Rupert Riedl

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Rupert Riedl (February 22, 1925 - September 18, 2005) was an Austrian zoologist who made contributions in the fields of:

Marine biology
Morphology
Theory of evolution (a systems approach)
Evolutionary Epistemology
Environment and society

Founder President of the Club of Vienna ; Wiener-Rupert-Riedl-Preis

Rupert Riedl was one of those examples of a scientist with such broad interests and diversity of publications that it would be very difficult for a single critic to give a balanced summary of his contribution to our intellectual heritage. The following comments therefore center only upon his influence in that area of philosophy pertaining to epistemology, and more particularly epistemology grounded in evolutionary theory where indeed his impact was great, although he is not nearly as well known in the English speaking circles as in German or even Spanish speaking ones.

One of the critical dividing lines in philosophy today separates those who attempt to naturalize philosophy, and those, particularly those of continental schools of thought, that consider this to be a distraction. For example friends of the hermeneutic approach, and others derived from this tradition such as Jurgen Habermas, pertain to the second category.

Riedl is very much in the forefront of the first group and deservingly so due to the excellence of his 1984 work,” Biology of Knowledge: The evolutionary basis of reason”. In this work cognitive abilities are examined as a consequence of developments concomitant with the increasing complexity of biological diversification over the immense periods of time pertaining to the scale of evolution, and few scholars are as qualified as Rupert Riedl to trace this history.

Riedl’s was not a solitary effort. He very much builds upon the work of the Viennese school of thought initially typified by Konrad Lorenz, and continued today by Erhard Vollmer, Franz Wuketits, and in Spain by Nicanor Ursura. This Viennese school of thought was always very skeptical of German idealism, and was nourished by the very solid tradition that produced such outstanding scientists as Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Edwin Schrödinger, not to mention the philosophers Karl Popper and Hans Reichenbach and, in the area of psychology, Freud.

In spite of being very well grounded in Kantian epistemology, Konrad Lorenz believed that the Kantian framework of cognitive concepts such as three dimensional space and time were not fixed, but were built up over the philogenetic history giving rise to the human brain. As such they are potentially subject to further developments and Lorenz’s position, expanded by Rupert Riedl, makes it easier to assimilate the non common sense interpretations implicit in such physical scientific areas as quantum field theory and the speculations of string theory.

Of equal importance is a more balanced evaluation of the role of left hemisphere brain functions as coordinated (only with certain difficulty) with right hemisphere brain functions than has normally been the case in philosophy. Riedl was a pioneer in drawing clearer distinctions between deductive and inductive (non conscious) cognitive processes and how the interrelation between them can go astray. His analysis of what he called “the pitfalls of reason” deserves special attention. Again the influence of Konrad Lorenz is evident since Lorenz, like Riedl, was very concerned with tendencies within the workings of our cognitive processes that can put into danger the future of civilization.

It is significant that much of the importance of Rupert Riedl has less to do with his direct influence on academic philosophy than having contributed to the assimilation of an evolutionary point of view with profound influence on the thinking of investigators in the very dynamic area of neuroscience. Examples that come to mind include Michael Gazzaniga, Antonio Damasio, and V. Ramachandran. The investigations of these scientists combine synergistically with the investigations of more physiologically oriented investigators such as Eric Kandel and Rodolfo Llinás, as well as the growing ability to develop computational models that take advantage of the techniques of systems dynamics as practiced by Dennis Nobel and P. Read Montague in order to bundle these types of investigations into predictive packages of unaccustomed complexity. The above combination of initiatives has the potential to directly affect areas such as sociology, economics, ethics and political theory. For this reason Riedl will eventually be seen to have had a greater influence on philosophy than has generally been appreciated up to the present time.

[edit] Works

Riedl, R. (1978) Order in living organisms: A systems analysis of evolution. New York: Wiley.
Riedl, R. (1984) Biology of Knowledge: The Evolutionary Basis of Reason, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Wagner, G. P. and M. D. Laubichler (2004) Rupert Riedl and the re-synthesis of evolutionary and developmental biology: body plans and evolvability. J Exp Zool B: Mol Dev Evol. 302B:92-102. as PDF-File downlowdable under: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~gpwagner/pubs_2000.html