Switch to: References

Citations of:

Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology

Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press (2011)

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Process Philosophy.Johanna Seibt - 2013 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   62 citations  
  • (2 other versions)Living Causes.John Dupré - 2013 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 87 (1):19-37.
    This paper considers the applicability of standard accounts of causation to living systems. In particular it examines critically the increasing tendency to equate causal explanation with the identification of a mechanism. A range of differences between living systems and paradigm mechanisms are identified and discussed. While in principle it might be possible to accommodate an account of mechanism to these features, the attempt to do so risks reducing the idea of a mechanism to vacuity. It is proposed that the solution (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   44 citations  
  • Process philosophy.Nicholas Rescher - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • The Weirdness of the World.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2024 - Princeton University Press.
    How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that’s a good thing Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Process Ontology in the Context of John Dupré's Philosophy of Biology.Okan Nurettin Okur - 2023 - Metazihin 6 (2):97-118.
    Substantialism, which is an extremely common paradigm in Western philosophy, has dominated the sciences over time. Arguing that the authentic structure of existence is fixed and unchangeable; over time, with the development of modern physics, this understanding, which was easily adopted due to the precision of mechanical and mathematical explanations and the ease of categorization, created a school of biology that tried to develop through quantitative propositions; thus, living things were considered static entities that could be understood through reverse engineering. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • 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  
  • Risky Inquiry: Developing an Ethics for Philosophical Practice.Rima Basu - 2023 - Hypatia 38:275-293.
    Philosophical inquiry strives to be the unencumbered exploration of ideas. That is, unlike scientific research which is subject to ethical oversight, it is commonly thought that it would either be inappropriate, or that it would undermine what philosophy fundamentally is, if philosophical research were subject to similar ethical oversight. Against this, I argue that philosophy is in need of a reckoning. Philosophical inquiry is a morally hazardous practice with its own risks. There are risks present in the methods we employ, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Adapting to Environmental Heterogeneity: Selection and Radiation.Hugh Desmond - 2021 - Biological Theory 17 (1):80-93.
    Environmental heterogeneity is invoked as a key explanatory factor in the adaptive evolution of a surprisingly wide range of phenomena. This article aims to analyze this explanatory scheme of categorizing traits or properties as adaptations to environmental heterogeneity. First it is suggested that this scheme can be understood as a reaction to how heterogeneity adaptations were discounted or ignored in the modern synthesis. Then a positive account is proposed, distinguishing between two broad categories of adaptation to environmental heterogeneity: properties selected (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Philosophy of Cell Biology.William Bechtel & Andrew Bollhagen - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Varieties of Power.Jesse M. Mulder - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (1):45-61.
    Power enthusiasts are engaged in two projects: developing a decent metaphysical account of powers, and applying that account in order to make progress on various other philosophical issues, ranging from narrowly related topics such as causality to further removed ones such as free will, reasoning, or perception. I argue that an intermediate step may be taken, one that explores ‘varieties of power’ while still staying within the realm of, of ‘pure’ powers metaphysics. Taking this intermediate step provides a much more (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Diachronic causal constitutive relations.Bert Leuridan & Thomas Lodewyckx - 2020 - Synthese (9):1-31.
    Mechanistic approaches are very common in the causal interpretation of biological and neuroscientific experimental work in today’s philosophy of science. In the mechanistic literature a strict distinction is often made between causal relations and constitutive relations, where the latter cannot be causal. One of the typical reasons for this strict distinction is that constitutive relations are supposedly synchronic whereas most if not all causal relations are diachronic. This strict distinction gives rise to a number of problems, however. Our end goal (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • 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  
  • 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  
  • A refinement to the general mechanistic account.Eric Nelson Hatleback & Jonathan M. Spring - 2019 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (2):19.
    Phyllis Illari and Jon Williamson propose a formulation for a general mechanistic account, the purpose of which is to capture the similarities across mechanistic accounts in the sciences. Illari and Williamson extract insight from mechanisms in astrophysics—which are notably different from the typical biological mechanisms discussed in the literature on mechanisms—to show how their general mechanistic account accommodates mechanisms across various sciences. We present argumentation that demonstrates why an amendment is necessary to the ontology referred to by the general mechanistic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Searching for a mind's brain: questioning underlying biophilosophical assumptions.J. Korf - 2017 - Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences 10 (1).
