Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Situating physiology within evolutionary theory.Nathalie Gontier - forthcoming - Journal of Physiology.
    Traditionally defined as the science of the living, or as the field that beyond anatomical structure and bodily form studies functional organization and behaviour, physiology has long been excluded from evolutionary research. The main reason for this exclusion is that physiology has a presential and futuristic outlook on life, while evolutionary theory is traditionally defined as the study of natural history. In this paper, I re-evaluate these classic science divisions and situate physiology within the history of the evolutionary sciences, as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • On the very idea of biological individuality.Samir Okasha - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Kant’s Ongoing Relevance for Philosophy of Science.Andrew Jones & Andrew Cooper - 2023 - Kantian Review 28 (3):337-354.
    In this introductory article we reconstruct several broad developments in the scholarship on Kant’s theory of natural science with a particular focus on the Anglophone context over the past half-century. Our goal is to illuminate the co-development of Kant scholarship and the philosophy of science during this period and to identify points of influence in both directions. In section 2 we present an overview of the scholarship on Kant’s account of natural laws. In section 3 we survey the diverse interpretations (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Death as the Cessation of an Organism and the Moral Status Alternative.Piotr Grzegorz Nowak - 2023 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 48 (5):504-518.
    The mainstream concept of death—the biological one—identifies death with the cessation of an organism. In this article, I challenge the mainstream position, showing that there is no single well-established concept of an organism and no universal concept of death in biological terms. Moreover, some of the biological views on death, if applied in the context of bedside decisions, might imply unacceptable consequences. I argue the moral concept of death—one similar to that of Robert Veatch—overcomes such difficulties. The moral view identifies (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Pregnancy, Parthood and Proper Overlap: A Critique of Kingma.Alexander Geddes - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):476-491.
    Elselijn Kingma argues that, in cases of mammalian placental pregnancy, the foster (roughly, the post-implantation embryo/foetus) is part of the gravida (the pregnant organism). But she does not consider the possibility of proper overlap. I show that this generates a number of serious problems for her argument and trace the oversight to a quite general issue within the literature on biological individuality. Doing so provides an opportunity to pull apart and clarify the relations between some importantly distinct questions concerning organismality (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Beyond congruence: evidential integration and inferring the best evolutionary scenario.Arsham Nejad Kourki - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (5):1-25.
    Molecular methods have revolutionised virtually every area of biology, and metazoan phylogenetics is no exception: molecular phylogenies, molecular clocks, comparative phylogenomics, and developmental genetics have generated a plethora of molecular data spanning numerous taxa and collectively transformed our understanding of the evolutionary history of animals, often corroborating but at times opposing results of more traditional approaches. Moreover, the diversity of methods and models within molecular phylogenetics has resulted in significant disagreement among molecular phylogenies as well as between these and earlier (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality by Endogenization of Scaffolded Properties.Pierrick Bourrat - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Scaffolding Natural Selection.Walter Veit - 2022 - Biological Theory 17 (2):163-180.
    Darwin provided us with a powerful theoretical framework to explain the evolution of living systems. Natural selection alone, however, has sometimes been seen as insufficient to explain the emergence of new levels of selection. The problem is one of “circularity” for evolutionary explanations: how to explain the origins of Darwinian properties without already invoking their presence at the level they emerge. That is, how does evolution by natural selection commence in the first place? Recent results in experimental evolution suggest a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • One or two? A Process View of pregnancy.Anne Sophie Meincke - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (5):1495-1521.
    How many individuals are present where we see a pregnant individual? Within a substance ontological framework, there are exactly two possible answers to this question. The standard answer—two individuals—is typically championed by scholars endorsing the predominant Containment View of pregnancy, according to which the foetus resides in the gestating organism like in a container. The alternative answer—one individual—has recently found support in the Parthood View, according to which the foetus is a part of the gestating organism. Here I propose a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Do Somatic Cells Really Sacrifice Themselves? Why an Appeal to Coercion May be a Helpful Strategy in Explaining the Evolution of Multicellularity.Adrian Stencel & Javier Suárez - 2021 - Biological Theory 16 (2):102-113.
    An understanding of the factors behind the evolution of multicellularity is one of today’s frontiers in evolutionary biology. This is because multicellular organisms are made of one subset of cells with the capacity to transmit genes to the next generation and another subset responsible for maintaining the functionality of the organism, but incapable of transmitting genes to the next generation. The question arises: why do somatic cells sacrifice their lives for the sake of germline cells? How is germ/soma separation maintained? (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Broadening the problem agenda of biological individuality: individual differences, uniqueness and temporality.Rose Trappes & Marie I. Kaiser - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (2):1-28.
    Biological individuality is a notoriously thorny topic for biologists and philosophers of biology. In this paper we argue that biological individuality presents multiple, interconnected questions for biologists and philosophers that together form a problem agenda. Using a case study of an interdisciplinary research group in ecology, behavioral and evolutionary biology, we claim that a debate on biological individuality that seeks to account for diverse practices in the biological sciences should be broadened to include and give prominence to questions about uniqueness (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Out of our skull, in our skin: the Microbiota-Gut-Brain axis and the Extended Cognition Thesis.Federico Boem, Gabriele Ferretti & Silvano Zipoli Caiani - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (2):1-32.
    According to a shared functionalist view in philosophy of mind, a cognitive system, and cognitive function thereof, is based on the components of the organism it is realized by which, indeed, play a causal role in regulating our cognitive processes. This led philosophers to suggest also that, thus, cognition could be seen as an extended process, whose vehicle can extend not only outside the brain but also beyond bodily boundaries, on different kinds of devices. This is what we call the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Cancer.Anya Plutynski - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Cancer—and scientific research on cancer—raises a variety of compelling philosophical questions. This entry will focus on four topics, which philosophers of science have begun to explore and debate. First, scientific classifications of cancer have as yet failed to yield a unified taxonomy. There is a diversity of classificatory schemes for cancer, and while some are hierarchical, others appear to be “cross-cutting,” or non-nested. This literature thus raises a variety of questions about the nature of the disease and disease classification. Second, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Uprooting Narratives: Legacies of Colonialism in the Neoliberal University.Melanie Bowman & María Rebolleda-Gómez - 2020 - Hypatia 35 (1):18-40.
    Two intertwined stories evince the influence of colonialism on Western universities. The first story centers on a conflict about wild rice research between the Anishinaabe people and the University of Minnesota. Underlying this conflict is a genetic notion of biological identity that facilitates the commodification of wild rice. This notion of identity is inextricably linked to agricultural control and expansion. The second story addresses the foundation of Western universities on the goals of civilization and capitalist productivity. These norms persist even (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Philosophy of immunology.Bartlomiej Swiatczak & Alfred I. Tauber - 2020 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2020.
    Philosophy of immunology is a subfield of philosophy of biology dealing with ontological and epistemological issues related to the studies of the immune system. While speculative investigations and abstract analyses have always been part of immune theorizing, until recently philosophers have largely ignored immunology. Yet the implications for understanding the philosophical basis of organismal functions framed by immunity offer new perspectives on fundamental questions of biology and medicine. Developed in the context of history of medicine, theoretical biology, and medical anthropology, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • What is a hologenomic adaptation? Emergent individuality and inter-identity in multispecies systems.Javier Suárez & Vanessa Triviño - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 187 (11).
    Contemporary biological research has suggested that some host–microbiome multispecies systems (referred to as “holobionts”) can in certain circumstances evolve as unique biological individual, thus being a unit of selection in evolution. If this is so, then it is arguably the case that some biological adaptations have evolved at the level of the multispecies system, what we call hologenomic adaptations. However, no research has yet been devoted to investigating their nature, or how these adaptations can be distinguished from adaptations at the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Exploding Individuals: Engaging Indigenous Logic and Decolonizing Science.Rebekah Sinclair - 2020 - Hypatia 35 (1):58-74.
