge, namely the necessity of causal laws that apply in pluribus, based on the factual certitudes of observation. Thus we have arrived at certitude not only that the earth is a spheroid, but why it is such according to the laws of gravitation and mechanics. Using such examples from his earlier, pioneering studies of the Aristotelian roots of Galileo's science, Wallace provides examples of this logic in action (logica utens as contrasted to logica docens, logical theory), showing how the search for causesused and defended by Galileo, Newton, and the other founders of modern sciencemust be adapted to the subject matter at hand and its causes and attributes being investigated, and how this differs radically from the merely formal character of contemporary symbolic logic.
Wallace also shows how models and analogies can be used in the formulation of the "demonstrative regress" promoted by the seventeenthcentury Paduan Aristotelian Jacopo Zabarella, in order to lead us from knowledge of observed effects to some understanding of the causes responsible for them. According to this method of demonstrative regress scientific reasoning proceeds from observed effect to explanatory cause and then from this cause to explain the observed effect. This induction from effect to cause does not demand, as many writers suppose, an exhaustive enumeration of particulars, because "in a necessary subject matter where objects have essential connection with each other," after "a certain number of these have been examined, the mind straightway notices the essential connection, and then, disregarding the remaining particulars, it proceeds at once to bring all the particulars together in the universal."(5). Thus Newton did not have to examine every case of a falling body to get the insight that massive bodies attract each other after he had seen not only that apples fall, but that closed, elliptical orbits of the planets and Jupiter's moons show they tend to fall toward the more massive body. Nor is this inductivedeductive demonstrative regress logically circular because in the regressive induction from effect to cause, the cause is only grasped "materially," that is, we
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need only know that the cause of the effect exists; while in the deductive return from cause to effect, the cause is seen "formally," precisely as the necessary cause of the effect, as Newton in the Principia demonstrated that gravitational "attraction" is the vera causa of planetary motion. As Wallace points out, the fact that later Einstein was to argue that this "attraction" was not an actio in distans but due to the curvature of spacetime produced by the presence of massive bodies or by the exchange of gravitons, in no way shows that Newton's conclusion was false or merely probable, but only tells us more about his (certainly true, but) approximate conclusion.(6)
In the final two chapters, Wallace looks to a series of significant episodes in the history of science in order to support his argument concerning the human mind's ability to grasp, at least in part, the natures of physical realities and to understand their attributes and activities in terms of their various causes. First, he presents the scientific arguments themselves in historical context, evaluating their demonstrative force (chap. 9). He discusses Theodoric of Freiberg's treatment of the rainbow, Galileo's argument concerning the moon and planets and his analysis of freefall and projectile motion, William Harvey's work on the circulation of the blood, Newton's theory of light and color and his understanding of universal gravitation, the work of Lavoisier, GuyLussac, Dalton, Avogadro, and Cannizzaro in the determination of the "units" in chemistry, and the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick.
In light of these scientific achievements, Wallace then addresses the problem of scientific progress in relation with Thomas Kuhn's historical and sociological notion of "paradigm shifts," first proposed in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(7) and very influential in recent thought. Wallace considers the initial (and in some cases still ongoing) controversies that surrounded each of his examples. He argues that each of these episodes involved the scientist in a movement toward a fuller and more complete understanding of the reality under
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investigation. Beginning with partial knowledge, based on sense experience and previous scientific insight, the scientist proceeds through experimentation and "agitation of mind" (Galileo's phrase) to uncover more of the truth that previously lay hidden in the obscurity of material processes and contingencies. This process of discovery, according to Wallace, is not reducible to the rules of symbolic logic and basic empirical statements, but is better served by the realistic content logic of Aristotelian dialectical reasoning and is at its best in causal demonstration. Moreover Wallace admits, with Kuhn, that historical and sociological factors have an immense influence on the understanding, acceptance, and final form of scientific achievements. He believes, however, that there is a real continuity in the history of natural science, manifested by the historical uncovering of ever more of the truth about nature, a truth that does not conflict with previous insights, but moves beyond them, bringing to light what was before hidden and obscure. The partial truth that was known then and the partial truth that we know now, is not, for Wallace, simply probable and revisable, subject to contradiction by new and different theories that may arise in the future. Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, and Watson and Crick made real and lasting contributions to the human understanding of nature, contributions that while capable of further refinement, and even profound rethinking, enable us today to move forward in the pursuit of truth.
