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  1. The Deliberation Model of Organismic Agency.Hugh Desmond - manuscript
    Organismic agency is often understood as the capacity to produce goal-directed behavior. This paper proposes a new way of modelling agency, namely as a naturalized deliberation. Deliberative action is not directed towards a particular goal, but involves a process of weighing multiple goals and a choice for a particular combination of these. The underlying causal model is symmetry breaking, where the organism breaks symmetries present in the selective environment. Deliberation is illustrated though the phenomena of mate choice and bacterial chemotaxis.
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  2. Field equations, quantum mechanics and geotropism.Han J. F. Geurdes - manuscript
    The biochemistry of geotropism in plants and gravisensing in e.g. cyanobacteria or paramacia is still not well understood today [1]. Perhaps there are more ways than one for organisms to sense gravity. The two best known relatively old explanations for gravity sensing are sensing through the redistribution of cellular starch statoliths and sensing through redistribution of auxin. The starch containing statoliths in a gravity field produce pressure on the endoplasmic reticulum of the cell. This enables the cell to sense direction. (...)
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  3. Cats are not necessarily animals.Margarida Hermida - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (4):1387-1406.
    Some plausibly necessary a posteriori theoretical claims include ‘water is H 2 O’, ‘gold is the element with atomic number 79’, and ‘cats are animals’. In this paper I challenge the necessity of the third claim. I argue that there are possible worlds in which cats exist, but are not animals. Under any of the species concepts currently accepted in biology, organisms do not belong essentially to their species. This is equally true of their ancestors. In phylogenetic systematics, monophyletic clades (...)
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  4. Life and Mind: The Common Tetradic Structure of Organism and Consciousness – a Phenomenological Approach.Christoph Hueck - 2024 - Dialectical Systems: A Forum in Biology, Ecology, and Cognitive Science.
    The question of the holistic structure of an organism is a recurring theme in the philosophy of biology and has been increasingly discussed again in recent years. Organisms have recently been described as complex systems that autonomously create, maintain and reproduce themselves while constantly interacting with their environment. Key focal points include their autopoiesis, autonomy, agency and teleological structure. This perspective marks a significant advancement from the 20th-century viewpoint, which predominantly saw organisms as genetically programmed, randomly generated and blindly selected (...)
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  5. Biological Individuals.Robert A. Wilson & Matthew J. Barker - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The impressive variation amongst biological individuals generates many complexities in addressing the simple-sounding question what is a biological individual? A distinction between evolutionary and physiological individuals is useful in thinking about biological individuals, as is attention to the kinds of groups, such as superorganisms and species, that have sometimes been thought of as biological individuals. More fully understanding the conceptual space that biological individuals occupy also involves considering a range of other concepts, such as life, reproduction, and agency. There has (...)
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  6. Organization needs organization: Understanding integrated control in living organisms.Leonardo Bich & William Bechtel - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 93:96-106.
    Organization figures centrally in the understanding of biological systems advanced by both new mechanists and proponents of the autonomy framework. The new mechanists focus on how components of mechanisms are organized to produce a phenomenon and emphasize productive continuity between these components. The autonomy framework focuses on how the components of a biological system are organized in such a way that they contribute to the maintenance of the organisms that produce them. In this paper we analyze and compare these two (...)
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  7. On the naturalisation of teleology: self-organisation, autopoiesis and teleodynamics.Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas - 2022 - Adaptive Behavior 30 (2):103-117.
    In recent decades, several theories have claimed to explain the teleological causality of organisms as a function of self-organising and self-producing processes. The most widely cited theories of this sort are variations of autopoiesis, originally introduced by Maturana and Varela. More recent modifications of autopoietic theory have focused on system organisation, closure of constraints and autonomy to account for organism teleology. This article argues that the treatment of teleology in autopoiesis and other organisation theories is inconclusive for three reasons: First, (...)
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  8. First principles in the life sciences: the free-energy principle, organicism, and mechanism.Matteo Colombo & Cory Wright - 2021 - Synthese 198 (14):3463–3488.
