David Hull (philosopher)

For other uses, see David Hull (philosopher) (disambiguation).

David Lee Hull (15 June 1935 – 11 August 2010) was a philosopher with a particular interest in the philosophy of biology. In addition to his academic prominence, he was well known as a gay man who fought for the rights of other gay and lesbian philosophers.

Hull was one of the first graduates of the History and Philosophy of Science department at Indiana University. After earning his PhD from IU he taught at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee for 20 years before moving to Northwestern, where he taught for another 20 years. Hull was a former president of the Philosophy of Science Association and the Society for Systematic Biology. He was particularly well known for his argument that species are not sets or collections but rather spatially and temporally extended individuals (also called the individuality thesis or "species-as-individuals" thesis).

Hull also proposed an elaborate discussion of science as an evolutionary process in his 1988 book, which also offered a historical account of the "taxonomy wars" of the 1960s and 1970s between three competing schools of taxonomy: phenetics, evolutionary systematics, and cladistics. In Hull's view, science evolves like organisms and populations do, with a demic population structure, subject to selection for ideas based on "conceptual inclusive credit." Either novelty or citation of work gives credit, and the professional careers of scientists share in credit by using successful research. This is a "hidden hand" account of scientific progress.

He was Dressler Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Northwestern University.

Bibliography

• Hull, D. L. (1973) Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin's Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; reprinted by the University of Chicago Press, 1983, ISBN 9780226360461.
• Hull, D. L. (1974) Philosophy of Biological Science. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, ISBN 9780136636090; translated into Portuguese (1975), Japanese (1994).
• Hull, D. L. (1988) Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ISBN 9780226360515.
• Hull, D. L. (1989) The Metaphysics of Evolution. Stony Brook NY: State University of New York Press, ISBN 9780791402122.
• Hull, D. L. (1992) "Review of The Scientific Attitude" Current Comments 15 (September 28): 149–154.
• Hull, D. L. (1999) "Evolutionists red in tooth and claw" Nature, 398 (April): 385.
• Hull, D. L. (2000) "Activism, scientists and sociobiology" Nature 407 (6805): 673–674
• Hull, D. L. (2001) "Replicators and interactors" In his Science and Selection. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 13–32.
• Hull, D. L. (2002a) "A career in the glare of public acclaim" Bioscience 52 (September): 837–841.
• Hull, D. L. (2002b) "Explanatory styles in science" American Scientist, September.
• Hull, D. L., R. Langman and S. Glenn (2001) "A general account of selection: biology, immunology and behavior" Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (3): 511–528.
• Hull, D. L. and M. Ruse, eds., (1998) The Philosophy of Biology Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780198752127.

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

External links

• David Hull Publications
• David Hull's Natural Philosophy of Science – by Paul E. Griffiths
• The Evolution of a Proof: Review of Darwin and His Critics – by Peter Medawar