Wallace rightly traces the misinterpretation of modern science to the skeptic David Hume, who denied the objective reality of causality and hence of the possibility of knowing the natures of things through their causes. Though he retained the term "causation" it was reduced merely to our subjective anticipation of an "effect" from the repeated experiences of its "cause." No wonder then that in this context Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm shifts," resulting not from objective evidence so much as from cultural changes, have fostered the current notion that science is only a social construct reflecting an ideology.
Wallace gives less attention to the even more decisive influence of Immanuel Kant's attempt to save Newton from
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Hume by arguing that even if causality and the nature of things are unknowable, yet we can still construct a science of necessary natural laws by attributing their necessity not to things themselves but to the way our minds necessarily think about things.(8) It was because of their Kantianism that the logical empiricists insisted that scientific verification can never be more than approximate and probable. Karl Popper, however, showed that in complex theories such relative probability cannot be established by verification, and tried to substitute falsification instead, until Willard Van Orman Quine demonstrated that falsification too is indecisive.(9) A determinant probability rests on good reasons. Hence if one is to avoid an infinite regress in probable reasons resulting in zero probability, one must posit some good reasons that are certain.
Very important to Wallace's exposition is his rejection of the blackandwhite conception of objective truth with which Descartes in his mathematicism burdened modern philosophy and which was so prominent a feature of logical empiricism. This notion of certitude supposed that it depends on clarity and distinctness. Aristotle's doctrine that physical reality has being (reality) not only in its actuality but also in its potentiality, its real capacity for change, had its consequences also for our knowledge of reality. Human concepts, based as they are on abstraction from sense perceptions, are never completely clear and actual; they always contain, even in their objectivity, a degree of confusion, of potentiality.
It is not strange, therefore, that the hopeless search for mathematical clarity has again and again led to skepticism about the possibility of an objective, rational understanding of the world and ourselves. For some time many philosophers have claimed that moral standards have no more than a subjective basis. Now some have begun to argue that the hard sciences, so long trusted
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for their critical objectivity, are just as much a matter of social construction as are ethics and politics.(10) The theoretical claims of natural science are suspected to be ideologically motivated and rhetorically promoted. Many excellent popularizing expositions(11) make clear that current science is directed by what are often very paradoxical and ambiguous theories that condition its search for the very same data on which it relies to confirm these same dubious theories. What are we to think, for example, of cosmologies that logically require us to suppose that countless new worlds are constantly being created, although they will remain forever inaccessible to our experience? Or that the universe emerged from nothing by quantum fluctuations in empty space as if these laws were not simply properties of an already existing cosmos? Or theories of evolution that explain the existence of the brilliant brains of scientists who study evolution by saying these brains have been created by a series of purely chance events that might much more probably have resulted in a merely random assemblage of particles?
All these magnificent efforts at understanding our world seem to result in a cosmos without human meaning and hence to require us on our own to give that cosmos meaning. Thus in a collection of interviews with twentyseven distinguished cosmologists, a Nobel laureate in physics, Steven Weinberg, was asked whether he stood by a statement in his book The First Three Minutes "that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless"; Weinberg could only add that "one of the things that makes life worthwhile is doing scientific
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research."(12) Most of the other scientists interviewed are less blunt (a few sharply disagree with Weinberg) but are unable to say anything much more positive. Can the goal of science be nothing more than the scientist's selfexpressionand the expression of an empty self at that?
