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  1. Are Biological Traits Explained by Their ‘Selected Effect’ Functions?Joshua R. Christie, Carl Brusse, Pierrick Bourrat, Peter Takacs & Paul E. Griffiths - 2022 - Australasian Philosophical Review 6 (4):335-359.
    The selected effects or ‘etiological’ theory of Proper function is a naturalistic and realist account of biological teleology. It is used to analyse normativity in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine, and elsewhere. The theory has been developed with a simple and intuitive view of natural selection. Traits are selected because of their positive effects on the fitness of the organisms that have them. These ‘selected effects’ are the Proper functions of the traits. Proponents argue that this (...)
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  • The life sciences and the history of analytic philosophy.Andreas Vrahimis - 2024 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 46 (27):1-28.
    Comparative to the commonplace focus onto developments in mathematics and physics, the life sciences appear to have received relatively sparse attention within the early history of analytic philosophy. This paper addresses two related aspects of this phenomenon. On the one hand, it asks: to the extent that the significance of the life sciences was indeed downplayed by early analytic philosophers, why was this the case? An answer to this question may be found in Bertrand Russell’s 1914 discussions of the relation (...)
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  • Explanatory Internalism: Challenging Selected-Effect Functions (prerpint).Tiago Rama - manuscript
    Explanatory Externalism states that the only adaptive force in evolution is natural selection. Explanatory Externalism is a central thesis of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis. The etiological theory of natural selected-effect functions also advocates Explanatory Externalism. According to this theory, natural selection is the process responsible for determining the proper natural functions of traits. However, I will point out several challenges to Explanatory Externalism that are proposed primarily by developmental biology and its various subfields. Based on these challenges, this paper will (...)
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  • The Explanatory Role of Umwelt in Evolutionary Theory: Introducing von Baer's Reflections on Teleological Development.Tiago Rama - 2024 - Biosemiotics 1:1-26.
    Abstract: This paper argues that a central explanatory role for the concept of Umwelt in theoretical biology is to be found in developmental biology, in particular in the effort to understand development as a goal-directed and adaptive process that is controlled by the organism itself. I will reach this conclusion in two (interrelated) ways. The first is purely theoretical and relates to the current scenario in the philosophy of biology. Challenging neo-Darwinism requires a new understanding of the various components involved (...)
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  • Agential Teleosemantics.Tiago Rama - 2022 - Dissertation, Autonomous University of Barcelona
    The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...)
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  • Biyoloji Felsefesinde Organizma Kavramı.Özlem Yilmaz - 2022 - Kilikya Felsefe Dergisi / Cilicia Journal of Philosophy 1 (1):78-86.
    Çevre sorunlarının katlanarak arttığı ve biyoloji biliminin büyük sıçramalarla geliştiği günümüzde organizma kavramının incelenmesi, hem kendi doğamızı (dolayısıyla da diğer canlılarla etkileşimlerimizi) hem de günümüz biyolojisindeki değişimleri daha iyi anlayabilmemiz için faydalı olacaktır. Bu çalışma, organizma kavramını özellikle organizma-çevre etkileşimi üzerinden inceleyerek günümüz biyolojisindeki önemini vurgulayacaktır. Organizma kavramı özellikle Modern Sentezden, Genişletilmiş Evrimsel Senteze geçişle birlikte ayrı bir önem kazanmıştır. Köklerini yirminci yüzyılın başlarındaki organizma-merkezci biyolojiden alan bu kavramın gelişimi, son birkaç on yıldır biyoloji biliminde gerçekleşmiş olan gelişmelerle (özellikle gelişim (...)
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  • Teleology and the organism: Kant's controversial legacy for contemporary biology.Andrea Gambarotto & Auguste Nahas - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 93 (C):47-56.
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  • Are biological traits explained by their 'selected effect' functions?Joshua R. Christie, Carl Brusse, Pierrick Bourrat, Peter Takacs & Paul Edmund Griffiths - forthcoming - Australasian Philosophical Review.