    This article assesses the applicability of a number of biological and neurobiological concepts to biophilosophical concepts of life and mind. Life, as instantiated by viable cells and organisms, is considered as a prerequisite of mind. Views such as embodied cognition, external mind or scaffolding theories were ignored. The biological characteristics of life and mind that are in particular relevant in the present context are: reversibility and irreversibility of brain processes, distinction between metabolic and potential brain energy, and the continuous turnover (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • How to Knit Your Own Markov Blanket.Andy Clark - 2017 - Philosophy and Predictive Processing.
    Hohwy (Hohwy 2016, Hohwy 2017) argues there is a tension between the free energy principle and leading depictions of mind as embodied, enactive, and extended (so-called ‘EEE1 cognition’). The tension is traced to the importance, in free energy formulations, of a conception of mind and agency that depends upon the presence of a ‘Markov blanket’ demarcating the agent from the surrounding world. In what follows I show that the Markov blanket considerations do not, in fact, lead to the kinds of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • The many faces of biological individuality.Thomas Pradeu - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (6):761-773.
    Biological individuality is a major topic of discussion in biology and philosophy of biology. Recently, several objections have been raised against traditional accounts of biological individuality, including the objections of monism, theory-centrism, ahistoricity, disciplinary isolationism, and the multiplication of conceptual uncertainties. In this introduction, I will examine the current philosophical landscape about biological individuality, and show how the contributions gathered in this special issue address these five objections. Overall, the aim of this issue is to offer a more diverse, unifying, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   46 citations  
  • The social brain meets the reactive genome: neuroscience, epigenetics and the new social biology.Maurizio Meloni - 2014 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8.
    The rise of molecular epigenetics over the last few years promises to bring the discourse about the sociality and susceptibility to environmental influences of the brain to an entirely new level. Epigenetics deals with molecular mechanisms such as gene expression, which may embed in the organism “memories” of social experiences and environmental exposures. These changes in gene expression may be transmitted across generations without changes in the DNA sequence. Epigenetics is the most advanced example of the new postgenomic and context-dependent (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Understanding viruses: Philosophical investigations.Thomas Pradeu, Gladys Kostyrka & John Dupré - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 59:57-63.
    Viruses have been virtually absent from philosophy of biology. In this editorial introduction, we explain why we think viruses are philosophically important. We focus on six issues, and we show how they relate to classic questions of philosophy of biology and even general philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Multilevel Causation and the Extended Synthesis.Maximiliano Martínez & Maurizio Esposito - 2014 - Biological Theory 9 (2):209-220.
    In this article we argue that the classical—linear and bottom-up directed—models of causation in biology, and the ‘‘proximate/ultimate’’ dichotomy, are inappropriate to capture the complexity inherent to biological processes. We introduce a new notion of ‘‘multilevel causation’’ where old dichotomies such as proximate/ultimate and bottom-up/ top-down are reinterpreted within a multilevel, web-like, approach. In briefly reviewing some recent work on complexity, EvoDevo, carcinogenesis, autocatalysis, comparative genomics, animal regeneration, phenotypic plasticity, and niche construction, we will argue that such reinterpretation is a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   48 citations  
  • Rethinking Woodger’s Legacy in the Philosophy of Biology.Daniel J. Nicholson & Richard Gawne - 2014 - Journal of the History of Biology 47 (2):243-292.
    The writings of Joseph Henry Woodger (1894–1981) are often taken to exemplify everything that was wrongheaded, misguided, and just plain wrong with early twentieth-century philosophy of biology. Over the years, commentators have said of Woodger: (a) that he was a fervent logical empiricist who tried to impose the explanatory gold standards of physics onto biology, (b) that his philosophical work was completely disconnected from biological science, (c) that he possessed no scientific or philosophical credentials, and (d) that his work was (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • (1 other version)Moralizing biology: The appeal and limits of the new compassionate view of nature.Maurizio Meloni - 2013 - History of the Human Sciences 26 (3):82-106.
    In recent years, a proliferation of books about empathy, cooperation and pro-social behaviours (Brooks, 2011a) has significantly influenced the discourse of the life-sciences and reversed consolidated views of nature as a place only for competition and aggression. In this article I describe the recent contribution of three disciplines – moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt), primatology (Frans de Waal) and the neuroscience of morality – to the present transformation of biology and evolution into direct sources of moral phenomena, a process here named (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Trust the process? Hyloenergeism and biological processualism.Jeremy W. Skrzypek - 2023 - Ratio 36 (4):334-346.
    In this paper, I propose a theory of living organisms that captures the insights of both traditional Aristotelian hylomorphism and John Dupré's “biological processualism”. Like traditional Aristotelian hylomorphism, the proposed theory understands material objects to be comprised of both matter and form. Unlike contemporary structural varieties of hylomorphism, however, it does not understand the form of a material object to be a relation, configuration, or structure exhibited by its parts but an activity or process in which its matter is continuously (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Models of the Nucleus: Incompatible Things, Compatible Processes.William Penn - unknown
    Nuclear models are incompatible in their thing-terms: terms that refer to static entities like objects, structures, and substances. Specifically, the two most prevalent models—the liquid drop and shell models—treat the nucleus, its internal structure, and the component nucleons as entities that contradict each other’s properties. These differences allow these two models to describe and explain different nuclear experiments: fission and scattering in the liquid drop model, and single-nucleon excitation and nuclear decay in the shell model. However, prima facie, these differences (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Genome Editing Animals and the Promise of Control in a (Post-) Anthropocentric World.Rosine Kelz - 2020 - Body and Society 26 (1):3-25.
    Gene editing tools are ‘revolutionizing’ microbiological research. Much of the public debate focuses on the possibility of human germ line applications. The use of genome editing to alter non-human animals, however, will have more immediate impacts on our daily lives. Genome edited animals are used for basic biological and biomedical research and could soon play a role in the livestock industry and ecosystem management. Genome editing thus provides an occasion to rethink societal narratives about the relationships between humans and other (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Heritability.Stephen M. Downes & Lucas J. Matthews - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Lucas Matthews and I substantially revised my SEP entry on Heritability. This version includes discussion of the missing heritability problem and other issues that arise from the use of Genome Wide Association Studies by Behavioral Geneticists.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Genidentity and Biological Processes.Thomas Pradeu - 2018 - In Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré (eds.), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    A crucial question for a process view of life is how to identify a process and how to follow it through time. The genidentity view can contribute decisively to this project. It says that the identity through time of an entity X is given by a well-identified series of continuous states of affairs. Genidentity helps address the problem of diachronic identity in the living world. This chapter describes the centrality of the concept of genidentity for David Hull and proposes an (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • (1 other version)Building General Knowledge of Mechanisms in Information Security.Jonathan M. Spring & Phyllis Illari - 2019 - Philosophy and Technology 32 (4):627-659.
    We show how more general knowledge can be built in information security, by the building of knowledge of mechanism clusters, some of which are multifield. By doing this, we address in a novel way the longstanding philosophical problem of how, if at all, we come to have knowledge that is in any way general, when we seem to be confined to particular experiences. We also address the issue of building knowledge of mechanisms by studying an area that is new to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • The Porosity of Autonomy: Social and Biological Constitution of the Patient in Biomedicine.Jonathan Beever & Nicolae Morar - 2016 - American Journal of Bioethics 16 (2):34-45.
    The nature and role of the patient in biomedicine comprise issues central to bioethical inquiry. Given its developmental history grounded firmly in a backlash against 20th-century cases of egregious human subjects abuse, contemporary medical bioethics has come to rely on a fundamental assumption: the unit of care is the autonomous self-directing patient. In this article we examine first the structure of the feminist social critique of autonomy. Then we show that a parallel argument can be made against relational autonomy as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Are there Psychological Species?Joshua Fost - 2015 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (2):293-315.