    Despite emerging attention to Indigenous philosophies both within and outside of feminism, Indigenous logics remain relatively underexplored and underappreciated. By amplifying the voices of recent Indigenous philosophies and literatures, I seek to demonstrate that Indigenous logic is a crucial aspect of Indigenous resurgence as well as political and ethical resistance. Indigenous philosophies provide alternatives to the colonial, masculinist tendencies of classical logic in the form of paraconsistent—many-valued—logics. Specifically, when Indigenous logics embrace the possibility of true contradictions, they highlight aspects of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • (1 other version)Current Perspectives in Philosophy of Biology.Joaquin Suarez Ruiz & Rodrigo A. Lopez Orellana - 2019 - Humanities Journal of Valparaiso 14:7-426.
    Current Perspectives in Philosophy of Biology.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Were You a Part of Your Mother?Elselijn Kingma - 2019 - Mind 128 (511):609-646.
    Is the mammalian embryo/fetus a part of the organism that gestates it? According to the containment view, the fetus is not a part of, but merely contained within or surrounded by, the gestating organism. According to the parthood view, the fetus is a part of the gestating organism. This paper proceeds in two stages. First, I argue that the containment view is the received view; that it is generally assumed without good reason; and that it needs substantial support if it (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   60 citations  
  • Conjoined twinning & biological individuation.Alexandria Boyle - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (8):2395-2415.
    In dicephalus conjoined twinning, it appears that two heads share a body; in cephalopagus, it appears that two bodies share a head. How many human animals are present in these cases? One answer is that there are two in both cases—conjoined twins are precisely that, conjoined twins. Another is that the number of humans corresponds to the number of bodies—so there is one in dicephalus and two in cephalopagus. I show that both of these answers are incorrect. Prominent accounts of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • A metaphysical approach to holobiont individuality: Holobionts as emergent individuals.Javier Suárez & Vanessa Triviño - 2019 - Quaderns de Filosofia 6 (1):59-76.
    Holobionts are symbiotic assemblages composed by a host plus its microbiome. The status of holobionts as individuals has recently been a subject of continuous controversy, which has given rise to two main positions: on the one hand, holobiont advocates argue that holobionts are biological individuals; on the other, holobiont detractors argue that they are just mere chimeras or ecological communities, but not individuals. Both parties in the dispute develop their arguments from the framework of the philosophy of biology, in terms (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Can the Epistemic Value of Natural Kinds Be Explained Independently of Their Metaphysics?Catherine Kendig & John Grey - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (2):359-376.
    The account of natural kinds as stable property clusters is premised on the possibility of separating the epistemic value of natural kinds from their underlying metaphysics. On that account, the co-instantiation of any sub-cluster of the properties associated with a given natural kind raises the probability of the co-instantiation of the rest, and this clustering of property instantiation is invariant under all relevant counterfactual perturbations. We argue that it is not possible to evaluate the stability of a cluster of properties (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Condiciones de identidad para organismos.José Tomás Alvarado & Cristóbal Unwin - 2017 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 21 (1):13-40.
    In this work it is proposed that the conditions of identity for biological organisms are given by the following principle: for all organisms x and y, x = y if and only if x has been caused by the self-preserving activity of y. This principle determines both the inter-temporal identity of organisms and the identity of organism in different possible worlds. It unifies what can be supposed about conditions of identity coming from —at least— three different conceptions about the nature (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Extended inheritance as reconstruction of extended organization: the paradigmatic case of symbiosis.Gaëlle Pontarotti - 2016 - Lato Sensu: Revue de la Société de Philosophie des Sciences 3 (1):93-102.
    The paper outlines the contours of an organizational perspective on extended inheritance. Based on theoretical studies about biological organization and extended physiology, this perspective allows for the conception of extended biological legacies while keeping a theoretically indispensable distinction between biological systems and their environment. In this context, the line of demarcation between these systems and their surroundings is modelled on an organizational criterion and on the related conceptual distinction between organizational constraints, whose specific role is to harness flows of matter (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • How Research on Microbiomes is Changing Biology: A Discussion on the Concept of the Organism.Adrian Stencel & Agnieszka M. Proszewska - 2018 - Foundations of Science 23 (4):603-620.
    Multicellular organisms contain numerous symbiotic microorganisms, collectively called microbiomes. Recently, microbiomic research has shown that these microorganisms are responsible for the proper functioning of many of the systems (digestive, immune, nervous, etc.) of multicellular organisms. This has inclined some scholars to argue that it is about time to reconceptualise the organism and to develop a concept that would place the greatest emphasis on the vital role of microorganisms in the life of plants and animals. We believe that, unfortunately, there is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Token physicalism and functional individuation.James DiFrisco - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (3):309-329.
    Token physicalism is often viewed as a modest and unproblematic physicalist commitment, as contrasted with type physicalism. This paper argues that the prevalence of functional individuation in biology creates serious problems for token physicalism, because the latter requires that biological entities can be individuated physically and without reference to biological functioning. After characterizing the main philosophical roles for token physicalism, I describe the distinctive uses of functional individuation in models of biological processes. I then introduce some requirements on token identity (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Individuality and Aggregativity.Stéphane Chauvier - 2017 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9 (11).
    Why is there a specific problem with biological individuality? Because the living realm contains a wide range of exotic particular concrete entities that do not easily match our ordinary concept of an individual. Slime moulds, dandelions, siphonophores are among the Odd Entities that excite the ontological zeal of the philosophers of biology. Most of these philosophers, however, seem to believe that these Odd Cases oblige us to refine or revise our common concept of an individual. They think, explicitly or tacitly, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Themen aus den Lebenswissenschaften.Marie I. Kaiser - 2017 - In Markus Andreas Schrenk (ed.), Handbuch Metaphysik (German). Stuttgart: Metzler.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)A trilemma for teleological individualism.John Basl - 2017 - Synthese 194 (4):1027-1029.
    This paper addresses the foundations of Teleological Individualism, the view that organisms, even non-sentient organisms, are goal-oriented systems while biological collectives, such as ecosystems or conspecific groups, are mere assemblages of organisms. Typical defenses of Teleological Individualism ground the teleological organization of organisms in the workings of natural selection. This paper shows that grounding teleological organization in natural selection is antithetical to Teleological Individualism because such views assume a view about the units of selection on which it is only individual (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Is Aldo Leopold's 'Land Community' an Individual?Roberta L. Millstein - 2018 - In O. Bueno, R. Chen & M. B. Fagan (eds.), Individuation across Experimental and Theoretical Sciences. Oxford University Press. pp. 279-302.
    The “land community” (or “biotic community”) that features centrally in Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic has typically been equated with the concept of “ecosystem.” Moreover, some have challenged this central Leopoldean concept given the multitude of meanings of the term “ecosystem” and the changes the term has undergone since Leopold’s time (see, e.g., Shrader-Frechette 1996). Even one of Leopold’s primary defenders, J. Baird Callicott, asserts that there are difficulties in identifying the boundaries of ecosystems and suggests that we recognize that their (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Pathways to pluralism about biological individuality.Beckett Sterner - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (5):609-628.
    What are the prospects for a monistic view of biological individuality given the multiple epistemic roles the concept must satisfy? In this paper, I examine the epistemic adequacy of two recent accounts based on the capacity to undergo natural selection. One is from Ellen Clarke, and the other is by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Clarke’s position reflects a strong monism, in that she aims to characterize individuality in purely functional terms and refrains from privileging any specific material properties as important in their (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Biological individuality: the case of biofilms.Marc Ereshefsky & Makmiller Pedroso - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (2):331-349.
    This paper examines David Hull’s and Peter Godfrey-Smith’s accounts of biological individuality using the case of biofilms. Biofilms fail standard criteria for individuality, such as having reproductive bottlenecks and forming parent-offspring lineages. Nevertheless, biofilms are good candidates for individuals. The nature of biofilms shows that Godfrey-Smith’s account of individuality, with its reliance on reproduction, is too restrictive. Hull’s interactor notion of individuality better captures biofilms, and we argue that it offers a better account of biological individuality. However, Hull’s notion of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   40 citations  
  • Plant individuality: a solution to the demographer’s dilemma.Ellen Clarke - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (3):321-361.
