Abstract
In the course of a more than 70-year philosophical career and over 100 publications, Marjorie Grene (1910–2009) developed an original and coherent philosophical position that placed situated organic life at the center of the interpretation of reality and human affairs. Grene sometimes described this position as an “ecological epistemology” and summarized its central thrust in the expression “all knowledge is orientation.” However, Grene’s view incorporated a set of apparently or potentially opposed commitments such as naturalism and anti-reductionism, pluralism and realism, and both a critique and affirmation of Darwinian evolutionary theory. This raises questions about precisely where Grene stood on the issues over which she argued and the coherence of her “ecological epistemology” as a whole. Here I review Grene’s work in the main research areas for which she is best known – history of philosophy, philosophy of biology, epistemology, and philosophical anthropology – with an eye to how these tensions were ultimately resolved in her account.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For a full bibliography of Grene’s publications, see Auxier & Hahn, 2002.
- 2.
I use the term “organic life” to clarify that I mean “life” in the sense of “living things,” those things that become the objects of biological science, rather than “life” in the less specific sense of “everyday life” or “life experience.”
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
As exemplified by the three main sections of the Library of Living Philosophers volume devoted to her work: Auxier & Hahn, 2002.
- 6.
She also recounted that she found it hard to fathom Kant in this period: “My first ten years farming I found I had lost any ear for the sacred text [i.e. the Transcendental Analytic in the first Critique]. We had a great gray Percheron mare named Kitty; I couldn’t look at her and ask, was she an appearance or a thing in herself. Of course the question is equally absurd for a gnat or a mouse; but somehow a ton work horse seems more absolutely real, out of all relation, or relativity, to our mode of perception, than smaller critters. … [B]abies are not just phenomenal either (or not in the Kantian sense!) Whatever the reason, there it was: agricultural duties and critical philosophy didn’t mix. … [W]hen I could read Kant again, later on, it was perhaps the immersion in farm life that made my rereading … more radically realistic than it had been” (1995, 35).
- 7.
- 8.
Recounted in Callebaut, 1993, 236–7, 467.
- 9.
Grene (2002, 25) later described this work as a recounting of the history of philosophy leading to a philosophy like that of Polanyi.
- 10.
In a late autobiographical reflection, she summarized the entire thrust of her philosophy almost from the beginning as an anti-Cartesian one: “The refusal to accept the cogito, and all it implies, as the unique starting point of philosophy “has been … a persistent theme in much of my work … [W]hat really put me off philosophy when I [first] tried it [as an undergraduate] was the instructor’s insistence that I accept the cogito: that is, accept the notion that, setting aside all my everyday beliefs, I could have some special awareness of myself as something purely subjective, apart from my bodily existence. Again, in the fall of 1931 in Freiburg im Breisgau, in Werner Brock’s proseminar on Descartes, I had the same problem. I remember coming out after the seminar remarking: ‘Was wär’ ich ohne meine Umwelt?’” (2002, 4).
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
Notice the difference between “reference to the empirical” and “empiricism”.
- 14.
“I tried reading Dewey and even Mead [in the 1940s], attempting to be a good American I suppose, but I soon found them as dim and dated as I do nowadays” (1995, 54).
- 15.
Smocovitis, 2009.
- 16.
By “philosophers” here I mean those affiliated with philosophy departments. The philosophical influences on participating biologists such as Levins, Lewontin, Gould, and Mayr was somewhat different – in some ways wider in the first three cases (e.g. Marxism) and in some ways narrower in the last case insofar as Mayr tended to be critical of all prior philosophy and sought to treat Darwin and Darwinism as a unique and original philosophical position. Honenberger, 2018 discusses the views of Mayr as well as the philosophers David Hull and Michael Ruse in their relation to positivism. For more on Grene’s unusualness within the context of contemporary philosophy of biology, see Mèthot (this volume).
- 17.
Sloan, 2002 emphasizes the distinctiveness of the “continental” and “historical” influence that Grene brought to her work in philosophy of biology.
- 18.
- 19.
Polanyi had also favorably cited Driesch’s “harmonious equipotentiality,” and even sought to generalize its application to non-living complex systems, in Polanyi, 1958, Part IV. Other than the passage referenced above, I find no positive references (and quite a few negative or self-distancing references) to Driesch in KK, Approaches, or UN. For Bergson I find no positive references in Approaches or UN, but some sympathy expressed for Bergson’s emphasis on the metaphysical significance of “time” in Grene 1966a, Chap. 9.
- 20.
Grene’s criticism of Fischer has been cited as an early expression of the position now known as “statisticalism,” e.g. Walsh et al., 2017.
- 21.
Nonetheless, “if one is looking for clues on what it is to be a person – clues that take due account of our situatedness, both in nature and in culture (itself within nature) – Portmann and Straus, as well as Plessner, do provide some evidence” (2002 19). Hence, the essays on Portmann, Plessner and Straus, though not the essays on Goldstein and Butendjik, were reprinted in UN. The role of Approaches as a transitional text between Grene’s earliest papers in philosophy of biology and KK, on the one hand, and the more philosophy-of-science oriented papers of UN, calls for closer attention than I can give it here.
