{"title":"Robert J Richards","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the works of Robert J. Richards, a celebrated scholar exploring the history of science and philosophy. Discover insightful analyses of Darwin, evolution, and the Romantic conception of life.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"meaning-of-evolution-book-robert-j-richards-9780226712024","title":"The Meaning of Evolution","description":"Did Darwin see evolution as progressive, directed toward producing ever more advanced forms of life? Most contemporary scholars say no. In this challenge to prevailing views, Robert J. Richards says yes-and argues that current perspectives on Darwin and his theory are both ideologically motivated and scientifically unsound. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e This provocative new reading of Darwin goes directly to the origins of evolutionary theory. Unlike most contemporary biologists or historians and philosophers of science, Richards holds that Darwin did concern himself with the idea of progress, or telos, as he constructed his theory. Richards maintains that Darwin drew on the traditional embryological meanings of the terms evolution and descent with modification. In the 1600s and 1700s, evolution referred to the embryological theory of preformation, the idea that the embryo exists as a miniature adult of its own species that simply grows, or evolves, during gestation. By the early 1800s, however, the idea of preformation had become the concept of evolutionary recapitulation, the idea that during its development an embryo passes through a series of stages, each the adult form of an ancestor species. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Richards demonstrates that, for Darwin, embryological recapitulation provided a graphic model of how species evolve. If an embryo could be seen as successively taking the structures and forms of its ancestral species, then one could see the evolution of life itself as a succession of species, each transformed from its ancestor. Richards works with the \u003ci\u003eOrigin\u003c\/i\u003e and other published and archival material to show that these embryological models were much on Darwin's mind as he considered the evidence for descent with modification. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Why do so many modern researchers find these embryological roots of Darwin's theory so problematic? Richards argues that the current tendency to see evolution as a process that is not progressive and not teleological imposes perspectives on Darwin that incorrectly deny the clearly progressive heart of his embryological models and his evolutionary theory.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49570069905681,"sku":"GOR004443243","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226712028.jpg?v=1750812697"},{"product_id":"kuhn-s-structure-of-scientific-revolutions-at-fifty-book-robert-j-richards-9780226317205","title":"Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions' at Fifty","description":"Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a watershed event when it was published in 1962, upending the previous understanding of science as a slow, logical accumulation of facts and introducing, with the concept of the “paradigm shift,” social and psychological considerations into the heart of the scientific process. More than fifty years after its publication, Kuhn’s work continues to influence thinkers in a wide range of fields, including scientists, historians, and sociologists. It is clear that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions itself marks no less of a paradigm shift than those it describes.               In Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” at Fifty, leading social scientists and philosophers explore the origins of Kuhn’s masterwork and its legacy fifty years on. These essays exhume important historical context for Kuhn’s work, critically analyzing its foundations in twentieth-century science, politics, and Kuhn’s own intellectual biography: his experiences as a physics graduate student, his close relationship with psychologists before and after the publication of Structure, and the Cold War framework of terms such as “world view” and “paradigm.”","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49580216910097,"sku":"GOR013732468","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50236082422033,"sku":"CIN022631720XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022631720X.jpg?v=1751005259"},{"product_id":"meaning-of-evolution-book-robert-j-richards-9780226712031","title":"The Meaning of Evolution","description":"Did Darwin see evolution as progressive, directed toward producing ever more advanced forms of life? Most contemporary scholars say no. In this challenge to prevailing views, Robert J. Richards says yes-and argues that current perspectives on Darwin and his theory are both ideologically motivated and scientifically unsound. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e This provocative new reading of Darwin goes directly to the origins of evolutionary theory. Unlike most contemporary biologists or historians and philosophers of science, Richards holds that Darwin did concern himself with the idea of progress, or telos, as he constructed his theory. Richards maintains that Darwin drew on the traditional embryological meanings of the terms evolution and descent with modification. In the 1600s and 1700s, evolution referred to the embryological theory of preformation, the idea that the embryo exists as a miniature adult of its own species that simply grows, or evolves, during gestation. By the early 1800s, however, the idea of preformation had become the concept of evolutionary recapitulation, the idea that during its development an embryo passes through a series of stages, each the adult form of an ancestor species. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Richards demonstrates that, for Darwin, embryological recapitulation provided a graphic model of how species evolve. If an embryo could be seen as successively taking the structures and forms of its ancestral species, then one could see the evolution of life itself as a succession of species, each transformed from its ancestor. Richards works with the \u003ci\u003eOrigin\u003c\/i\u003e and other published and archival material to show that these embryological models were much on Darwin's mind as he considered the evidence for descent with modification. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Why do so many modern researchers find these embryological roots of Darwin's theory so problematic? Richards argues that the current tendency to see evolution as a process that is not progressive and not teleological imposes perspectives on Darwin that incorrectly deny the clearly progressive heart of his embryological models and his evolutionary theory.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49652582940945,"sku":"GOR007910166","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50325425684753,"sku":"CIN0226712036VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52819553648913,"sku":"CIN0226712036G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226712036.jpg?v=1754489509"},{"product_id":"darwin-and-the-emergence-of-evolutionary-theories-of-mind-and-behavior-book-robert-j-richards-9780226712000","title":"Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior","description":"With insight and wit, Robert J. Richards focuses on the development of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior from their first distinct appearance in the eighteenth century to their controversial state today. Particularly important in the nineteenth century were Charles Darwin's ideas about instinct, reason, and morality, which Richards considers against the background of Darwin's personality, training, scientific and cultural concerns, and intellectual community. Many critics have argued that the Darwinian revolution stripped nature of moral purpose and ethically neutered the human animal. Richards contends, however, that Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and their disciples attempted to reanimate moral life, believing that the evolutionary process gave heart to unselfish, altruistic behavior.   \"Richards's book is now the obvious introduction to the history of ideas about mind and behavior in the nineteenth century.\"—Mark Ridley, Times Literary Supplement   \"Not since the publication of Michael Ghiselin's The Triumph of the Darwinian Method has there been such an ambitious, challenging, and methodologically self-conscious interpretation of the rise and development and evolutionary theories and Darwin's role therein.\"—John C. Greene, Science   \"His book . . . triumphantly achieves the goal of all great scholarship: it not only informs us, but shows us why becoming thus informed is essential to understanding our own issues and projects.\"—Daniel C. Dennett, Philosophy of Science","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49669224825105,"sku":"GOR009738204","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346902552849,"sku":"CIN0226712001G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226712001.jpg?v=1751324265"},{"product_id":"romantic-conception-of-life-book-robert-j-richards-9780226712116","title":"The Romantic Conception of Life","description":"\"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.\" Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science.  Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory.  Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49729464533265,"sku":"NGR9780226712116","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50592581910801,"sku":"GOR006755025","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50645371879697,"sku":"GOR014022091","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53460393623825,"sku":"CIN0226712117G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226712117.jpg?v=1751133291"},{"product_id":"tragic-sense-of-life-book-robert-j-richards-9780226712147","title":"The Tragic Sense of Life","description":"Prior to World War I, more people learned of evolutionary theory from the voluminous writings of Charles Darwin's foremost champion in Germany, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), than from any other source, including the writings of Darwin himself. 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In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people who held it and the development of 19th-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved - from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling - Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, and aesthetic and moral considerations - all tempered by personal relationships - altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the centre of the main currents of 19th-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature underlying Darwin's evolutionary theory. 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Richards focuses on the development of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior from their first distinct appearance in the eighteenth century to their controversial state today. Particularly important in the nineteenth century were Charles Darwin's ideas about instinct, reason, and morality, which Richards considers against the background of Darwin's personality, training, scientific and cultural concerns, and intellectual community. Many critics have argued that the Darwinian revolution stripped nature of moral purpose and ethically neutered the human animal. 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Dennett, \u003ci\u003ePhilosophy of Science \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51322848903441,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51322852376849,"sku":"CIN0226711994VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226711994.jpg?v=1750843684"},{"product_id":"tragic-sense-of-life-book-robert-j-richards-9780226712161","title":"The Tragic Sense of Life","description":"Prior to World War I, more people learned of evolutionary theory from the voluminous writings of Charles Darwin's foremost champion in Germany, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), than from any other source, including the writings of Darwin himself. 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