    The problem of plant individuality is something which has vexed botanists throughout the ages, with fashion swinging back and forth from treating plants as communities of individuals (Darwin 1800 ; Braun and Stone 1853 ; Münch 1938 ) to treating them as organisms in their own right, and although the latter view has dominated mainstream thought most recently (Harper 1977 ; Cook 1985 ; Ariew and Lewontin 2004 ), a lively debate conducted mostly in Scandinavian journals proves that the issues (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Social revolution. [REVIEW]Jonathan Birch - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (4):571-581.
    Andrew Bourke’s Principles of Social Evolution identifies three stages that characterize an evolutionary transition in individuality and deploys inclusive fitness theory to explain each stage. The third stage, social group transformation, has hitherto received relatively little attention from inclusive fitness theorists. In this review, I first discuss Bourke’s “virtual dominance” hypothesis for the evolution of the germ line. I then contrast Bourke’s inclusive fitness approach to the major transitions with the multi-level approach developed by Richard Michod, Samir Okasha and others. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Immunity and the Emergence of Individuality.Thomas Pradeu - 2013 - In Frederic Bouchard & Philippe Huneman (eds.), From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. pp. 77.
    Since, it has become clear that individuality is not to be considered as a given, but rather as something which needs to be explained. How has individuality emerged through evolution, and how has it subsequently been maintained? In particular, why is it that multicellular organisms appeared and persisted, despite the obvious interest of each cell of favoring its own replication? Several biologists see the immune system as one of the key components for explaining the maintenance of multicellular organisms’ individuality. Indeed, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Individual differences, uniqueness, and individuality in behavioural ecology.Rose Trappes - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 96 (C):18-26.
    In this paper I develop a concept of behavioural ecological individuality. Using findings from a case study which employed qualitative methods, I argue that individuality in behavioural ecology should be defined as phenotypic and ecological uniqueness, a concept that is operationalised in terms of individual differences such as animal personality and individual specialisation. This account make sense of how the term “individuality” is used in relation to intrapopulation variation in behavioural ecology. The concept of behavioural ecological individuality can sometimes be (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • (1 other version)Biological Individuality and the Foetus Problem.William Morgan - 2022 - Erkenntnis 89 (2):799-816.
    The Problem of Biological Individuality is the problem of how to count organisms. Whilst counting organisms may seem easy, the biological world is full of difficult cases such as colonial siphonophores and aspen tree groves. One of the main solutions to the Problem of Biological Individuality is the Physiological Approach. Drawing on an argument made by Eric Olson in the personal identity debate, I argue that the Physiological Approach faces a metaphysical problem - the ‘Foetus Problem’. This paper illustrates how (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • An evaluation of the autopoietic account of interests.Stephanie Hoffmann - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-18.
    Historically, biocentrists have ascribed interests to organisms via an account of function. One promising account of function for this purpose is the organizational or autopoietic account of function, according to which some entity x has a function of self-maintenance when the parts of x contribute to the goal of self-maintenance. In this paper, I will present the autopoietic account of interests and provide some reasons for thinking that this account is promising. I will also present a possible issue for the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today.Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, Sean Aas, Dan Brudney, Jessica Flanigan, S. Matthew Liao, Alex London, Wayne Sumner & Julian Savulescu - 2021 - American Journal of Bioethics 22 (12):10-21.
    In some views, philosophy’s glory days in bioethics are over. While philosophers were especially important in the early days of the field, so the argument goes, the majority of the work in bioethics today involves the “simple” application of existing philosophical principles or concepts, as well as empirical work in bioethics. Here, we address this view head on and ask: What is the role of philosophy in bioethics today? This paper has three specific aims: (1) to respond to skeptics and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  • How Many Organisms during a Pregnancy?Jonathan Grose - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (5):1049-1060.
