From Aristotle's Teleology to Darwin's Genealogy

From Aristotle to Darwin, from ancient teleology to contemporary genealogies, this book offers an overview of the birth and then persistence of Aristotle's framework into modernity, until its radical overthrow by the evolutionary revolution.

Solinas has written a concise, penetrating study of the philosophical underpinnings of natural history in Europe from Aristotle through Darwin. And he offers a perceptive analysis of how it was that history came to be fundamental to our understanding of the living world. (Greg Priest, ISIS, Vol. 108 (04), December, 2017)

It offers a bird's eye view of this long period, focusing on three philosophical pillars sustaining Aristotle's conception of natural world: fixism, essentialism, and teleology. this book presents a didactic union between historic and philosophic approaches that will be of interest to biologists, historians, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and general public. the book makes a substantialcontribution to connecting history, philosophy, and the psychology of evolutionary thinking. (Marco A. C. Varella, Human Ethology Bulletin, Vol. 31 (2), 2016)

The translation is excellent and keeps the deep meanings and the fine taste of the dense prose of the young Italian philosopher. the book is a very important contribution to the understanding of the roots of many modern biological discussions, offering a thoughtful reinterpretation of the movement, plenty of dense theoretical and philosophical consequences, from a figure of static nature seen as perfect and plenty of useful adaptations towards imperfections and inutilities of an ever-changing world. (Nelio Bizzo, Medicina & Storia, Vol. 15 (8), 2015)

Autorentext

Marco Solinas holds the National Scientific Qualification as Professor of Philosophy; he has studied and researched in Florence, Nottingham, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Paris. He has written articles in important international reviews, and is author of Psiche: Platone e Freud (2008), also published in German with the title Via Platonica zum Unbewussten (2012).

Inhalt
PART I: THE ARISTOTELIAN TELEOLOGICAL TRADITION The Original Framework 1. Consistency 2. To the Margins 3. Fixed in Time 4. Tools 5. Adaptations 6. Means of Defence 7. Unseeing Eyes For and Against Aristotle 1. Regrafting and Divergences 2. Reception and Institutionalization 3. Rebirth 4. Mathematization 5. Teleological Experimentalism 6. Chicks 7. Procreations Preordained 8. The Last Stronghold Indirect Supremacy 1. Persistence 2. Long Shadows 3. Subtext 4. conomia naturæ 5. Short Shadows PART II: THE EVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION Crisis and Hegemony 1. Under Pressure 2. Elephant Bones 3. The Challenger 4. The Last Great Heir Darwin's Breakthrough 1. Haunted 2. A Hundred Thousand Wedges 3. Barren Virgins 4. The Stamp of Inutility 5. Metamorphoses 6. Variations 7. Revolutions 8. Genealogies Dry Branches 1. Obsolescence 2. A Double-edged Sword 3. Techne 4. On the Cusp 5. Archaisms 6. Corals 7. Circularity 8. Revenge