    The selected effects or ‘etiological’ theory of Proper function is a naturalistic and realist account of biological teleology. It is used to analyse normativity in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine and elsewhere. The theory has been developed with a simple and intuitive view of natural selection. Traits are selected because of their positive effects on the fitness of the organisms that have them. These ‘selected effects’ are the Proper functions of the traits. Proponents argue that this (...)
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  • Unknotting reciprocal causation between organism and environment.Jan Baedke, Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda & Guido I. Prieto - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (5):1-29.
    In recent years, biologists and philosophers of science have argued that evolutionary theory should incorporate more seriously the idea of ‘reciprocal causation.’ This notion refers to feedback loops whereby organisms change their experiences of the environment or alter the physical properties of their surroundings. In these loops, in particular niche constructing activities are central, since they may alter selection pressures acting on organisms, and thus affect their evolutionary trajectories. This paper discusses long-standing problems that emerge when studying such reciprocal causal (...)
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  • Eight journals over eight decades: a computational topic-modeling approach to contemporary philosophy of science.Christophe Malaterre, Francis Lareau, Davide Pulizzotto & Jonathan St-Onge - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2883-2923.
    As a discipline of its own, the philosophy of science can be traced back to the founding of its academic journals, some of which go back to the first half of the twentieth century. While the discipline has been the object of many historical studies, notably focusing on specific schools or major figures of the field, little work has focused on the journals themselves. Here, we investigate contemporary philosophy of science by means of computational text-mining approaches: we apply topic-modeling algorithms (...)
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  • Schwerpunkt: Technische und organische Form – ein altes neues Problem?Marco Tamborini & Mathias Gutmann - 2020 - Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 68 (5):705-711.
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  • Population and organismal perspectives on trait origins.Brian McLoone - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 83:101288.
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  • Philosophy of Cell Biology.William Bechtel & Andrew Bollhagen - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Revisiting three decades of Biology and Philosophy: a computational topic-modeling perspective.Christophe Malaterre, Davide Pulizzotto & Francis Lareau - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (1):5.
    Though only established as a discipline since the 1970s, philosophy of biology has already triggered investigations about its own history The Oxford handbook of philosophy of biology, Oxford University Press, New York, pp 11–33, 2008). When it comes to assessing the road since travelled—the research questions that have been pursued—manuals and ontologies also offer specific viewpoints, highlighting dedicated domains of inquiry and select work. In this article, we propose to approach the history of the philosophy of biology with a complementary (...)
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  • The Creativity of Natural Selection? Part II: The Synthesis and Since.John Beatty - 2019 - Journal of the History of Biology 52 (4):705-731.
    This is the second of a two-part essay on the history of debates concerning the creativity of natural selection, from Darwin through the evolutionary synthesis and up to the present. In the first part, I focussed on the mid-late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, with special emphasis on early Darwinism and its critics, the self-styled “mutationists.” The second part focuses on the evolutionary synthesis and some of its critics, especially the “neutralists” and “neo-mutationists.” Like Stephen Gould, I consider the (...)
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  • Is the Cell Really a Machine?Daniel J. Nicholson - 2019 - Journal of Theoretical Biology 477:108–126.
    It has become customary to conceptualize the living cell as an intricate piece of machinery, different to a man-made machine only in terms of its superior complexity. This familiar understanding grounds the conviction that a cell's organization can be explained reductionistically, as well as the idea that its molecular pathways can be construed as deterministic circuits. The machine conception of the cell owes a great deal of its success to the methods traditionally used in molecular biology. However, the recent introduction (...)
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  • What is this thing called Philosophy of Science? A computational topic-modeling perspective, 1934–2015.Christophe Malaterre, Jean-François Chartier & Davide Pulizzotto - 2019 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 9 (2):215-249.
    What is philosophy of science? Numerous manuals, anthologies or essays provide carefully reconstructed vantage points on the discipline that have been gained through expert and piecemeal historical analyses. In this paper, we address the question from a complementary perspective: we target the content of one major journal of the field—Philosophy of Science—and apply unsupervised text-mining methods to its complete corpus, from its start in 1934 until 2015. By running topic-modeling algorithms over the full-text corpus, we identified 126 key research topics (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Reconceptualizing the Organism: From Complex Machine to Flowing Stream.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 draws on insights from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to demonstrate the ontological inadequacy of the machine conception of the organism. The thermodynamic character of living systems underlies the importance of metabolism and calls for the adoption of a processual view, exemplified by the Heraclitean metaphor of the stream of life. This alternative conception is explored in its various historical formulations and the extent to which it captures the nature of living systems is examined. Following this, the chapter considers the metaphysical (...)
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  • Realization in biology?Sergio Balari & Guillermo Lorenzo - 2019 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 41 (1):5.
    It is widely assumed that functional and dispositional properties are not identical to their physical base, but that there is some kind of asymmetrical ontological dependence between them. In this regard, a popular idea is that the former are realized by the latter, which, under the non-identity assumption, is generally understood to be a non-causal, constitutive relation. In this paper we examine two of the most widely accepted approaches to realization, the so-called ‘flat view’ and the ‘dimensioned view’, and we (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • The emerging structure of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: where does Evo-Devo fit in?Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda & Francisco Vergara-Silva - 2018 - Theory in Biosciences 137.
    The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) debate is gaining ground in contemporary evolutionary biology. In parallel, a number of philosophical standpoints have emerged in an attempt to clarify what exactly is represented by the EES. For Massimo Pigliucci, we are in the wake of the newest instantiation of a persisting Kuhnian paradigm; in contrast, Telmo Pievani has contended that the transition to an EES could be best represented as a progressive reformation of a prior Lakatosian scientific research program, with the extension (...)
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  • (1 other version)Towards a characterization of metaphysics of biology: metaphysics for and metaphysics in biology.Vanesa Triviño - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-21.
    Since the last decades of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the use of metaphysics by philosophers when approaching conceptual problems in biology has increased. Some philosophers call this tendency in philosophy of biology ‘Metaphysics of Biology’. In this paper, I aim at characterizing Metaphysics of Biology by paying attention to the diverse ways philosophers use metaphysics when addressing conceptual problems in biology. I will claim that there are two different modes of doing Metaphysics of Biology, namely (...)
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  • Organisms, activity, and being: on the substance of process ontology.Christopher J. Austin - 2020 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (2):1-21.
    According to contemporary ‘process ontology’, organisms are best conceptualised as spatio-temporally extended entities whose mereological composition is fundamentally contingent and whose essence consists in changeability. In contrast to the Aristotelian precepts of classical ‘substance ontology’, from the four-dimensional perspective of this framework, the identity of an organism is grounded not in certain collections of privileged properties, or features which it could not fail to possess, but in the succession of diachronic relations by which it persists, or ‘perdures’ as one entity (...)
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  • Conceptual heterogeneity and the legacy of organicism: thoughts on the life organic: Essay review of Erik Peterson, The life organic: the theoretical biology club and the roots of epigenetics, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016, 328 pp., $45.00.Daniel S. Brooks - 2019 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 41 (2):24.
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  • O Organism, Where Art Thou? Old and New Challenges for Organism-Centered Biology.Jan Baedke - 2018 - Journal of the History of Biology 52 (2):293-324.
    This paper addresses theoretical challenges, still relevant today, that arose in the first decades of the twentieth century related to the concept of the organism. During this period, new insights into the plasticity and robustness of organisms as well as their complex interactions fueled calls, especially in the UK and in the German-speaking world, for grounding biological theory on the concept of the organism. This new organism-centered biology understood organisms as the most important explanatory and methodological unit in biological investigations. (...)
