Brian Goodwin's name has come up in a lazy google of process structuralism. His "complexity theory" seems to have an almost Platonic conception of biology, and if that weren't enough to sideline him he seems to be kind of a New Ager. He's reviewed here towards the bottom of the page, and there's an interview with him somehere I can't take the time to look up at the moment.
You have a colorful web log!
In content, or presentation? The color scheme was a default setting. I've been thinking of changing it.
Gilson devoted his last three series of Toronto lectures to a sharpening of his presentation of the role of metaphysics as complementary to the sciences of nature. the first of theses series, "Finalism Revisited," comprised four lectures: "The Case for Final Causality," "The Case for the Mechanical Cause," "Finalism and Physical Probability," and "Evolution: Teleology and Theology," They were delivered on 6, 15, 22, and 29 January 1970, respetivley. "Finalism Revisted" . . . covered material later published in D'Aristote à Darwin et retour . . The dominant theme of the lectures was "the pull of creation toward the causes whose effect it is," . . he moved into nineteenth-century research by Claude Bernard and recent work by Walter M. Elsasser on the biological sciences . . . .In 1971 Gilson's lectures series for Toronto was "In Quest of Evolution": the three component lectures were "Darwin without Evolution," "Evolution without Darwin," and "From Malthus to the Twilight of Evolution." . . . Gilson now wanted to show how antifinalism had actually produced nineteenth-century evolutionism [just say "teleology" on this forum and you have all porcupines squealing] . . . Darwin had originally been inspired by his reading of Malthus on the principle of population. The first philosophical theory of evolution was presented not by Darwin, but by Herbert Spencer. The general public, however, confused the two theories, and began to misread Darwin's scientific demonstration of the origin of species as a demonstration of the origin of being; Darwin himself was too good a scientist to ever mistake his scientific theory for a philosophical one [hmmm.] once the transference was made . . . Darwin never contradicted them. For Gilson theories of evolution had never proven themselves scientifically tenable, and had raised many questions that science could not answer . . . .
[15 May 1971 Gilson gave an address at Catholic University "Evolution: From Aristotle and Back."] In January 1972 Gilson gave his last series of lectures in Toronto. "In Quest of Species" probed philosophy for some means of reconciling Darwin's findings on the origin of species; the three lectures in the series were called "Species for Experience," "Species for Science," and "species for Philosophy." Nothing he wrote satisfied him:
I now shall type up a third redaction . . . What I now want to say is that species is not a scientific notion either . . . Adler . . . pointed out the mistake of those scholastics who confuse logical with biological species."Ultimately, it was to Aristotle that Gilson turned for inspiration: "[Aristotle] merely says: 'No part of an animal is purely material or purely immaterial." Drop the immaterial and the notion of species makes no sense; it is not a scientific notion but a philosophical one." Gilson's "In Quest of Species" led to this same conclusion:
True species can be found in zoos. There are no others. Darwin despaired of trying to differentiate species from varieties. Adler is driven to affirm that there are three species: plant, brute, man. The only explanation I can see for the very possibility of species is the notion of substantial form.
Gilson opened the first lecture of the series with a strong assertion. At eighty-six he was still, as he had been throughout his life, profoundly convinced of the specificity of the philosophical order: "I call specifically philosophical," he said, "those problems that arise in science from science, but have no scientific conclusion" . . . . In Cravant, on 30 July 1972, Gilson finished his preparation of his next three lectures for Toronto, "In Quest of Matter." The papers surveyed three ways of examining matter: the Greek method, the Christian philosopher's method, and the scientific method followed since Descartes . . . .
Although Descartes and his scientific successors have presented many varying opinions on matter, most have thought of matter as a thing discoverable in its properties and uses, and as useful and profitable to science. For them matter is no longer an obscurity, a mutability, or a potency; rather, matter is an extension, a quantity, a figure or situation, a movement. For the sciences the distinguishing mark of matter is its usefulness. [Ghost of general_re] The ancients and the medievals asked themselves the philsophical question. "What is matter?" The moderns merely pry into its properties:
The result of Descartes' victory is that modern scientism leaves us without any metaphysical notion of matter . . . . Science has discovered an unbelievable quantity of truth concerning the structure of material bodies; it has pushed beyond the notion of atom and discovered in elemental molcules an infinitely small universe of unbelievable complexity . . . . Because [scientists] are busy investigating the nature of matter, they believe they are examining the question of what it is.In Gilson's view, despite all such progress, "the nature of reality is other than our knowledge of it." To illustrate he repeats Einstein's reply to the wife of physicist Max Born, who asked him if he believed that absolutely everything could be expressed scientifically. "Yes," he replied, "it would be possible, but it would make no sense. It would be description without meaning--as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure."