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“... In February 1943, Erwin Schrödinger delivered a series of three lectures in Dublin. A year later, they were published as a book, under the title What Is Life?, so ensuring that Schrödinger’s ideas reached an audience far larger than the four hundred – a number, he wryly notes, which ‘did not substantially dwindle’ over the three lectures – who originally heard him ...”

“... Each week I plot your equations dot for dot, xs against ys in all manner of algebraical relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. God’s truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?’ So says Lady Thomasina Coverly, the heroine of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, to her tutor Septimus Hodge ...”

“... From the late seventies to the mid-Nineties, biological orthodoxy insisted that the artificial production of animals with an identical complement of nuclear genes – clones, in the vernacular – could only be achieved by means of the transfer of nuclei from embryonic cells, and then only in non-mammalian species. There were excellent grounds for insisting on the impossibility of cloning from adult cells ...”

“... Ernst Mayr is one of the century’s pre-eminent Darwinian evolutionists, who, in the past two decades, has published a magisterial history of biology and many seminal philosophical essays. From the title of this new book, one might expect a tour of the current state of the life sciences, made accessible to non-specialists. His selection of topics, and his way of writing about them, suggest, however, that he is less interested in communicating substantive pieces of biology than in cultivating a particular way of seeing the subject – an attitude that would appear to derive from a pre-occupation with the ideas and controversies of the past ...”

“... Organisms that contribute to the reproductive success of their species by doing things that decrease the size of their own brood appear to be inevitable losers in the Darwinian struggle. Since the 19th century, biologists have regarded the evolutionary possibility of altruism as an important theoretical puzzle, and in past decades, it has become clear that it can’t be solved by vague appeals to the idea that co-operative behaviour is good for the flock, the herd or the species ...”

“... with presenting an external, perhaps critical, perspective. Nevertheless, in The Lives to Come, Philip Kitcher provides an outstanding illustration of what the philosophy of science can contribute to public understanding. Molecular genetics, the topic of Kitcher’s book, is surely the area of contemporary research ...”

“... of our personhood, and as important for the scientist as for anyone else. In The Ethical Project, Philip Kitcher attempts to show that there is adequate room for moral reasons in a causal world. As a philosopher and historian of science, Kitcher is wedded to Naturalism, the doctrine that philosophy should posit nothing ...”

“... to plumb. What depths? What could possibly be down there? Two new fish have risen to this bait. Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht’s Finding an Ending proceeds from their conviction that ‘Wagner’s libretto, ponderous and mannered though it may sometimes seem (and be), is charged with life and significance.’ They therefore propose ‘to probe ...”

“... palatable to the middle classes’. The novella’s effect was all the stronger for not being – Philip Kitcher misreads it – about ‘a closet homosexual’ who has ‘refused to acknowledge his sexual inclinations’. Unlike his fully self-aware creator, who, though never a practising homosexual (‘how can one sleep with men?’ he asked in a 1950 ...”

“... introducers of Finnegans Wake regularly imagine three sorts of reader or non-reader of the book. Philip Kitcher, in Joyce’s Kaleidoscope, lists ‘those too intimidated to try to read it, those who have tried and failed, and … those who write about it’. Roger Marsh, the producer of Jim Norton’s and Marcella Riordan’s haunting audio ...”

“... have suggested in reply that their argument has been misunderstood. In response to Ned Block and Philip Kitcher, for example, they say it was never their intention to claim that there cannot be a fact of the matter about which of two correlated traits ‘causes increased reproductive success’. Rather, their claim is that even if one trait causes ...”

“... the baillis who first appear in the administrative echelons of the French monarchy in the reign of Philip Augustus, the armed retainers of tenth and 11th-century Japan who attached themselves to regional lords rather than to the central government, the early English factory-owners still operating, so to say, as islands in a sea of small-scale artisan ...”