Marjorie Grene

The Philosophy of Marjorie Grene

(Volume XXIX, 2002)

Sharp-witted, pungent, uncowed by modish orthodoxies, Marjorie Grene has been stirring the pot of philosophical controversy since the 1930s, with a fifteen-year interregnum largely devoted to farming in Ireland. Her piercing intelligence has been focused on many subject areas, especially epistemology, philosophy of biology, and history of philosophy, and yet the architectonic unity of her thinking makes a lasting impression. Her highly readable books -- on existentialism, Darwinism, Aristotle, and Descartes, among other topics -- have, by their illuminating insights and unpretentious expositions, transformed the worldviews, and even the lives, of thousands of thoughtful readers.

Table of Contents

Marjorie Grene: Intellectual Autobiography

Marjorie Grene

(Replies follow essays)

Phil Mullins: On Persons and Knowledge: Marjorie Grene and Michael Polanyi
Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley: The Contextual Human Person: Reflections on the Philosophy of Marjorie Grene
Helen E. Longino: Marjorie Grene's Philosophical Naturalism 
Richard Schacht: The Future of Human Nature: Marjorie Grene and the Idea of a Philosophical Anthropology
Peter Machamer and Lisa Osbeck: Perception, Conception, and the Limits of the Direct Theory 
Michael Luntley: Agency and Our Tacit Sense of Things
Anthony N. Perovich, Jr.: Persons, Minds, and "The Specter of Consciousness"
David M. Rosenthal: Persons, Minds, and Consciousness
Phillip R. Sloan: Reflections on the Species Problem: What Marjorie Grene Can Teach Us about a Perennial Issue
David L. Hull: A Portrait of Biology
David J. Depew: Philosophical Naturalism Without Naturalized Philosophy: Aristotelian and Darwinian Themes in Marjorie Grene's Philosophy of Biology
Niles Eldredge: Hierarchy: Theory and Praxis in Evolutionary Biology
Richard M. Burian: "Historical Realism," "Contextual Objectivity," and Changing Concepts of the Gene
Eugenie Gatens-Robinson: The Telic Character of Life: Marjorie Grene on the Oddness of Living Things 
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: A Note on Time and Biology
John Beatty: "The Historicity of Nature?" "Everything That Is Might Have Been Different?"
Richard Glauser: Descartes, Suarez, and the Theory of Distinctions 
John Cottingham: The Ultimate Incoherence?  Descartes and the Passions
Desmond M. Clarke: Explanation, Consciousness, and Cartesian Dualism
Kathleen Blamey: Pascal and Descartes
Helen Hattab: Handmaiden, Nursemaid, or Sister to Philosophy?  The Role of the History of Philosophy Today
Charles M. Sherover: On Grene's Presentation of Heidegger
David Detmer: Grene on Sartre

Bibliography of the Writings of Marjorie Grene