Provisional Further Note on Hawkes & Gould

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Aug 19 20:22:13 PDT 2002


Yoshie's point below might be applicable in a special way to Hawkes's major error: his arguing that Gould's book represents a shift in paradigm. The following is based on reaching pg. 65 (of 1453 pp.) of Gould's book.

It _does_ represent a new paradigm -- but not in in biology (as Richard Levins said, that is for the future to decide) but in what is more or less Hawkes's _own_ field: Intellectual History.

Hawkes is a practioner of an ideology: History of Ideas.

Gould's work represents a new paradigm in intellectual history, which reveals History of Ideas as a particularly corrupt ideology.

I'll probably have to read another 2906 pages before I can say anything further than this.

Whether my suggestion is accurate or not, Gould's book is extremely important for _non-biologists_ (historians, 'humanists,' sociologists, etc. as a possible model for intellectual history.

Carrol

The date of Yoshie's post was Sun, 02 Jun 2002 14:13:37 -0400

Subject line: Re: The Follies (Re: sketch of Hawkes on Gould)

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> Justin says:
>
> >Pardon me for being pragmatist about this, but as a sometime
> >professional historian and philosopher of science, let me say that I
> >think that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Marx was an
> >amateur political economist, trained (like me!) as a philosopher and
> >lawyer. On a more mundane level, Frederick Crewes, English prof at
> >Berkeley, has turned out to be a forminable critic of
> >psychoanalysis, although he lacks formal psychological training as
> >far as I know.
>
> Both examples, though, are critiques of ideologies -- which economics
> & psychoanalysis are -- rather than critiques of this or that theory
> within science.
> --
> Yoshie
>
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