Fortunately there are contemporary thinkers, like Wallace, who are pointing a more hopeful way for twentyfirstcentury thought not by denying the objectivity and rationality of scientific thought but by what the French call ressourcement, a return to the sources. Because modern science has achieved so much and in so short a time, we need to review its progress to see whether it has been consistent with its truest self. Defenders of scientific realism have found the clue to its revision in the careful study of its history so as to discover when it has been on track and when it has been shunted off into deadends. Historical studies can mislead, but happily they tend to be selfcorrecting. Thus Kuhn's stimulating but dubious theory of "paradigm shifts" started the trend of accusing science of being a mere social construct, but it also favored deeper research into the rise of modern science and the alleged paradigm shift from ancient and medieval science to modern science with the "Copernican Revolution" and the work of Galileo.(13)
Thus Wallace's book puts together the major results of his own lifetime of historical and philosophical research and splendidly fulfills a project in which he has encouraged others to labor.(14) Our conviction is that the current interpretation of the investigation of nature, which has made such remarkable progress
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since the seventeenth century, became seriously distorted in the eighteenth century by the skepticism of Hume and the idealism of Kant, which have resulted in the conceptual tangles and frustrations already mentioned. To overcome this situation modern science must be freed of these misguided philosophical influences and exhorted to follow with courage its own deeper and more continuous tradition.
While the work under review is a fine synthesis of these efforts, it also shows that much work is still to be done. To retain focus on his principal thesis Wallace has wisely chosen to pass over lightly the questions raised by quantum physics and by neoDarwinianism. These issues are highly technical and the theories are rapidly changing; to pursue them might obscure the main point which is to show that there is now a very large body of scientific knowledge that is not called into question by these cuttingedge questions. We may be on the edge of a grand unified theory of natural forces or a major improvement on Darwin, but such advances will not invalidate the major achievements of the past. They can only put them in a new context. Wallace justifies this limitation of his treatment of current science by showing that subatomic entities, cosmological origins, and the history of life on earth cannot be explored scientifically except by grounding the search in a scientific account of the present cosmic and earthly situation at the level of entities that we can well describe in a realistic way consistent with common experience.
Within the limits of his treatment, Wallace demonstrates that in fact the scientific view of the world as developed by modern science can be understood as an authentic "philosophy of nature" which seeks a causal understanding of the material world, independent of metaphysics, ethics, and politics, that is not reducible to the mathematical models which are its tools. Thus this book takes a different approach than do many current synthesizing works which attempt to begin with quantum theory, cosmology, and evolutionary theory to explain the world. This is to go from the lesser known to the better known, thus exposing
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science to the fantastic paradoxes that GellMann calls "flapdoodle."(15)
While Wallace's decision not to enter more deeply into the problems of quantum physics, cosmology, and evolutionary theory is well justified, he might have done well to have touched, at least in summary fashion, on the most important questions these unifying theories raise for an Aristotelian reinterpretation of the current scientific world picture, since these questions are the ones today most discussed in popularizing works.(16) First of all, it is important to note that a "paradigm shift" has been quietly taking place from the attempt, dominant from Newton to Einstein, to explain the universe in terms of universal laws to a new mode of explanation in terms of historical sequences of particular events that are not governed by any such universal law but are ultimately matters of chance.
While it is true that, as Steve Weinberg says in Dreams of a Final Theory, cosmologists long for a mathematical law from which, without the specification of any initial conditions, the entire evolution of the cosmos could be deduced, this kind of determinism is at odds with quantum indeterminism and chaos theory. The slightest surprise at one point of cosmic development could make for an utterly different universe in the future, and such a surprise is always possible considering random quantum fluctuations. It could be added that Weinberg's universe without initial conditions would be the equivalent of the classical philosophical definition of God, that is, the absolutely necessary Being. That a material being, that is, one that is changing and thus in part potential and yet to be determined, should be absolutely necessary, is absurd. We must, therefore, accept that by all evidence the universe in which we live is not necessary, but wholly contingent, and that its development involves the chances of history and a genuine (i.e., unpredictable) future.
