William C. Wimsatt: Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings: piecewise approximations to reality: Harvard University Press, 2007, 472 pp

Biol Philos (2011) 26:261268

DOI 10.1007/s10539-010-9199-1

BOOK REVIEW

William C. Wimsatt: Re-engineering philosophyfor limited beings: piecewise approximations to reality

Harvard University Press, 2007, 472 pp

Alex Rosenberg

Received: 18 January 2010 / Accepted: 18 January 2010 / Published online: 17 February 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Citing Archilochus as his source, Isaiah Berlin famously divided thinkers into hedgehogs and foxes: the former know one big thing and the latter know many small things. (To get a handle on the distinction, Plato was in Berlins view a hedgehog, while Aristotle was a fox.) Berlin did not seem to allow for the possibility of what we might call hedgefoxesthat rare thinker who knows several big things. Among philosophers of biology, and more generally among philosophers of science, William Wimsatt comes closest to lling that bill.

If Wimsatt had only introduced us to the notion of generative entrenchment, he would have had an enduring impact on the subject. But he did not stop there. He was perhaps the rst to make much of the rolls of robustness, heuristics, mechanisms, aggregativity, and complexity in biology and in our understanding of it. Some of this happened so long ago, way back among the rst generation of latter day philosophers of biology, that it has become part of the common patrimony of the subject. But all these big things were originally Bills ideas. In our subject no one is more of a hedgefox than Wimsatt.

In Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings Wimsatt brings together and substantially revises, expands, updates many of the essays in which he introduced these and other concepts now in daily use by philosophers of biology and the special sciences. The original versions of some of the chapters date back to papers from the early 1970s, most appeared as book chapters or in PSA proceedings volumes. To these now revised pieces, Wimsatt has added 5 new chapters, and material that organizes this sample of his oeuvre.

As the title makes clear, Wimsatts aim, here and throughout his career, has been to identify methodological tools appropriate for well adapted but error-prone cognitive agents like us. This must be central to any naturalistic account of how people thinkwhether scientists, engineers, historians or sociologists of science or

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