Liberté, Egalité, Modularité: In Memory of Werner Callebaut (1952–2014)

Abstract

Werner Callebaut, the scientific director of The KLI Institute, professor of philosophy, president of the ISHPSSB, editor-in-chief of Biological Theory, and dear colleague of innumerable members of the academic community, died in Vienna, Austria, on November 6, 2014, at the age of 62. We deplore the loss of a brilliant intellectual, a philosopher in the full meaning of the word, and a sparkling mobilizer of ideas. Werner was born in Mechelen, Belgium, on October 7, 1952. His early leaning towards learning and knowledge had already come to the fore as a schoolboy, when he would dig for Roman archaeological remains in his family’s backyard and had developed a liking for academic publications. He was notorious for getting on his teachers’ nerves by ‘‘knowing too much.’’ After visiting high school at the Koninklijk Atheneum Vilvoorde, he went on to study philosophy at Ghent University, where, in 1983, he received his PhD with a thesis entitled ‘‘Contribution to a General Theory of Rationality on Evolutionary Foundations—With an Application to the Organization of Scientific Knowledge.’’ He subsequently pursued an academic career that led him via the Universities of Brussels, Limburg, and Ghent to Hasselt University, where he became a professor of philosophy in 1995. Following two visiting fellow periods at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (The KLI Institute), he moved to Austria and, in 1999, became the scientific manager and eventually the scientific director of the KLI while continuing a part-time affiliation at Hasselt University and offering courses at the University of Vienna. Rarely have I met anyone who understood the workings of science better than Werner did. Equally profoundly, he understood and unflinchingly pointed his finger at the conceptual deficits in science. Werner’s ambitious philosophical quest derived from an early-formed conviction that the humanities-based approach to the philosophy of science needed to be overcome. While learned in classical philosophy, logic, ethics, and epistemology, it was his firm opinion that ‘‘real’’ philosophy of science needs to be concerned with, and based on, science. He became a role model for this attitude by extensively studying theoretical and empirical evolutionary biology, from which he derived his view that epistemological naturalism was the inevitable philosophical consequence of Darwinian theory. He fought strongly for this naturalized approach and, influenced by the work of Herbert Simon, extended it to the philosophy of economics, exploring the evolutionary study of human decision making. Furthermore, in his philosophical examinations of the theoretical content of biology, Werner used his method to address the multiple challenges from different fields of biology to the standard theory of evolution, devising a perspectivist take to handle incompatible models in scientific practice. To him, perspectives represented analyses at different levels of a system that, necessarily, can coexist at the same time but may lose explanatory rigor when they are combined. Together with Ron Giere (2006), Bill Wimsatt (2007), and Bas van Fraassen (2008), Werner advocated a philosophy of science according to which science cannot—as a matter of principle—transcend the human perspective. He integrated these views and applied his own version of scientific perspectivism to the conceptual issues associated with the modeling of complex, multilevel, and multiscale phenomena (Callebaut 2012). He suggested that this approach could be extended to G. B. Muller (&) Department of Theoretical Biology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: gerhard.mueller@univie.ac.at