Bill Wimsatt is one of the philosophy of biology's underappreciated performers. Many of his takes on biology have influenced a great many people, including me. Here is an interview with him on his latest book Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality (Harvard Press, 2007). According to the interview, he takes our cognitive limitations as a virtue. I hope to get a copy sometime, after which I'll review it. He says
“Complex systems are messy,” said Wimsatt, gesturing to the 400-page synthesis of his work. “And human beings make errors trying to understand them. That’s OK. The goal should not be to eliminate errors, but to recognize and metabolize them.”
That is because, Wimsatt explains, “humans and organisms are engineered to be error-tolerant but still reliable. We learn, and re-engineer to do better. Evolved systems are complex and chaotic, but nonetheless ordered and robust.”
Sounds very interesting.
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Yes, he is brilliant, but each one of his papers takes a week of hard work to read through! If he could only write it in a language that we mere mortals can understand...
I took a course from him before, and what really struck me was his engineering-systems-like approach to everything --- the emphasis on how things actually work rather than on how they could work in theory. It was quite a contrast with just about every other philosophy course I'd encountered.
Mildly amusing aside: His office is the messiest office I've ever seen. It fits in with the whole 'complex systems are messy' thing.
It's one of the reasons why Bill's work is so hard to summarise. He's over a lot of territory, and he doesn't seem to want to name -isms the way philosophers usually do.
Oh, and he is just the nicest person. I am so happy to have had the privilege to meet him (he spent a couple of months here in NC on some kind of research grant, probably with the Center for Humanities). And after a week of reading one of his papers, one has the distinct feeling that it was worth the effort. Every time.
I wonder if the book may be more readable than his papers, i.e., if he tried to make it so, or had some help from a good editor... If so, it is certainly worth reading.
I've met Bill a couple of times - he came to my talk at Berkeley on essentialism. Yes, he is a nice guy, and yes, from the available excerpt he has had either a good editor or time to write more fluidly than his papers.
Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings is, in my opinion, the best philosophical work of 2007. Wimsatt's humility in regards to philosophical problem-solving/finding/generating is really quite wonderful. Also, start with the Epilogue; he states that he meant to have it at the beginning, which I think would have been a good decision. It serves as a nice personalized introduction to his thought over 30 years.