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The Philosophy of J. S. Haldane

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

William McDougall F.R.S.
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Extract

In a little book of 155 pages the late John Scot Haldane gave the world his final message. Much as his friends and admirers must regret his recent death, we may rejoice that in these few pages he has succeeded in presenting in clear and unmistakable fashion the philosophy which, throughout his long life of highly successful detailed research in physiology combined with equally effective and untiring application of his findings to practical problems, he slowly developed into the outlines of a comprehensive and rounded system.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 11 , Issue 44 , October 1936 , pp. 419 - 432
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1936

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References

page 419 Note 1 The Philosophy of a Biologist. Oxford Press, 1935.

page 419 Note 2 Haldane first struck the note of the philosophy here presented in brief form in an essay of 1883 (Essays in Philosophical Criticism). The other books in which he has developed his views are Mechanism, Life and Personality of 1913, his Silliman Lectures of 1915, his Gifford Lectures of 1928, his Donnellan Lectures of 1930 (The Philosophical Basis of Biology). References in this article to these earlier presentations are indicated by dates of publication.

page 420 Note 1 The adjective neutral is not altogether satisfactory here; but I can find none better; and, in adopting it, I am following the lead of Dr. William Stern.

page 423 Note 1 In a lecture before the Congress on the History of Science (1932) Haldane, after referring to the recent developments of micro-physics, said: “Atoms seem now as if they had properties similar to those which the vitalists attributed to living organisms; and even their externalactivities cannot be described in terms of the Galilean conception. It looks as if, while we shall retain the old physical and mathematical conceptions for practical purposes, more fundamental physical and mathematical conceptions were assuming similar characteristics to those of biology.” And in 1931 he wrote: “It might be … that if we knew enough we should have to regard the behaviour of plants, or of individual cells in our bodies, or even the behaviour of atoms or molecules, as conscious behaviour.”

page 423 Note 2 Haldane seems to overlook the fact that every machine exhibits wholeness in the same sense. Each part can be understood and interpreted only in terms of its relations to other parts and to the function of the whole machine; and the working of each part is dependent on that of all the other parts in harmonious co-operation.

page 424 Note 1 For example: “Human life ceases almost at once if the oxygen supply to the central nervous system is cut off, or if the latter is reached by some very poisonous substance. Facts such as these, which may be multiplied indefinitely, make vitalism an altogether inconsistent hypothesis” (p. 36). And: “The mistake of the vitalists and of the essentially similar ‘organicist’ or ‘organismal’ biologists, was to separate a living organism from its environment. The maintained co-ordination is present, just as much in the relations between organism and environment as in the relations between the parts of an organism itself. We cannot separate in space the phenomena of life from those of its environment.”

page 425 Note 1 “The existence of life is the most fundamental axiom of biology” (1931, p. 31.)