Rupert Riedl

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.

[1][2] Riedl built upon the work of the Viennese school of thought initially typified by Konrad Lorenz, and continued in Vienna by Gerhard Vollmer, Franz Wuketits, and in Spain by Nicanor Ursura.

Riedl was skeptical of German idealism, and nourished by the tradition that produced the scientists and philosophers of science Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann, Erwin Schrödinger, Karl Popper, Hans Reichenbach and Sigmund Freud.

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.

Riedl had less direct influence on academic philosophy than his profound influence on the thinking of investigators in neuroscience such as Michael Gazzaniga, Antonio Damasio, and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, whose investigations combine synergistically with those of more physiologically-oriented scientists such as Eric Kandel and Rodolfo Llinás, as well as computational models that take advantage of the techniques of systems dynamics as practiced by the physiologists Denis Noble and P. Read Montague.