Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Forces of Nature: Evolution, Divergence, Decimation
- 2 Pathological Life and the Limits of Medical Perception
- 3 Violence, Pathos and Animal Life in European Philosophy and Critical Animal Studies
- 4 From Animal-Machines to Cybernetic Organisms . . .
- 5 Organicism and Complexity: Whitehead and Kauffman
- 6 Aped, Mongrelised and Scapegoated: Adventures in Biopolitics and Transgenics in Haraway's Animal Worlds
- Epilogue: A Vicious Circle
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Forces of Nature: Evolution, Divergence, Decimation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Forces of Nature: Evolution, Divergence, Decimation
- 2 Pathological Life and the Limits of Medical Perception
- 3 Violence, Pathos and Animal Life in European Philosophy and Critical Animal Studies
- 4 From Animal-Machines to Cybernetic Organisms . . .
- 5 Organicism and Complexity: Whitehead and Kauffman
- 6 Aped, Mongrelised and Scapegoated: Adventures in Biopolitics and Transgenics in Haraway's Animal Worlds
- Epilogue: A Vicious Circle
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
A universe that is ‘full’, in the sense of exhibiting the maximal diversity of kinds, must be chiefly full of ‘leaps’. There is at every point an abrupt passage to something different, and there is no purely logical principle determining – out of all the infinitely various ‘possible’ kinds of differentness
–which shall come next.In the spirit of Alfred North Whitehead's characterisation of the history of philosophy, Arthur O. Lovejoy sets out a history of the idea of the Great Chain of Being as, essentially, a series of ‘footnotes to Plato’. By this he means, in particular, the predominance of thinking in terms of the principles of plenitude, of continuity, and of unilinear gradation, terms that were not fully formulated by Plato, but that nevertheless came to represent significant cornerstones of the study of natural history in subsequent eras. According to the principle of plenitude,
the universe is a plenum formarum in which the range of conceivable diversity of kinds of living things is exhaustively exemplified, … that the extent and abundance of the creation must be as great as the possibility of existence and commensurate with the productive capacity of a ‘perfect’ and inexhaustible Source, and that the world is the better, the more things it contains.
The principle of continuity, in some ways a development of the idea of plenitude, then comes to dominate natural history as the idea that all living things exist in an ascending series of forms. Finally, the principle of unilinear gradation (through Aristotle), adds to the ideas of the fullness and continuity of beings the sense of their existence and organisation into hierarchies of physical and psychological development.
To preface my discussion of some key debates in nineteenth-century biology, it is worth noting some aspects of eighteenth-century thought that Lovejoy identifies as having a particular effect on this idea of the Chain of Being and its basis in the Platonic principles. Lovejoy notes that, whereas the fields of astronomy, physics and metaphysics had thrown off the yoke of Aristotelianism, biology in the early modern period was characterised by a certain fidelity to Aristotle's categorisation of living things into kinds.
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- Philosophy, Animality and the Life Sciences , pp. 12 - 34Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014