- 22.
- 23.
For discussion, see Brandon, 1984.
- 24.
For critical discussion, see Longino, 2002.
- 25.
It should be noted, however, that neither Plessner nor Grene would have allowed a description of this theory as “phenomenology.” Plessner compared but distinguished his approach from Husserlian phenomenology (e.g. Plessner, 1928/2019, 25–27, 107ff). And Grene frequently distanced herself from “phenomenology”: regarding Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, for instance, she insisted it was not actually phenomenology but only titled as such to appease Merleau-Ponty’s academic advisors (2005).
- 26.
Incidentally, this recognition and emphasis on “mediation” in integration with “immediacy” distinguishes Grene’s (and Plessner’s) views from some other efforts to deploy a Gibson-style “ecological realism” in epistemology, e.g. Dreyfus & Taylor, 2012.
- 27.
Historically speaking, Gibson’s view might be read as a further development of earlier psychological approaches that emphasized the importance of environmental factors for the concept of behavior, such as the traditions of Darwinian animal psychology and of ethology; and as a precursor of the more recent turn toward “extended” and “embedded” theories of cognition (for examples of the latter that make explicit use of Gibson, see Chemero, 2009 and Cisek, 2019).
Bibliography
Abbreviations for Works by Grene
KK = Knower and the Known (1966).
Approaches = Approaches to a Philosophical Biology (1968).
UN = The Understanding of Nature (1974).
PT = A Philosophical Testament (1995).
Works by Grene
Grene, M. (1938). (as Marjorie Glicksman). A Note on the Philosophy of Heidegger. Journal of Philosophy, 35(4), 93–104. Reprinted in 1976a.
Grene, M. (1947). On Some Distinctions Between Men and Brutes. Ethics, 57, 121–127. Reprinted in 1974a.
Grene, M. (1948). Dreadful Freedom: A Critique of Existentialism. University of Chicago Press.
Grene, M. (1957). Heidegger. Bowes & Bowes.
Grene, M. (1958). Two Evolutionary Theories. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 9, 110–127. Reprinted in 1974a.
Grene, M. (1959). The Faith of Darwinism. Encounter. November. Reprinted in 1966a.
Grene, M. (1961). Statistics and Selection. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 12, 25–42. Reprinted in 1966a, 1974a.
Grene, M. (1963). A Portrait of Aristotle. Thoemmes Press.
Grene, M. (1964). Biology and Teleology. Cambridge Review, 269–273. Reprinted in 1966a, 1974a.
Grene, M. (1966a). The Knower and the Known. Faber & Faber.
Grene, M. (1966b). Positionality in the Philosophy of Helmuth Plessner. Review of Metaphysics, 20, 250–277. Reprinted in 1968, 1974a.
Grene, M. (1968). Approaches to a Philosophical Biology. Basic Books, Inc.
Grene, M. (1969). Introduction. In M. Polanyi, Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi, ed. M. Grene. University of Chicago Press.
Grene, M. (1973). Sartre. New Viewpoints.
Grene, M. (1974a). The Understanding of Nature: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology. D. Reidel Publishing Co.
Grene, M. (1974b). Reducibility: Another Side Issue? In Grene 1974a.
Grene, M. (1974c). People and Other Animals. In Grene 1974a.
Grene, M. (1976a). Philosophy In and Out of Europe. University of California Press.
Grene, M. (1976b). Merleau-Ponty and the Renewal of Ontology. Review of Metaphysics, 29(4), 605–625.
Grene, M., & Mendelsohn, E. (Eds.). (1976c). Topics in the Philosophy of Biology. D. Reidel Publishing Co.
Grene, M. (1978a). The Paradoxes of Historicity. Review of Metaphysics, 32(1), 15–36.
Grene, M. (1978b). Sociobiology and the Human Mind. In Sociobiology and Human nature: An interdisciplinary Critique and Defense, eds. Michael S. Gregory, Anita Silvers, and Diane Sutch. Jossey-Bass, Inc.
Grene, M. (1983). N-Dogmas of Empiricism. In R. S. Cohen & M. W. Wartofsky (Eds.), Epistemology, Methodology, and the Social Sciences. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Vol. 71, pp. 89–106). D. Reidel Publishing Co.
Grene, M. (1985). Descartes. Harvester Press.
Grene, M. (1987). Hierarchies in Biology. American Scientist, 75(5), 504–510.
Grene, M. (1988). Hierarchies and Behavior. In G. Greenberg & E. Tobach (Eds.), Evolution of Social Behavior and Integrative Levels. The T.C. Schneirla Conference Series (Vol. 3, pp. 3–17). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Grene, M. (1990). Evolution, “Typology” and “Population Thinking”. American Philosophical Quarterly, 27(3), 237–244.
Grene, M., & Eldredge, N. (1992). Interactions: The Biological Context of Social Systems. Columbia University Press.
Grene, M. (1995). A Philosophical Testament. Open Court Press.
Grene, M. (2002). Intellectual Biography. In Auxier and Hahn 2002, 4–28.
