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Notes
More precisely, these ‘-isms’ do appear sporadically in the book, but are cited as basic terms or ideas that are treated as constituent of organicism, rather than separate intellectual positions.
Morgan is included as a “first generation” organicist (TLO, p. 23) while Smuts is included as an important tangential figure capturing the Zeitgeist of organicism during the 1920’s and early 1930’s.
These are discussed at length by Pnina Abir-Am (e.g. 1987), who I will return to forthwith.
Even the critic Ernst Mayr gave a positive nod to organicism in his The Growth of Biological Thought (1982, pp. 66), though the genuineness of this nod has been disputed.
Ecology is also all too rarely examined by philosophers and historians of science, so I cannot really fault Peterson for this point.
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Brooks, D.S. Conceptual heterogeneity and the legacy of organicism: thoughts on the life organic. HPLS 41, 24 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-019-0263-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-019-0263-0