    A common reaction to functional diversity is to group entities into clusters that are functionally similar. I argue here that people are diverse with respect to reasoning-related processes, and that these processes satisfy the basic requirements for evolving entities: they are heritable, mutable, and subject to selective pressures. I propose a metric to quantify functional difference and show how this can be used to place psychological processes into a structure akin to a phylogenetic or evolutionary tree. Three species concepts are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Animalism and the Persistence of Human Organisms.John Dupré - 2014 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (S1):6-23.
    Humans are a kind of animal, and it is a natural and sensible idea that the way to understand what it is for a human person to persist over time is to reflect on what it is for an animal to persist. This paper accepts this strategy. However, especially in the light of a range of recent biological findings, the persistence of animals turns out to be much more problematic than is generally supposed. The main philosophical premise of the paper (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Gene Mobility and the Concept of Relatedness.Jonathan Birch - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (4):445-476.
    Cooperation is rife in the microbial world, yet our best current theories of the evolution of cooperation were developed with multicellular animals in mind. Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness is an important case in point: applying the theory in a microbial setting is far from straightforward, as social evolution in microbes has a number of distinctive features that the theory was never intended to capture. In this article, I focus on the conceptual challenges posed by the project of extending Hamilton’s (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • (1 other version)Heritability.Stephen M. Downes - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Desinformação, negacionismo e a pandemia.Ernesto Perini-Santos - 2022 - Filosofia Unisinos 23 (1):1-15.
    Para qualquer tema sobre o qual não se é especialista, deve-se deferir a quem sabe mais. A deferência aos outros entra em conflito com expectativas de autonomia epistêmica e de divisão democrática do saber. Uma solução para esta tensão é ceder a estas expectativas, o que é equivalente a abandonar o conhecimento. Uma outra solução consiste em restringir seus efeitos a temas sobre os quais temos algum interesse prático. Esta proposta é instável, porque o interesse prático pode se estender a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Evolution and ethics viewed from within two metaphors: machine and organism.Michael Ruse - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (1):1-17.
    How is moral thinking, ethics, related to evolutionary theorizing? There are two approaches, epitomized by Charles Darwin who works under the metaphor of the world as a machine, and by Herbert Spencer who works under the metaphor of the world as an organism. Although the author prefers the first approach, the aim of this paper is to give a disinterested account of both approaches.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Microbial Suicide: Towards a Less Anthropocentric Ontology of Life and Death.Astrid Schrader - 2017 - Body and Society 23 (3):48-74.
    While unicellular microbes such as phytoplankton (marine algae) have long been considered immortal unless eaten by predators, recent research suggests that under specific conditions entire populations of phytoplankton actively kill themselves; their assumed atemporality is being revised as marine ecologists recognize phytoplankton’s important role in the global carbon cycle. Drawing on empirical research into programmed cell death in marine microbes, this article explores how, in their study of microbial death, scientists change not only our understanding of microbial temporality, but also (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology.John A. Dupre & Daniel J. Nicholson - 2018 - In Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré (eds.), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter argues that scientific and philosophical progress in our understanding of the living world requires that we abandon a metaphysics of things in favour of one centred on processes. We identify three main empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology: metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence. We show how taking a processual stance in the philosophy of biology enables us to ground existing critiques of essentialism, reductionism, and mechanicism, all of which have traditionally been associated with (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   54 citations  
  • Right out of the box: how to situate metaphysics of science in relation to other metaphysical approaches.Alexandre Guay & Thomas Pradeu - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):1847-1866.
    Several advocates of the lively field of “metaphysics of science” have recently argued that a naturalistic metaphysics should be based solely on current science, and that it should replace more traditional, intuition-based, forms of metaphysics. The aim of the present paper is to assess that claim by examining the relations between metaphysics of science and general metaphysics. We show that the current metaphysical battlefield is richer and more complex than a simple dichotomy between “metaphysics of science” and “traditional metaphysics”, and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • The harms of ignoring the social nature of science.Sara Weaver - 2019 - Synthese 196 (1):355-375.
    In this paper I argue that philosophers of science have an obligation to recognize and engage with the social nature of the sciences they assess if those sciences are morally relevant. Morally-relevant science is science that has the potential to risk harm to humans, non-humans, or the environment. My argument and the approach I develop are informed by an analysis of the philosophy of biology literature on the criticism of evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolution of human psychology and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Slavery, Carbon, and Moral Progress.Dale Jamieson - 2017 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (1):169-183.
    My goal in this paper is to shed light on how moral progress actually occurs. I begin by restating a conception of moral progress that I set out in previous work, the “Naïve Conception,” and explain how it comports with various normative and metaethical views. I go on to develop an index of moral progress and show how judgments about moral progress can be made. I then discuss an example of moral progress from the past—the British abolition of the Atlantic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Do No Harm: the Extended Mind Model and the Problem of Delayed Damage.James Williams - 2016 - Sophia 55 (1):71-82.
    I argue in this essay that there can be harm due to philosophy that is not directly expressed in violent imagery. The harm is instead a concealed and delayed detrimental effect of an assumption of non-violence in a working model, defined as a picture of a field of enquiry and the methods required to approach it. Theses for the extended mind, as developed by Andy Clark and others, lead to a form of harm that follows from the models they work (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Goal-dependence in ontology.David Danks - 2015 - Synthese 192 (11):3601-3616.
    Our best sciences are frequently held to be one way, perhaps the optimal way, to learn about the world’s higher-level ontology and structure. I first argue that which scientific theory is “best” depends in part on our goals or purposes. As a result, it is theoretically possible to have two scientific theories of the same domain, where each theory is best for some goal, but where the two theories posit incompatible ontologies. That is, it is possible for us to have (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Symbiosis, selection, and individuality.Austin Booth - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (5):657-673.
    A recent development in biology has been the growing acceptance that holobionts, entities comprised of symbiotic microbes and their host organisms, are widespread in nature. There is agreement that holobionts are evolved outcomes, but disagreement on how to characterize the operation of natural selection on them. The aim of this paper is to articulate the contours of the disagreement. I explain how two distinct foundational accounts of the process of natural selection give rise to competing views about evolutionary individuality.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  • (1 other version)Units and levels of selection.Elisabeth Lloyd - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The theory of evolution by natural selection is, perhaps, the crowning intellectual achievement of the biological sciences. There is, however, considerable debate about which entity or entities are selected and what it is that fits them for that role. This article aims to clarify what is at issue in these debates by identifying four distinct, though often confused, concerns and then identifying how the debates on what constitute the units of selection depend to a significant degree on which of these (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   46 citations  
  • Selfhood in Question: The Ontogenealogies of Bear Encounters.Anne Sauka - 2022 - Open Philosophy 5 (1):532-550.
    Recent years have witnessed an increase in bear sightings in Latvia, causing a change of tone in the country’s media outlets, regarding the return of “wild” animals. The unease around bear reappearance leads me to investigate the affective side of relations with beings that show strength and resilience in more-than-human encounters in human-inhabited spaces. These relations are characterized by the contrasting human feelings of alienation vis-à-vis their environments today and a false sense of security, resulting in disbelief to encounter beings (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • A lack of meaning?Anne Sauka - 2020 - Approaching Religion 10 (2):125 - 140.
    This article explores the ‘lack of meaning’ in contemporary society as a consequence of Western dualist thought paradigms and ontologies, via Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘reactive nihilism’ following the colloquial murder of God. The article then explores processual and new materialist approaches in the understanding of the lived and carnal self, arguing for immanent and senseful materiality as an ethical platform for religious, environmental, and societal solidarity for tomorrow. For the theoretical justification of the processual approach in understanding the enfleshed (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • 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  
  • Towards Mechanism 2.0: Expanding the Scope of Mechanistic Explanation.Arnon Levy & William Bechtel - unknown
    Accounts of mechanistic explanation, especially as applied to biology and sometimes going under the heading of “new mechanism,” provided an attractive alternative to nomological accounts that preceded them. These accounts were motivated by selected examples, drawn primarily from cell and molecular biology and neuroscience. However, the range of examples that scientists take to be mechanistic explanations is far broader. We focus on examples that differ from those traditionally recruited by Mechanists. Our contention is that attention to additional examples will lead (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations