James Spence Medallist 1996: Professor Sir David Hull

A crucial question for a process view of life is how to identify a process and how to follow it through time. The genidentity view (first proposed by Kurt Lewin and later elaborated by Hans Reichenbach) can contribute decisively to this project. It says that the identity through time of an entity X is given by a well-identified series of continuous states of affairs. Genidentity helps address the problem of diachronic identity in the living world. This chapter describes the centrality of the concept of genidentity for David Hull and proposes an extension of Hull’s view to the ubiquitous phenomenon of symbiosis. Finally, using immunology as a key example, it shows that the genidentity view suggests that the main interest of a process approach is epistemological rather than ontological and that its principal claim is one of priority, namely that processes precede and define things, and not vice versa.

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David Hull Through Two Decades

Nijhoff International Philosophy Series - What the Philosophy of Biology Is ◽

10.1007/978-94-009-1169-7_1 ◽

1989 ◽

pp. 1-15 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Michael Ruse

Keyword(s):

David Hull

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Philosophy of Biological Science. David Hull

Isis ◽

10.1086/351492 ◽

1975 ◽

Vol 66 (3) ◽

pp. 416-417

Author(s):

Michael Ruse

Keyword(s):

Biological Science ◽

David Hull

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84. For a machine for Facing and Dressing Stone; David Hull and John Critcherson, Portland, Cumberland county, Maine, May 8

Journal of the Franklin Institute ◽

10.1016/s0016-0032(38)91829-0 ◽

1838 ◽

Vol 25 (2) ◽

pp. 109-110

Keyword(s):

Cumberland County ◽

David Hull

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Sceptical Reflections on Human Nature

10.1093/oso/9780198823650.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Kim Sterelny

Keyword(s):

Human Nature ◽

Evolutionary Biology ◽

David Hull ◽

The Cost ◽

Over Time

David Hull famously argued that the very idea of human nature was pre-Darwinian; once we genuinely embrace Darwin’s insights into unbounded variation and plasticity over time, no robust account of human nature can survive. There have been a variety of responses to Hull’s critique, variously showing that some concept of human nature can be rebuilt in ways consistent with contemporary evolutionary biology. In this chapter, I argue that, in one sense, some of these reconstructive attempts succeed. One can develop a concept of human nature consistent with evolutionary insights into variation and potentially unbounded change. But in a deeper sense these reconstructive projects are in trouble: the cost of making a concept of human nature evolutionarily credible is, arguably, to rob that concept of explanatory salience.

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