    The free-energy principle states that all systems that minimize their free energy resist a tendency to physical disintegration. Originally proposed to account for perception, learning, and action, the free-energy principle has been applied to the evolution, development, morphology, anatomy and function of the brain, and has been called a postulate, an unfalsifiable principle, a natural law, and an imperative. While it might afford a theoretical foundation for understanding the relationship between environment, life, and mind, its epistemic status is unclear. Also (...)
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  9. El holobionte/hologenoma como nivel de seleccion.Javier Suárez - 2021 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 36 (1):81-112.
    The units or levels of selection debate concerns the question of what kind of biological systems are stable enough that part of their evolution is a result of the process of natural selection acting at their level. Traditionally, the debate has concerned at least two different, though related, questions: the question of the level at which interaction with the environment occurs, and the question of the level at which reproduction occurs. In recent years, biologists and philosophers have discussed a new (...)
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  10. The Ontology of Organismic Agency: A Kantian Approach.Hugh Desmond & Philippe Huneman - 2020 - In Andrea Altobrando & Pierfrancesco Biasetti (eds.), Natural Born Monads: On the Metaphysics of Organisms and Human Individuals. De Gruyter. pp. 33-64.
    Biologists explain organisms’ behavior not only as having been programmed by genes and shaped by natural selection, but also as the result of an organism’s agency: the capacity to react to environmental changes in goal-driven ways. The use of such ‘agential explanations’ reopens old questions about how justified it is to ascribe agency to entities like bacteria or plants that obviously lack rationality and even a nervous system. Is organismic agency genuinely ‘real’ or is it just a useful fiction? In (...)
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  11. (1 other version)From Life-Like to Mind-Like Explanation: Natural Agency and the Cognitive Sciences.Alex Djedovic - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Toronto, St. George Campus
    This dissertation argues that cognition is a kind of natural agency. Natural agency is the capacity that certain systems have to act in accordance with their own norms. Natural agents are systems that bias their repertoires in response to affordances in the pursuit of their goals. -/- Cognition is a special mode of this general phenomenon. Cognitive systems are agents that have the additional capacity to actively take their worlds to be certain ways, regardless of whether the world is really (...)
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  12. The Unfolding of a New Vision of Life, Cosmos and Evolution.Agustin Ostachuk - 2020 - Ludus Vitalis 28 (53):81-83.
    Has science already answered the fundamental questions about the concepts of Life, Cosmos and Evolution? Has science not relegated these fundamental questions by following up on more immediate, “useful” and practical endeavors that ultimately ensure that the wheel of capitalism keeps spinning in its frantic search for material and economic progress? There is something terribly wrong with the current theory of evolution, understood as the Darwinian theory with its successive versions and extensions. The concept of natural selection, the cornerstone of (...)
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  13. A Theory of Evolution as a Process of Unfolding.Agustin Ostachuk - 2020 - Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 16 (1):347-379.
    In this work I propose a theory of evolution as a process of unfolding. This theory is based on four logically concatenated principles. The principle of evolutionary order establishes that the more complex cannot be generated from the simpler. The principle of origin establishes that there must be a maximum complexity that originates the others by logical deduction. Finally, the principle of unfolding and the principle of actualization guarantee the development of the evolutionary process from the simplest to the most (...)
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  14. The stability of traits conception of the hologenome: An evolutionary account of holobiont individuality.Javier Suárez - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (1):1-27.
    Bourrat and Griffiths :33, 2018) have recently argued that most of the evidence presented by holobiont defenders to support the thesis that holobionts are evolutionary individuals is not to the point and is not even adequate to discriminate multispecies evolutionary individuals from other multispecies assemblages that would not be considered evolutionary individuals by most holobiont defenders. They further argue that an adequate criterion to distinguish the two categories is fitness alignment, presenting the notion of fitness boundedness as a criterion that (...)
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  15. The Organism and its Umwelt: a Counterpoint between the Theories of Uexküll, Goldstein and Canguilhem.Agustin Ostachuk - 2019 - In Francesca Michelini & Kristian Köchy (eds.), Jakob von Uexküll and Philosophy: Life, Environments, Anthropology. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 158-171.
    The topic of the relationship between the organism and its environment runs through the theories of Uexküll, Goldstein and Canguilhem with equal importance. In this work a counterpoint will be established between their theories, in the attempt to assess at which points the melodies are concordant and at which points they are discordant. As fundamental basis to his theory, Uexküll relies on the concept of conformity to a plan, which allows him to account for the congruity and perfect adjustment between (...)
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  16. The Quest for a Holistic and Historical-Developmental Theory of the Organism.Agustin Ostachuk - 2019 - Ludus Vitalis 27 (51):23-42.
    In this work the doctrine of organicism will be addressed, as explained and seen mainly by Bertalanffy. We will study how this doctrine represents and embodies the ambiguity of Kantian teleology as a regulative principle, and how this same problem leads to consider a real problem as a knowledge problem. It will be concluded that organicism, conceived in this way, does not represent a true holism, but what we will call a syn-holism, a synthesis or assembly, and that to obtain (...)
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  17. Memory and Learning in Plants.Baluska Frantisek, Gagliano Monica & Guenther Witzany (eds.) - 2018 - Cham: Springer.
    This book assembles recent research on memory and learning in plants. Organisms that share a capability to store information about experiences in the past have an actively generated background resource on which they can compare and evaluate coming experiences in order to react faster or even better. This is an essential tool for all adaptation purposes. Such memory/learning skills can be found from bacteria up to fungi, animals and plants, although until recently it had been mentioned only as capabilities of (...)
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  18. Grounding knowledge and normative valuation in agent-based action and scientific commitment.Catherine Kendig - 2018 - In Hauke Riesch, Nathan Emmerich & Steven Wainwright (eds.), Philosophies and Sociologies of Bioethics: Crossing the Divides. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. pp. 41-64.
    Philosophical investigation in synthetic biology has focused on the knowledge-seeking questions pursued, the kind of engineering techniques used, and on the ethical impact of the products produced. However, little work has been done to investigate the processes by which these epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical forms of inquiry arise in the course of synthetic biology research. An attempt at this work relying on a particular area of synthetic biology will be the aim of this chapter. I focus on the reengineering of (...)
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  19. Scott Lidgard and Lynn K. Nyhart, eds. Biological Individuality: Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives. [REVIEW]Catherine Kendig - 2018 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (2):475-480.
    Biologists, historians of biology, and philosophers of biology often ask what is it to be an individual, really. This book does not answer that question. Instead, it answers a much more interesting one: How do biologists individuate individuals? In answering that question, the authors explore why biologists individuate individuals, in what ways, and for what purposes. The cross-disciplinary, dialogical approach to answering metaphysical questions that is pursued in the volume may seem strange to metaphysicians who are not biologically focused, but (...)
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  20. The Evolution Concept: The Concept Evolution.Agustin Ostachuk - 2018 - Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 14 (3):354-378.
    This is an epistemologically-driven history of the concept of evolution. Starting from its inception, this work will follow the development of this pregnant concept. However, in contradistinction to previous attempts, the objective will not be the identification of the different meanings it adopted through history, but conversely, it will let the concept to be unfolded, to be explicated and to express its own inner potentialities. The underlying thesis of the present work is, therefore, that the path that leads to the (...)
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  21. Organisms as Persisters.Subrena E. Smith - 2017 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9 (14).
    This paper addresses the question of what organisms are and therefore what kinds of biological entities qualify as organisms. For some time now, the concept of organismality has been eclipsed by the notion of individuality. Biological individuals are those systems that are units of selection. I develop a conception of organismality that does not rely on evolutionary considerations, but instead draws on development and ecology. On this account, organismality and individuality can come apart. Organisms, in my view, are as Godfrey-Smith (...)
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  22. Stem Cell Lineages: Between Cell and Organism.Melinda Bonnie Fagan - 2017 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9 (6).
    Ontologies of living things are increasingly grounded on the concepts and practices of current life science. Biological development is a process, undergone by living things, which begins with a single cell and (in an important class of cases) ends with formation of a multicellular organism. The process of development is thus prima facie central for ideas about biological individuality and organismality. However, recent accounts of these concepts do not engage developmental biology. This paper aims to fill the gap, proposing the (...)
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  23. Evolution of Individuality: A Case Study in the Volvocine Green Algae.Erik R. Hanschen, Dinah R. Davison, Zachariah I. Grochau-Wright & Richard E. Michod - 2017 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9 (3).
    All disciplines must define their basic units and core processes. In evolutionary biology, the core process is natural selection and the basic unit of selection and adaptation is the individual. To operationalize the theory of natural selection we must count individuals, as they are the bearers of fitness. While canonical individuals have often been taken to be multicellular organisms, the hierarchy of life shows that new kinds of individuals have evolved. A variety of criteria have been used to define biological (...)
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  24. Philosophical Problems of Immunology (2nd edition).Bartlomiej Swiatczak - 2017 - In Thomas Schramme & Steven Edwards (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine. Springer. pp. 1-17.
    At the dawn of the computational era, immunology is at a crossroads: Its efforts to frame microbial-host interactions in combative, war-related terms no longer fit the larger picture of immune protection, and its focus on antimicrobial responses barely captures the diverse functions of the immune system, from tissue maintenance to cancer surveillance to development. As the classical view of immune processes becomes increasingly complex, the problem of self, individuality, mind-body interactions, and disease causation have stimulated extensive philosophical comment. Relating these (...)
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  25. “Man-Machines and Embodiment: From Cartesian Physiology to Claude Bernard’s ‘Living Machine’”.Charles T. Wolfe & Philippe Huneman - 2017 - In Justin E. H. Smith (ed.), Embodiment: A History. Oxford University Press.
    A common and enduring early modern intuition is that materialists reduce organisms in general and human beings in particular to automata. Wasn’t a famous book of the time entitled L’Homme-Machine? In fact, the machine is employed as an analogy, and there was a specifically materialist form of embodiment, in which the body is not reduced to an inanimate machine, but is conceived as an affective, flesh-and-blood entity. We discuss how mechanist and vitalist models of organism exist in a more complementary (...)
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  26. The Principle of Life: from Aristotelian Psyche to Drieschian Entelechy.Agustin Ostachuk - 2016 - Ludus Vitalis 24 (45):37-59.
    Is life a simple result of a conjunction of physico-chemical processes? Can be reduced to a mere juxtaposition of spatially determined events? What epistemology or world-view allows us to comprehend it? Aristotle built a novel philosophical system in which nature is a dynamical totality which is in constant movement. Life is a manifestation of it, and is formed and governed by the psyche. Psyche is the organizational principle of the different biological levels: nutritive, perceptive and intelective. Driesch's crucial experiment provided (...)
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  27. The ethics of eating as a human organism: A Bergsonian analysis of the misrecognition of life.Caleb Ward - 2016 - In Mary C. Rawlinson & Caleb Ward (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics. London: Routledge. pp. 48-58.
    Conventional ethics of how humans should eat often ignore that human life is itself a form of organic activity. Using Henri Bergson’s notions of intellect and intuition, this chapter brings a wider perspective of the human organism to the ethical question of how humans appropriate life for nutriment. The intellect’s tendency to instrumentalize living things as though they were inert seems to subtend the moral failures evident in practices such as industrial animal agriculture. Using the case study of Temple Grandin’s (...)
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  28. The Machine Conception of the Organism in Development and Evolution: A Critical Analysis.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 48:162-174.
    This article critically examines one of the most prevalent metaphors in modern biology, namely the machine conception of the organism (MCO). Although the fundamental differences between organisms and machines make the MCO an inadequate metaphor for conceptualizing living systems, many biologists and philosophers continue to draw upon the MCO or tacitly accept it as the standard model of the organism. This paper analyses the specific difficulties that arise when the MCO is invoked in the study of development and evolution. In (...)
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  29. The Return of the Organism as a Fundamental Explanatory Concept in Biology.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (5):347-359.
    Although it may seem like a truism to assert that biology is the science that studies organisms, during the second half of the twentieth century the organism category disappeared from biological theory. Over the past decade, however, biology has begun to witness the return of the organism as a fundamental explanatory concept. There are three major causes: (a) the realization that the Modern Synthesis does not provide a fully satisfactory understanding of evolution; (b) the growing awareness of the limits of (...)
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  30. The organism as ontological go-between. Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual history.Charles T. Wolfe - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 1:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shps.
    The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles – sometimes overt, sometimes masked – throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the ‘theorization’ of Life, (...)
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  31. Biological explanations, realism, ontology, and categories.Matthew J. Barker - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4):617-622.
    This is an extended review of John Dupré's _Processes of Life_, a collection of essays. It clarifies Dupré's concepts of reductionism and anti-reductionism, and critically examines his associated discussions of downward causation, and both the context sensitivity and multiple realization of categories. It reviews his naturalistic monism, and critically distinguishes between his realism about categories and constructivism about classification. Challenges to his process ontology are presented, as are arguments for his pluralism about scientific categories. None of his main conclusions are (...)
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  32. The mismeasure of machine: Synthetic biology and the trouble with engineering metaphors.Maarten Boudry & Massimo Pigliucci - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4):660-668.
    The scientific study of living organisms is permeated by machine and design metaphors. Genes are thought of as the ‘‘blueprint’’ of an organism, organisms are ‘‘reverse engineered’’ to discover their functionality, and living cells are compared to biochemical factories, complete with assembly lines, transport systems, messenger circuits, etc. Although the notion of design is indispensable to think about adaptations, and engineering analogies have considerable heuristic value (e.g., optimality assumptions), we argue they are limited in several important respects. In particular, the (...)
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  33. The Organic Whole: A Conception Worthy of Biological Life.Bhakti Madhava Puri - 2013 - The Harmonizer.
    All the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis (Neo-Darwinism) have been disproven. [1, 2] An article with the title, "Rocking the foundations of molecular genetics,” appearing in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences at the end of 2012 [3] would have not been possible a decade ago. Groundbreaking experimental evidence of epigenetic maternal inheritance over several generations was published in the same journal, throwing the whole foundation of 21st century molecular genetics into question. Neo-Darwinism attributed genetic change (...)
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  34. En Kropslig Kultur Historie - om omverdens relationen".Maria Brincker - 2012 - In E. O. Pedersen & A.-M. S. Christensen (eds.), Mennesket - En Introduktion Til Filosofisk Antropologi. Systime. pp. 197-216.
    This chapter deals with the way our psychology and actions a scaffolded by their environment but also the tensions that can appear between individual and environment, both at the level of biology and culture. The chapter is grounded in an analysis of the early 20th century theoretical biologist Jacob von Uexkull and his notion of "Umwelt" or "surround world". But also raises the question of whether organisms fit their environment as neatly as Uexkull and many later thinkers have proposed or (...)
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  35. Biological-mereological coincidence.Judith K. Crane - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 161 (2):309-325.
    This paper presents and defends an account of the coincidence of biological organisms with mereological sums of their material components. That is, an organism and the sum of its material components are distinct material objects existing in the same place at the same time. Instead of relying on historical or modal differences to show how such coincident entities are distinct, this paper argues that there is a class of physiological properties of biological organisms that their coincident mereological sums do not (...)
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  36. Evolution in the Double Stream of Time - An inner Morphology of Organic Thought (2nd edition).Christoph J. Hueck - 2012 - Stuttgart: Akanthos Academy.
