Culture

Author: Friedel Weinert
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
(4/5)

In less than 300 pages, Professor Weinert pulls off the impressive feat of re-telling the story of three major chapters in the histories of astronomy, biology, and psychology, while also discussing the implications these 'revolutions' had and/or have for the philosophies of science, mind, and religion. Copernicus, Darwin, & Freud (CD&F) is one of those rare books that delivers more than it promises, going far beyond just the philosophy of science. 
Admittedly, CD&F is hard-going, but not because it’s poorly written. It’s just that Weinert is covering lots of ground. His discussion of the Copernican turn covers the obvious stuff about the displacement of the Earth from the centre of the universe, the less obvious (albeit expected) stuff about scientific realism/anti-realism (cf. Kuhn), and a surprising section on concepts of “laws of nature.” And then, as if to demonstrate that he’s not lost in ancient texts, he leaps to the twentieth century, bringing up the Anthropic Principle in recent cosmology. Likewise, in his discussion of the Darwinian revolution, Weinert predictably discusses the discrediting of nineteenth-century natural theology, and the Intelligent Design renaissance, but only after a sustained reflection of philosophy of mind, determinism, and materialism. And again for Freud: sure, there’s the boring old stuff about human nature and about what count as science (e.g., does Freudianism?), but the far more interesting bits concern the nature of social science, its methodology, and its concepts of causation, and the new kids on the psychological block, evolutionary psychology (and its cognates).
That’s a lot of topics. And, of course, Weinert isn’t an expert in all of them, so specialists are bound to find things to disagree with. However, I didn’t detect anything particularly annoying, which is kind of unusual of me. I have a penchant for finding glaring omissions and naïve pontifications in inter-disciplinary monographs, but CD&F didn’t annoy me very much at all. I hope to see this book used in history and philosophy of science classes soon.