Grene, M. (2005). Interview with The Believer magazine. (http://www.believermag.com/issues/200503/?read=interview_grene) Accessed February 6, 2011.
Works by Others
Auxier, R. E., & Hahn, L. E. (Eds.). (2002). The Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Marjorie Grene (Vol. XXIX). Open Court.
Brandon, R. (1984). Grene on Mechanism and Reductionism: More Than Just a Side Issue. PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 1984, 345–353.
Bock, W. J., & von Wahlert, G. (1963). Two Evolutionary Theories – A Discussion. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 14(54), 140–146.
Burian, R. (2009). Marjorie Grene: A Remembrance With Special Attention to Her Importance for ISHPSSB. Biological Theory, 4(2), 183–187.
Callebaut, W. (1993). The Naturalistic Turn: How Real Philosophy of Science is Done. University of Chicago Press.
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. MIT Press.
Cisek, P. (2019). Resyntheizing Behavior Through Phylogenetic Refinement. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 81, 2265–2287.
Dreyfus, H., & Taylor, C. (2012). Retrieving Realism. Harvard University Press.
Dupré, J. (1993). The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. Harvard University Press.
Eldredge, N. (1992). Marjorie Grene, ‘Two Evolutionary Theories’ and Modern Evolutionary Theory. Synthese, 92(1), 135–149.
Gibson, J. J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. George Allen & Umwin, Limited.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin.
Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper and Row.
Heidegger, M. (1929/1997). In R. Taft (Ed.), Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Churchill J. S. Trans.) (5th ed.). Indiana University Press.
Honenberger, P. (2015). Grene and Hull on Types and Typological Thinking in Biology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 50, 13–25.
Honenberger, P. (2018). Darwin Among the Philosophers: Hull and Ruse on Darwin, Herschel, and Whewell. HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of the Philosophy of Science, 8, 278–309.
Hull, D. (1965a). The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy – Two Thousand Years of Stasis: Part 1. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 15(60), 314–326.
Hull, D. (1965b). The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy – Two Thousand Years of Stasis: Part 2. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 16(61), 1–18.
Hull, D. (1969). What the Philosophy of Biology is Not. Journal of the History of Biology, 2, 241–268.
Longino, H. (2002). Marjorie Grene’s Philosophical Naturalism. In: Auxier & Hahn.
Mayr, E. (1959). Typology versus Population Thinking. In Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal (pp. 409–412). The Anthropological Society of Washington.
Mitchell, S. (2002). Integrative Pluralism. Biology & Philosophy, 17, 55–70.
Mullins, P. (2002). On Persons and Knowledge: Marjorie Grene and Michael Polanyi. In: Auxier & Hahn.
Nagel, T. (2012). Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press.
Nye, M. J. (2011). Michael Polanyi and his Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science. University of Chicago Press.
Odling-Smee, F. J., Laland, K. N., & Feldman, M. W. (2003). Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton University Press.
Plessner, H. (1928/2019). Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie. Walter de Gruyter & Co. [The Levels of Organic Being and of Man: Introduction to a Philosophical Anthropology. Trans. Millay Hyatt. Fordham University Press].
Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. University of Chicago Press.
Polanyi, M. (1966/2009). The Tacit Dimension. University of Chicago Press.
Polanyi, M. (1968). Life’s Irreducible Structure. Science, 160(3834), 1308–1312.
Ruse, M. (2007). Relecture de “Deux theories évolutionnistes” de Marjorie Grene. In J. Gayon & R. Burian (Eds.), Conceptions de la science: hier, aujourd’hui, demain: hommage à Marjorie Grene (pp. 368–386). Brussels.
Schindewolf, O. (1993). Basic Questions in Paleontology: Geologic Time, Organic Evolution, and Biological Systematics. Translated by J. Schaefer. University of Chicago Press.
Sloan, P. (2002). Reflections on the Species Problem: What Marjorie Grene Can Teach Us About a Perennial Issue. In: Auxier & Hahn.
Smocovitis, V. B. (2009). Marjorie, Matriarchy, and ‘Wretched Reflection’: A Personal Remembrance of Marjorie Grene. Biological Theory, 4(2), 191–195.
Street, S. (2011). Evolution and the Normativity of Epistemic Reasons. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 35, 213–248.
Van Valen, L. (1963). On Evolutionary Theories. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 14(54), 146–152.
Walsh, D., Ariew, A., & Matthen, M. (2017). Four Pillars of Statisticalism. Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology, 9(1).
Winsor, M. (2005). The Creation of the Essentialism Story: An Exercise in Meta-History. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 28(2), 149–174.
Acknowledgments
For comments on previous versions of this essay I am indebted to Chris Donohue, Phillip Sloan, Charles Wolfe, an anonymous reviewer for the press, and participants of the 2021 workshop on Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology organized by Charles Wolfe, Giuseppe Bianco, and Gertrudis Van der Vijver and hosted by Ghent University and Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès. All errors are my own.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Honenberger, P. (2023). All Knowledge Is Orientation: Marjorie Grene’s Ecological Epistemology. In: Bianco, G., Wolfe, C.T., Van de Vijver, G. (eds) Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20529-3_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20529-3_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-20528-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-20529-3
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)