William C Wimsatt

Biography

Wimsatt, as an undergraduate, began studying engineering physics at Cornell University. After working for a year working as a designer in industry, he turned to philosophy receiving a BA degree magna cum laude in 1965. Wimsatt then went to the University of Pittsburgh on Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and Mellon Fellowships. to study philosophy of science and received his PhD in 1971. His thesis consisted of a philosophical analysis of biological function. He published three papers from his dissertation: "Teleology and the Logical Structure of Function Statements", "Complexity and Organization", and "Reductionism, levels of organization, and the mind-body problem". From July 1969 to December 1970, he was a postdoctoral fellow in population biology with Richard Lewontin at the University of Chicago, and was subsequently hired as an assistant professor of Philosophy in 1971 and promoted to full professor in 1981.

In 2007, he was named the Peter H. Ritzma Professor in Philosophy and Evolutionary Biology. He has been a visiting Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University, visiting Hurst Professor and a Clark-Way Harrison Distinguished Visitor at Washington University in St. Louis, a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy, a senior fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Vienna, Austria, Winton University Professot at the University of Minnesota, and a fellow at the Franke Humanities Institute in Chicago. He is on the scientific advisory board of the Land Institute.

Influences

Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins, Herbert A. Simon, Stuart Kauffman, and Donald T. Campbell are all important influences on Wimsatt's work. Some of the most important commentators on Wimsatt's writings are his students, many of whom are now working as philosophers of science and scientists, e.g. Marshall Abrams, Douglas Allchin, Irene Appelbaum, William Bechtel, Stuart Glennan, James R. Griesemer, Jeffry Ramsey, Sahotra Sarkar, Jeffrey Schank, and Marty Sereno.

Personal

Wimsatt is the son of the late William A. Wimsatt who was a Cornell University professor specializing in bats. He was married to Barbara Horberg on June 13, 1971. He has one son, William Upski Wimsatt, known as an author and political activist.

Philosophy

Wimsatt's philosophical position starts with two themes: we are limited beings and the world we try to understand is complex. The problem then is how to build a philosophical world view based on these two themes. For Wimsatt, robustness (e.g., believing that a particular apple exists because we can see it, feel it, smell it, taste it, and hear it crunch when we eat it) is fundamental for accessing what exists in the world. The more we can detect things in multiple ways, the more we are inclined to believe they exist. Closely connected to robustness are the heuristics, which we use to think about the world and are foundational to his epistemology. They are rules of thumb, which can be wrong or biased but tend to work when applied to what is robust in the world. For Wimsatt, questions of realism (i.e., what exists) are not separable from questions of epistemology (i.e., what we can know) and the discovery of what exists. This may appear circular, but it is by evolution that we have evolved multiple ways of detecting things in the world.

Awards

Wimsatt was awarded the 2013 David Hull award for outstanding contributions to Philosophy of Biology and support of students in the profession by the International Society for History Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology.

Selected publications