    Mammalian placental pregnancy is a neglected problem case for theories of organismality. This example is closer to home than those typically discussed within philosophy of biology. I apply evolutio...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Biological Individuality and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: A Philosophical Conundrum in a (New) Biological Focus.Íñigo Ongay de Felipe - 2020 - Filozofia Nauki 28 (3):25-45.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Hegel's Philosophy of Biology? A Programmatic Overview.Andrea Gambarotto & Luca Illetterati - 2020 - Hegel Bulletin 41 (3):349-370.
    This paper presents what we call ‘Hegel's philosophy of biology’ to a target audience of both Hegel scholars and philosophers of biology. It also serves to introduce a special issue of theHegel Bulletinentirely dedicated to a first mapping of this yet to be explored domain of Hegel studies. We submit that Hegel's philosophy of biology can be understood as a radicalization of the Kantian approach to organisms, and as prefiguring current philosophy of biology in important ways, especially with regard to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • (1 other version)Collective individuation and emergence of organismality.Isaac Hernández & Davide Vecchi - 2019 - Humanities Journal of Valparaiso 14:335-362.
    In this article we focus on the emergence of biological individuality by association, trying to formulate some theoretical conditions to think about the process of collective individualization. The starting point of our analysis is the notion of “major evolutionary transition.” A major evolutionary transition is the result of the integration of a multiplicity of initially independent biological entities that, by managing to organize their interactions, become a collective of components having an identity oriented towards a common goal. When biological organisms (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The hologenome concept of evolution: a philosophical and biological study.Javier Suárez - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Exeter
    The hologenome concept of evolution is a hypothesis about the evolution of animals and plants. It asserts that the evolution of animals and plants was partially triggered by their interactions with their symbiotic microbiomes. In that vein, the hologenome concept posits that the holobiont (animal host + symbionts of the microbiome) is a unit of selection. -/- The hologenome concept has been severely criticized on the basis that selection on holobionts would only be possible if there were a tight transgenerational (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • On radical solutions in the philosophy of biology: What does “individuals thinking” actually solve?Thomas A. C. Reydon - 2019 - Synthese 198 (4):3389-3411.
    The philosophy of biology is witnessing an increasing enthusiasm for what can be called “individuals thinking”. Individuals thinking is a perspective on the metaphysics of biological entities according to which conceiving of them as individuals rather than kinds enables us to expose ongoing metaphysical debates as focusing on the wrong question, and to achieve better accounts of the metaphysics of biological entities. In this paper, I examine two cases of individuals thinking, the claim that species are individuals and the claim (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Functions and Health at the Interface of Biology and Technology.Elselijn Kingma - 2020 - Noûs 54 (1):182-203.
    Synthetic biology promises to eliminate the distinction between biology and engineering by delivering a philosophically interesting new kind of entity: a biological organism that is wholly designed and constructed by humans. The possibility of such organisms raises interesting questions in three domains: the analysis of (1) biological functions, (2) engineering functions, and (3) health and disease. This paper identifies and systematically answers these questions. This does not only establish how we should think about functions and health and disease in synthetic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Kinds of Biological Individuals: Sortals, Projectibility, and Selection.DiFrisco James - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (3):845-875.
    Individuality is an important concept in biology, yet there are many non-equivalent criteria of individuality expressed in different kinds of biological individuals. This article evaluates these different kinds in terms of their capacity to support explanatory generalizations over the systems they individuate. Viewing the problem of individuality from this perspective promotes a splitting strategy in which different kinds make different epistemic trade-offs that suit them for different explanatory roles. I argue that evolutionary individuals, interpreted as forming a functional kind, face (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Menagerie à tranimals.Lindsay Kelley - 2017 - Angelaki 22 (2):97-109.
    The prefix “trans-” surrounds “animal” with a pluralizing effect: tranimals. This portmanteau word describes creatures at once real and imagined who traverse taxonomic categories. This essay considers two of many threads of trananimality: the transgenic and the prosthetic. Artist Jodi Clark imagines the Menagerie à Trois as a space for carnal humanimality, where sexual entanglements commingle with chimeric forms. This menagerie à tranimals extends Clark’s ever-expanding Menagerie à Trois by articulating a framework for contemplating and indexing humanimal networks of engineered (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark