BIBLIOGRAPHY
For Aristotle's anthropomorphism, see his Physics, ed.
and
trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1930), Book II, Ch. 8. The locus
classicus of the critique of
anthropomorphism is Bacon's
doctrine of the Idols, in Novum Organum, Book I (Aphorisms
XXXVII-LXVIII), and in Novum Organum, in Works, eds.
R. L. Ellis, J. Spedding, and D. D.
Heath, 14 vols. (London,
1857-74). But Novum
Organum, Book II is notoriously
anthropomorphic with its
“thin” and “thick” essences
(cf.
I. B. Cohen, below). See also B. Spinoza, Ethics, IV, and
Treatise on the Correction of the Understanding
(London,
1910); and John Locke, An Essay Concerning
Human Un-
derstanding, 5th
ed. (London, 1706). References to animism,
the discussion of the
nineteenth-century anthropologists'
attitude towards it, and the
indication as to the Baconian
character of this attitude, are in E. E. Evans-Pritchard,
Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford, 1965); esp.
references
in the Index: Art, Animism, Fetishism, and Ghost
Theory.
The locus classicus of the
critique of anthropomorphism and
parochialism is found in Galileo's Dialogue on the Great
World Systems, trans.
Thomas Salusbury, ed. G. de San-
tillana
(Chicago, 1953), esp. the First Day. See, however,
the discussion of
the abstract and the concrete in the Second
Day and Santillana's
reference (p. 221) to The Assayer, from
which
the quotation about “geometrical characters” is
taken. Also compare Galileo on abstractness with J. C.
Maxwell on the
same topic (and on Faraday) in his Treatise
on
Electricity and Magnetism, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904;
New
York, 1954), paragraphs 529, 541, and 546ff. See also
Maxwell's
comparison of Faraday's fields to muscles in “On
Action at a
Distance,” Proceedings of the Royal Institu-
tion of Great Britain,
7, reprinted in Scientific Papers, ed.
W. O.
Niven (Cambridge, 1890; reprint New York, 1965), II,
311-23; the
analogy on 320-21. Cf. John Tyndall's Faraday
as a
Discoverer (London, 1870), and Helmholtz' Preface to
the
German edition of that book, translated in Nature, 2
(1870). Cf. J. Agassi, “Analogies as
Generalizations,” in
Philosophy of Science,
31, 4 (1964). For the Faraday-Tyndall
correspondence, see Tyndall, “On the Existence of a Mag-
netic Medium in Space,”
Philosophical Magazine,
9 (1855),
205-09; and M. Faraday,
“Magnetic Remarks,” ibid.,
253-55. For Newton's
discussion of the attack on his theory
as postulating occult qualities,
see I. B. Cohen,
Franklin
and Newton...
(Philadelphia, 1956), Ch. IV, and last sec-
tions of Ch. VI. Finally, for the role of language as a veil
between man and nature, thus making some measure of
parochialism
inevitable, see Bertrand Russell's essay, “Mys-
ticism and Logic,” in his
Mysticism and Logic (London,
1910); and Karl R. Popper,
“Why Are the Calculi of Logic
and Arithmetic Applicable to
Reality?” especially the last
section, and his
“Language and the Body-Mind Problem,”
both in his
Conjectures and Refutations (London and New
York, 1963). See in this connection Bacon's
Novum
Organum (Aphorisms LIX-LX) on the Idols of the Market
Place; and
Max Black,
Models and Metaphors
(Ithaca, 1962), the essays
on “Benjamin Lee
Whorf” and on “Models.”
JOSEPH AGASSI
[See also Abstraction;
Analogy;
Baconianism;Relativity;
Stoicism.]