The same is true of the evolution of life. Stephen Jay Gould is right (and this eliminates the whole system of Teilhard de Chardin) in declaring that the theory of biological evolution
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contains no universal law of progress.(17) Nothing in present evolutionary theory makes it inevitable that intelligent human life should have appeared on earth or anywhere else. It is much more likely that evolution would have ended with insects, or bacteria, or no life at all. The Anthropic Principle of Barrow and Tipler(18) is valid only in the weaker form of a look backward in time which requires us to affirm that human life could not have emerged if the universe had been much different than it is. We cannot claim that given the universe as it is intelligent life must necessarily have emerged.
At this point, as Wallace tells us, the methods of natural science reach their limits. What they do and should affirm is that our universe as such is not ultimately selfexplanatory, that is, the cosmos is a fact but not a necessary fact. This becomes very evident in the fortunate emergence of intelligent life from a universe that might just as well go in an entirely different direction. That it has not done so, however, cannot be attributed to the mere throw of the dice, since the improbability of the emergence of so extremely complex an entity as the human brain (as well shown by Wallace's description of human nature) is so vast that we must infer the existence of nonmaterial causes for the material universe and its dramatic history, and hence consider the possibility of a metaphysics. This metaphysics, however, requires as its condition precisely this sort of physical proof of the existence of nonphysical causes of the physical.
A special point we would like to make, not elaborated by Wallace, concerns the ambiguous use in current science of the term matter as if it were somehow identical with energy. GellMann in the work referred to(19) points out that it is not
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correct to say that matter is converted into energy and energy into matter, since in fact what happens is that one sort of matter is converted into another sort with the release or absorption of energy in accordance with conservation laws. Moreover current science seems to identify matter with mass, which is said to be a measure of the quantity of matter. An Aristotelian, however, would say that Descartes was mistaken in identifying matter with quantity but that quantity (extension) is the first property of matter. Thus it is not at all evident that all matter must have mass.
In Newtonian science one could speak of "empty space" devoid of matter, a notion that Aristotle considered a confusion of real quantity with abstract mathematical quantity, which cannot as such exist in the physical world. Einstein returned to a more Aristotelian view when he replaced Newton's absolute space with a gravitational field which cannot exist without the presence in it of a massive body but which itself has no mass. In current quantum physics the socalled vacuum within the atom and in interstellar space is filled with all sorts of particlewaves carrying the four fundamental forces, and some of these particles, photons and neutrinos and their antiparticles, although material are said to be of zero mass. An Aristotelian must conclude that these "fields," since they constitute an extended real plenum between massive bodies and thus have quantity (as well as being the subject of "curvature," "waves," etc.) must also be considered to be material. Hence mass is a property of some matter but not of all kinds or states of matter.
The rethinking of the history and achievements of science that Wallace proposes opens up an objective way to pass from modern science to ethics and politics in the practical realm and to metaphysics in the realm of the ultimate meaning of reality. It should be studied by scientists, moralists, and metaphysicians if they want to open interdisciplinary dialogue and seek a coordination and mutual communication between the fields of research. An example of such dialogue is the especially interesting chapter 8, section 1, in which Wallace compares his own AristotelianThomist ontology with that of one of the most
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respected of contemporary American philosophers, Willard Van Orman Quine.
This work, therefore, is an excellent defense of the scientific enterprise against such current mistaken notions as that (1) science is a mere social construct, incapable of objective truth; (2) the achievements of science are unworthy of the title of "philosophy" because they arrive only at an accidental superficial knowledge of things ("perinoetic" science in Jacques Maritain's terms) rather than their natures; (3) they are merely dialectical (i.e., arrive only at probable truths); (4) real philosophy (i.e., metaphysics) is independent of natural science because it has access to "being as such" by some mental abstractive or judgmental process by which the ens of ens mobile is shown to be distinguishable from the mobile; (5) natural science encompasses the whole range of reality accessible to objective human knowledge; (6) human nature, along with the natures of the other physical things of our experience, lacks any intrinsic teleology which could supply an objective basis for ethics, so that it is a fallacy to reason from the "is" to the "ought."