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  • Unmodern Synthesis: Developmental Hierarchies and the Origin of Phenotypes.Richard Gawne, Kenneth Z. McKenna & H. Frederik Nijhout - 2018 - Bioessays 40 (1):1600265.
    The question of whether the modern evolutionary synthesis requires an extension has recently become a topic of discussion, and a source of controversy. We suggest that this debate is, for the most part, not about the modern synthesis at all. Rather, it is about the extent to which genetic mechanisms can be regarded as the primary determinants of phenotypic characters. The modern synthesis has been associated with the idea that phenotypes are the result of gene products, while supporters of the (...)
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  • Typology and Natural Kinds in Evo-Devo.Ingo Brigandt - 2021 - In Nuño De La Rosa Laura & Müller Gerd (eds.), Evolutionary Developmental Biology: A Reference Guide. Springer. pp. 483-493.
    The traditional practice of establishing morphological types and investigating morphological organization has found new support from evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), especially with respect to the notion of body plans. Despite recurring claims that typology is at odds with evolutionary thinking, evo-devo offers mechanistic explanations of the evolutionary origin, transformation, and evolvability of morphological organization. In parallel, philosophers have developed non-essentialist conceptions of natural kinds that permit kinds to exhibit variation and undergo change. This not only facilitates a construal of species (...)
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  • That was the Philosophy of Biology that was: Mainx, Woodger, Nagel, and Logical Empiricism, 1929–1961.Sahotra Sarkar - 2023 - Biological Theory 18 (3):153-174.
    This article is a systematic critical survey of work done in the philosophy of biology within the logical empiricist tradition, beginning in the 1930s and until the end of the 1950s. It challenges a popular view that the logical empiricists either ignored biology altogether or produced analyses of little value. The earliest work on the philosophy of biology within the logical empiricist corpus was that of Philipp Frank, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Felix Mainx. Mainx, in particular, provided a detailed analysis (...)
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  • Teleonomy: Revisiting a Proposed Conceptual Replacement for Teleology.Max Dresow & Alan C. Love - 2023 - Biological Theory 18 (2):101-113.
    The concept of teleonomy has been attracting renewed attention recently. This is based on the idea that teleonomy provides a useful conceptual replacement for teleology, and even that it constitutes an indispensable resource for thinking biologically about purposes. However, both these claims are open to question. We review the history of teleological thinking from Greek antiquity to the modern period to illuminate the tensions and ambiguities that emerged when forms of teleological reasoning interacted with major developments in biological thought. This (...)
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  • The elephant in the room: The biomimetic principle in bio-robotics and embodied AI.Marco Tamborini - 2023 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 97 (C):13-19.
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  • The Circulation of Morphological Knowledge: Understanding “Form” across Disciplines in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.Marco Tamborini - 2022 - Isis 113 (4):747-766.
    This essay pushes the history of a scientific discipline, morphology, toward a broader philosophically informed and cross-disciplinarily engaged history of knowledge. It shows that by looking at how knowledge and practices circulated between scientific disciplines (such as biology) and technoscientific ones (like architecture and design) we can better understand how (morphological) knowledge was produced. By doing so, the analysis contributes to the study of the mechanisms of knowledge exchange between the organic and the technical worlds and, more broadly, to the (...)
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  • Revisiting D.W. Smithers’s “Cancer: An Attack on Cytologism” (1962).Ana M. Soto & Carlos Sonnenschein - 2020 - Biological Theory 15 (4):180-187.
    David Waldron Smithers was, among other things, a physician and a pioneer of cancer radiotherapy and a well-respected figure in British medicine and public health. From the 1940s until his retirement from medical practice in 1973, he was the director of the Radiotherapy Department at the Royal Marsden Hospital and London University Chair of Radiotherapy at the Institute of Cancer Research. Using massive amounts of clinical observations, which he interpreted from an organicist viewpoint, and his impressive synthetic thinking, he proposed (...)
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  • Re-forming Morphology: Two Attempts to Rehabilitate the Problem of Form in the First Half of the Twentieth Century.Max Dresow - 2020 - Journal of the History of Biology 53 (2):231-248.
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  • (1 other version)New Perspectives on Theory Change in Evolutionary Biology.Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda - 2019 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 50 (4):573-581.
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  • Levels of Organization in Biology.Markus Eronen & Daniel Stephen Brooks - unknown - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Levels of organization are structures in nature, usually defined by part-whole relationships, with things at higher levels being composed of things at the next lower level. Typical levels of organization that one finds in the literature include the atomic, molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, organismal, group, population, community, ecosystem, landscape, and biosphere levels. References to levels of organization and related hierarchical depictions of nature are prominent in the life sciences and their philosophical study, and appear not only in introductory textbooks and (...)
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  • Organisms as subjects: Jakob von Uexküll and Adolf Portmann on the autonomy of living beings and anthropological difference.Filip Jaroš & Carlo Brentari - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (3):1-23.
    This paper focuses on the links between Jakob von Uexküll’s theoretical biology and Adolf Portmann’s conception of organic life. Its main purpose is to show that Uexküll and Portmann not only share a view of the living being as an autonomous and holistically organized entity, but also base this view on the seminal idea of the subjectivity of the organism. In other words, the respective holistic principles securing the autonomy of the living being—the Bauplan, for Uexküll; the Innerlichkeit, for Portmann—share (...)
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  • A non-metaphysical evaluation of vitalism in the early twentieth century.Bohang Chen - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (3):50.
    In biology the term “vitalism” is usually associated with Hans Driesch’s doctrine of the entelechy: entelechies were nonmaterial, bio-specific agents responsible for governing a few peculiar biological phenomena. Since vitalism defined as such violates metaphysical materialism, the received view refutes the doctrine of the entelechy as a metaphysical heresy. But in the early twentieth century, a different, non-metaphysical evaluation of vitalism was endorsed by some biologists and philosophers, which finally led to a logical refutation of the doctrine of the entelechy. (...)
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  • Darwin among the Philosophers: Hull and Ruse on Darwin, Herschel, and Whewell.Phillip Honenberger - 2018 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (2):278-309.
    In a series of articles and books published in the 1970s, David Hull (1935–2010) and Michael Ruse (1940–) proposed interpretations of the relation between nineteenth-century British philosophy of science, on the one hand, and the views and methods of Charles Darwin, on the other, that were incompatible or at least in strong interpretive tension with one another. According to Hull, John Herschel’s and William Whewell’s philosophies of science were logically incompatible with Darwin’s revolutionary theory. According to Ruse, however, Darwin discovered (...)
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  • “A Single and Indivisible Principle of Unity”: On Growth and Form in Context.Matthew Jarron - forthcoming - Biological Theory:1-15.
    D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form is one of the key works at the intersection of science and the imagination. This introductory essay explores the book and its context, drawing on archival sources to provide a unique perspective. It looks at Thompson’s own life and career, his experiences at University College, Dundee, and how he came to write the book. It describes the contents of the 1917 first edition (as many today are familiar only with the 1961 abridgement of the (...)
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  • Organic form and evolution: the morphological problem in twentieth-century italian biology.Marco Tamborini - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (4):1-17.
    This paper examines the efforts in evolution research to understand form’s structure that developed in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, it analyzes how the organic approach in biology and the study of organic form merged in the morphological research agendas of Giuseppe Colosi and Giuseppe Levi. These biologists sought to understand form’s inner composition and structure. First, I will briefly outline the morphological practices and frameworks used to study form changes and structures in the (...)
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  • Revisiting George Gaylord Simpson’s “The Role of the Individual in Evolution”.Lynn K. Nyhart & Scott Lidgard - 2021 - Biological Theory 16 (4):203-212.
    “The Role of the Individual in Evolution” is a prescient yet neglected 1941 work by the 20th century’s most important paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson. In a curious intermingling of explanation and critique, Simpson engages questions that would become increasingly fundamental in modern biological theory and philosophy. Did individuality, adaptation, and evolutionary causation reside at more than one level: the cell, the organism, the genetically coherent reproductive group, the social group, or some combination thereof? What was an individual, anyway? In this (...)
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  • Between the Wars, Facing a Scientific Crisis: The Theoretical and Methodological Bottleneck of Interwar Biology.Jan Baedke & Christina Brandt - 2022 - Journal of the History of Biology 55 (2):209-217.
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  • Analysis and/or Interpretation in Neurophysiology? A Transatlantic Discussion Between F. J. J. Buytendijk and K. S. Lashley, 1929–1932. [REVIEW]Julia Gruevska - 2022 - Journal of the History of Biology 55 (2):321-347.
    In the interwar period, biologists employed a diverse set of holistic approaches that were connected to different research methodologies. Against this background, this article explores attempts in the 1920s and 1930s to negotiate quantitative and qualitative methods in the field of neurophysiology. It focuses on the work of two scientists on different sides of the Atlantic: the Dutch animal psychologist and physiologist Frederik J.J. Buytendijk and the American neuropsychologist Karl S. Lashley, specifically analyzing their critical correspondence, 1929–1932, on the problems (...)
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  • Autopoiesis, biological autonomy and the process view of life.Anne Sophie Meincke - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (1):1-16.
    In recent years, an increasing number of theoretical biologists and philosophers of biology have been opposing reductionist research agendas by appealing to the concept of biological autonomy which draws on the older concept of autopoiesis. In my paper, I investigate some of the ontological implications of this approach. The emphasis on autonomy and autopoiesis, together with the associated idea of organisational closure, might evoke the impression that organisms are to be categorised ontologically as substances: ontologically independent, well-individuated, discrete particulars. However, (...)
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  • Technische Form und Konstruktion.Marco Tamborini - 2020 - Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 68 (5):712-733.
    In this paper, I delineate the first pages of a philosophical genealogy which outlines the cornerstones of a philosophy of bio-technical forms. In so doing, the essay contributes to the philosophical understanding of some key scientific concepts. In particular, it analyses the philosophical and historical preconditions, the epistemic assumptions, as well as the ontological commitments of the concept of form as used in digital design and in bionics. In the first section, I investigate Ernst Kapp’s philosophy of technical forms. In (...)
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  • Philosophie der Bionik: Das Komponieren von bio-robotischen Formen.Marco Tamborini - 2023 - Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 71 (1):30-51.
    In this paper, I explore how bio-hybrid forms can be created and combined starting from organic forms. The thesis put forward is epistemological: the combinatorial practice of bionics, biomimetics, biorobotics, and all design strategies inspired by nature is not based on a kind of biomimetic inspiration, i. e., on a kind of imitation of nature, but on a practice of translation. To develop this thesis, I focus on the practices of contemporary biorobotics, first examining the practice of translating natural forms (...)
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  • Kostas Kampourakis and Tobias Uller (Eds.): Philosophy of Science for Biologists. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2020, 330 + x pp., £69.99 (hardcover), ISBN: 9781108491839. [REVIEW]Guido I. Prieto - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (4):613-616.
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  • An Epistemology of Scientific Practice: Positioning Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger in Twentieth‐Century History and Philosophy of Biology.Pierre-Olivier Méthot - 2022 - Berichte Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 45 (3):397-414.
    Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 397-414, September 2022.
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  • The History of Science and the Science of History: Computational Methods, Algorithms, and the Future of the Field.Abraham Gibson & Cindy Ermus - 2019 - Isis 110 (3):555-566.
    Many researchers insist that computational methods will transform the historical profession, while an equally large number reject these claims as unwarranted hype. This study attempts to place the debate in historical and social context. The essay is divided into three parts. The first part offers a brief review of computational history. It asks whether the “computational turn” bears any resemblance to quantitative history and how it fits within the digital humanities. The second part describes the authors’ recent attempts to apply (...)
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