    This book shows that in the naturalistic and Darwinian explanation of life and its evolution, a decisive factor is overlooked, namely the human, knowing mind. The questions about life and its evolution can be answered if consciousness is taken into account not as a spectator, but as an integral part of reality. In the first-person-perception of cognition, the forces and laws of organic development can be observed and explored. It becomes apparent that evolution was not a random event, but the (...)
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  37. Chance between holism and reductionism: tensions in the conceptualisation of Life.Charles T. Wolfe - 2012 - Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.
    In debates between holism and reductionism in biology, from the early 20th century to more recent re-enactments involving genetic reductionism, developmental systems theory, or systems biology, the role of chance – the presence of theories invoking chance as a strong explanatory principle – is hardly ever acknowledged. Conversely, Darwinian models of chance and selection (Dennett 1995, Kupiec 1996, Kupiec 2009) sit awkwardly with reductionist and holistic concepts, which they alternately challenge or approve of. I suggest that the juxtaposition of chance (...)
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  38. Neural Correlates of Color-Selective Metacontrast in Human Early Retinotopic Areas.Kiyohiro Maeda, Hiroki Yamamoto, Masaki Fukunaga, Masahior Umeda, Chuzo Tanaka & Yoshimichi Ejima - 2010 - Journal of Neurophysiology 104:2291-2301.
    Metacontrast is a visual illusion in which the visibility of a target stimulus is virtually lost when immediately followed by a nonoverlapping mask stimulus. For a colored target, metacontrast is color-selective, with target visibility markedly reduced when the mask and target are the same color, but only slightly reduced when the colors differ. This study investigated neural correlates of color-selective metacontrast for cone-opponent red and green stimuli in the human V1, V2, and V3 using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Neural activity (...)
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  39. What is an organism? An immunological answer.Thomas Pradeu - 2010 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2-3):247-267.
    The question “What is an organism?”, formerly considered as essential in biology, has now been increasingly replaced by a larger question, “What is a biological individual?”. On the grounds that i) individuation is theory-dependent, and ii) physiology does not offer a theory, biologists and philosophers of biology have claimed that it is the theory of evolution by natural selection which tells us what counts as a biological individual. Here I show that one physiological field, immunology, offers a theory, which makes (...)
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  40. The Concept (Soul) in Living Organisms.Bhakti Madhava Puri - 2010 - Darwin Under Siege.
    In addition to any content, another essential element must be the order or form of that content. Content implies a container. Generally, the container is not thought of as having any determinate influence upon the content. This is a mistake. If we have a bowl-shaped container, the marbles at the bottom will form a concave shape. A square-shaped container will exhibit the marbles in a planar pattern. Thus the container does influence the order or form of its content. Similarly, the (...)
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  41. Do organisms have an ontological status?Charles T. Wolfe - 2010 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2-3):195-232.
    The category of ‘organism’ has an ambiguous status: is it scientific or is it philosophical? Or, if one looks at it from within the relatively recent field or sub-field of philosophy of biology, is it a central, or at least legitimate category therein, or should it be dispensed with? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific “bolstering” for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the “mechanistic” or “reductionist” trend, which has been perceived (...)
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  42. Organic Whole.Bhakti Madhava Puri - 2009 - Darwin Under Siege.
    There is a nested hierarchy of wholes that characterizes reality, and especially life. The most fundamental principle is that Reality in the Vedantic/Bhagavat conception is based on Personality, as mentioned in the very first aphorism of the Bhagavat Purana, “janmady asya yatho nvayat itaratas charteshu abhijnah svarat.” Here and in many other scriptures the foundation or origin of everything is centered upon the abhijna or cognizant (conscious) primordial Personality of Godhead. Modern science in the West has become centered on matter (...)
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  43. Naturalismus und Biologie.Geert Keil - 2007 - In Ludger Honnefelder & Matthias C. Schmidt (eds.), Naturalismus als Paradigma. Berlin University Press. pp. 76-85.