Thus science as conceived by Wallace supplies a firm foundation for both ethics and metaphysics. Hence The Modeling of Nature should be read and consulted by serious scholars of the sciences, their history, and their significance for the understanding of ourselves and our world. Its sustained argument is richly illustrated with historical examples, and it is philosophically sophisticated and scientifically relevant. The modest size of the volume and its convenient divisions into chapters and sections make it useful as a textbook as well. Moreover, its wideranging and thorough bibliography and its index make it an ideal teaching tool for graduate seminars devoted to historical and philosophical treatments of science. And its interdisciplinary character enables it to serve as a text in undergraduate courses concerned with the relationship between the sciences, humanities, and theology, as well as upperlevel courses in the philosophy of science and the history of science. This is an important book for scientists, philosophers, and
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theologians, providing all of us with a realistic and critical approach to the study of nature.
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1. William A. Wallace, O.P., The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), xvii + 450 pp.
2. His major studies are Galileo and His Sources: The Heritage of the Collegio Romano in Galileo's Science (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1984) and Galileo's Logic of Discovery and Proof (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992).
3. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1974.
4. Reprinted in his book of essays, From a Realist Point of View (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America Press, 1979; 2d ed., 1983), 121.
5. Modeling, 302.
6. Ibid., 35964.
7. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962; 2d ed., enlarged, 1970.
8. On the stages of this development see Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 465ff. However, Michael Friedman, in a detailed study on Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) shows that there were other factors than Hume's destruction of causality at work in Kant's lifelong preoccupation with natural philosophy, especially his desire to free it from the metaphysics of Leibnitz and Wolff which has continued to influence neoScholasticism.
9. Modeling, 24849.
10. Thus Michael Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) argues that "man" as we now know him/her, that is, "modern man," has existed only since the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century and is probably about to pass away along with his/her trust in objective science (see 386f.).
11. We are engulfed in a deluge of such books, for example, on physics: John D. Barrow, Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991); Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (New York: Vintage, 1993); Murray GellMann, The Jaguar and the Quark: Adventures in the Simple and Complex (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1994); and on biology: Niles Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate on Evolutionary Theory (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1995); Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); and Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box (New York: The Free Press, 1996).
12. Alan Lightman and Roberta Brawer, Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 466; referring to Weinberg's, The First Three Minutes (London: Trinity Press, 1977). In his later work Dreams of a Final Theory Weinberg discusses this question more cautiously.
13. For the various theories of the historical development of science and the debate about Kuhn's theory see the excellent work of H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), which refers to Wallace's work (see index, p. 660).
14. Modeling, xvii. For the history of this line of Thomistic interpretation and application in the United States see Benedict Ashley, O.P., "The River Forest School of Natural Philosophy," in R. James Long, ed., Philosophy and the God of Abraham: Essays in Memory of James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1991), 116; and idem, "The Loss of Theological Unity: Pluralism, Thomism, and Catholic Morality," in Mary Jo Weaver and R. Scott Appleby, Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 6387.
15. "Quantum Dynamics and Flapdoodle," in Quark and Jaguar, 16776.
16. See note 10 above for examples.
17. See his recent defense of his views against Daniel Dennett, "Darwinian Fundamentalism: Part I," The New York Review of Books 44 no. 10 (12 June 1997): 3437: "The radicalism of [Darwinian] natural selection lies in its power to dethrone some of the deepest and most traditional comforts of Western thought, particularly the notion that nature's benevolence, order, and good design, with humans at a sensible summit of power and an omnipotent and benevolent creator who loves us most of all (the oldstyle theological version), or at least that nature has meaningful directions, and that humans fit into a sensible and predictable pattern regulating the totality (the modern and more secular version)," (34; emphasis added).
18. J. D. Barrow and F. D. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). For discussion see GellMann, Jaguar and Quark, 21213.
19. Jaguar and Quark, 124.