Books

Paleoaesthetics and the Practice of Paleontology (2019)

The practice of paleontology has an aesthetic as well as an epistemic dimension. Paleontology has distinctively aesthetic aims, such as cultivating sense of place and developing a better aesthetic appreciation of fossils. Scientific cognitivists in environmental aesthetics argue that scientific knowledge deepens and enhances our appreciation of nature. Drawing on that tradition, this essay argues that knowledge of something’s history makes a difference to how we engage with it aesthetically. This means that investigation of the deep past can contribute to aesthetic aims. Conversely, the epistemic successes of paleontology and the earth sciences owe a great deal to aesthetic practices ranging from fossil preparation, to paleo art, to the production of geological field sketches.

Paleontology: A Philosophical Introduction  (2011) explores how much we can learn about evolution from the fossil record. It focuses on four big ideas of macroevolutionary theory:

Punctuated equilibria
species selection
The distinction between passive and driven evolutionary trends
Historical contingency

The last chapter also includes some discussion of the definition of "fossil."

Review by Alan Love in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Joyce Havstad discusses the book at the Extinct blog.

My first book, Making Prehistory: Historical Science and the Scientific Realism Debate (2007), argued that the scientific realism debate had been skewed by philosophers' neglect of issues in the historical sciences. (I know, the cover image has nothing to do with what the book is about.)

The book defends a non-realist view of historical science inspired by the work of Arthur Fine. I'm still a committed non-realist about the deep past. My main reservation about realism with respect to historical science is that it involves metaphysical claims that we don't really need to make in order to understand the science.

Review by Stathis Psillos in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 