    Einleitung Sind wir heute alle Naturalisten? Drei Arten des Naturalismus in der theoretischen Philosophie Metaphysischer Naturalismus Scientia mensura-Naturalismus Analytischer Naturalismus Naturalismus mit oder ohne Leitwissenschaft Biologischer Naturalismus Evolutionärer Naturalismus .
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  44. (1 other version)Sechzehn Tage: Wann beginnt ein menschliches Leben?Berit Brogaard & Barry Smith - 2006 - In Guido Imagire & Christine Schneider (eds.), Untersuchungen zur Ontologie. pp. 3-40.
    When does a human being begin to exist? We argue that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. We lay down a set of conditions for being a human being, and we determine when, in the course of normal fetal development, these conditions are first satisfied. Issues dealt with along the way include: modes of substance-formation, twinning, the nature of the intra-uterine environment, and the nature of the (...)
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  45. (1 other version)Sechzehn Tage: Wann beginnt ein menschliches Leben?Barry Smith & Berit Brogaard - 2006 - In G. Imaguirer & Christine Schneider (eds.), Untersuchungen zur Ontologie. Philosophia. pp. 3-40.
    Der Abschluß der Gastrulation, der gleichzeitig auch den Anfang der Neurulation bedeutet, ist die zeitliche Grenze, die Beginn eines menschlichen Individuums markiert. Oft wird behauptet, daß jegliche natürliche Veränderung stetig ist. Wie ist es dann aber möglich, eine zeitliche Grenze auszuzeichnen, an der ein menschliches Lebewesen zu existieren beginnt? Man beachte, was geschieht, wenn wir vom Thema zeitlicher Unstetigkeit zum räumlichen übergehen. Lebewesen haben räumliche Grenzen (wie sie durch ihre Haut geformt wird). Die letzteren sind genuine Diskontinuitäten, auch angesichts der (...)
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  46. Sixteen days.Barry Smith & Berit Brogaard - 2003 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28 (1):45 – 78.
    When does a human being begin to exist? We argue that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. We lay down a set of conditions for being a human being, and we determine when, in the course of normal fetal development, these conditions are first satisfied. Issues dealt with along the way include: modes of substance-formation, twinning, the nature of the intra-uterine environment, and the nature of the (...)
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  47. Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre im Aufbrechen der Paradigmen mechanizistischen Denkens.Jürgen Stahl - 1993 - Fichte-Studien 5:149-158.
    Im Artikel wird der Paradigmenwechsel analysiert, der sich mit der Betonung des Subjekts im Erkenntnisprozess durch die Transzendentalphilosophie ergab. Mit der Anwendung des Organismusbegriffs von Kant entwickelte Fichte das Schema selbstorganisierender evolutionärer Veränderung. Die Erkenntnis gegesätzlicher Momente avanciert zum Mittelpunkt der Wesenserkenntnis, indem sie diese als die bewegende Ursache der Transformation erkennt. -/- The article analyzes the paradigm shift that resulted from transcendental philosophy's emphasis on the subject in the process of cognition. Using Kant's concept of the organism, Fichte developed (...)
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  48. Reflections on a theory of organisms: holism in biology.Walter M. Elsasser - 1987 - Baltimore, Md: Published for the Johns Hopkins Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sciences by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
    Are living organisms--as Descartes argued--just machines? Or is the nature of life such that it can never be fully explained by mechanistic models? In this thought-provoking and controversial book, eminent geophysicist Walter M. Elsasser argues that the behavior of living organisms cannot be reduced to physico-chemical causality. Suggesting that molecular biology today is at the same point as Newtonian physics on the eve of the quantum revolution, Elsasser lays the foundation for a theoretical biology that points the way toward a (...)
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  49. Body as the Unity of Action.David L. Thompson - manuscript
    Kosgaard claims that selves/agents self-constitute during actions by relying on principles such as Kant’s Categorical Imperative. This intellectualist approach neglects the body. Merleau-Ponty considers the “lived body” and its perceptual world as the source of the unity of action, an approach that I extrapolate to all biological organisms.
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