Rupert Riedl

Who was Rupert Riedl?

Rupert Riedl was an Austrian zoologist who made contributions in the fields of:

⁕Marine biology

⁕Morphology

⁕Theory of evolution

⁕Evolutionary Epistemology

⁕Environment and society

He was also the Founder President of the Club of Vienna.

Rupert Riedl was a scientist with broad interests, whose influence in epistemology grounded in evolutionary theory was notable, although less in English-speaking circles than in German or even Spanish speaking ones. His 1984 work, Biology of Knowledge: The evolutionary basis of reason examined cognitive abilities and the increasing complexity of biological diversification over the immense periods of evolutionary time.

Riedl built upon the work of the Viennese school of thought initially typified by Konrad Lorenz, and continued today by Gerhard Vollmer, Franz Wuketits, and in Spain by Nicanor Ursura, skeptical of German idealism, and nourished by the tradition that produced Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann, Erwin Schrödinger, Karl Popper, Hans Reichenbach and Sigmund Freud.

Konrad Lorenz believed that the Kantian framework of cognitive concepts such as three dimensional space and time were not fixed but built up over phylogenetic history, potentially subject to further developments. Lorenz’s position, as expanded by Rupert Riedl, attempts to make it easier to assimilate non common sense physical scientific areas such as quantum field theory and string theory.