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  1. From the Method of Division to the Theory of Transformations: Thompson After Aristotle, and Aristotle After Thompson.Laura Nuño de la Rosa & James G. Lennox - 2023 - Biological Theory 1.
    Aristotle’s influence on D’Arcy Thompson was praised by Thompson himself and has been recognized by others in various respects, including the aesthetic and normative dimensions of biology, and the multicausal explanation of living forms. This article focuses on the relatedness of organic forms, one of the core problems addressed by both Aristotle’s History of Animals (HA), and the renowned chapter of Thompson’s On Growth and Form (G&F), “On the Theory of Transformations, or the Comparison of Related Forms.” We contend that, (...)
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  • Is a Cognitive Revolution in Theoretical Biology Underway?Tiago Rama - 2024 - Foundations of Science 1:1-22.
    The foundations of biology have been a topic of debate for the past few decades. The traditional perspective of the Modern Synthesis, which portrays organisms as passive entities with limited role in evolutionary theory, is giving way to a new paradigm where organisms are recognized as active agents, actively shaping their own phenotypic traits for adaptive purposes. Within this context, this article raises the question of whether contemporary biological theory is undergoing a cognitive revolution. This inquiry can be approached in (...)
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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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  • Are homologies really natural kinds?Christopher H. Pearson - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (4):42.
    The metaphysical nature of homologies has been variously characterized as natural kind, individualist, and pluralist-pragmatic. In this essay, I aim to build on the work of proponents of a natural kinds ontology for homologies using Richard Boyd’s influential HPC account of natural kinds. I aim to advance this position by showing the unique fit of extending the HPC account to homologies, deflecting individualist critiques, as well as the pluralist-pragmatic alternative, showing that homologies have a determinate metaphysical character as kinds. As (...)
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  • The Nature of Race: the Genealogy of the Concept and the Biological Construct’s Contemporaneous Utility.John Fuerst - 2015 - Open Behavioral Genetics.
    Racial constructionists, anti-naturalists, and anti-realists have challenged users of the biological race concept to provide and defend, from the perspective of biology, biological philosophy, and ethics, a biologically informed concept of race. In this paper, an ontoepistemology of biology is developed. What it is, by this, to be "biological real" and "biologically meaningful" and to represent a "biological natural division" is explained. Early 18th century race concepts are discussed in detail and are shown to be both sensible and not greatly (...)
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  • A Biologically Informed Hylomorphism.Christopher J. Austin - 2017 - In William M. R. Simpson, Robert Charles Koons & Nicholas Teh (eds.), Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science. New York: Routledge. pp. 185-210.
    Although contemporary metaphysics has recently undergone a neo-Aristotelian revival wherein dispositions, or capacities are now commonplace in empirically grounded ontologies, being routinely utilised in theories of causality and modality, a central Aristotelian concept has yet to be given serious attention – the doctrine of hylomorphism. The reason for this is clear: while the Aristotelian ontological distinction between actuality and potentiality has proven to be a fruitful conceptual framework with which to model the operation of the natural world, the distinction between (...)
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  • Dis-positioning Euthyphro.Ben Page - 2018 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 84 (1):31-55.
    The Euthyphro objection is often perceived, rightly or wrongly, as the king objection to theistic meta-ethics. This paper proposes a response that hasn’t been much explored within the contemporary literature, based on the metaphysics of dispositions and natural law theory. The paper will first contend that there is a parallel between ways theists conceptualise God’s role in creating laws of nature and the ways God creates goods. Drawing upon these parallels I propose a possible response to the dilemma, where this (...)
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  • Philosophy of Biology and Metaphysics: Reconsidering the Aristotelian Approach.Federica Bocchi - 2016 - Dissertation, Università Degli Studi di Parma
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  • Evo-devo: a science of dispositions.Christopher J. Austin - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 7 (2):373-389.
    Evolutionary developmental biology represents a paradigm shift in the understanding of the ontogenesis and evolutionary progression of the denizens of the natural world. Given the empirical successes of the evo-devo framework, and its now widespread acceptance, a timely and important task for the philosophy of biology is to critically discern the ontological commitments of that framework and assess whether and to what extent our current metaphysical models are able to accommodate them. In this paper, I argue that one particular model (...)
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  • The individuality thesis (3 ways).Matthew H. Haber - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (6):913-930.
    I spell out and update the individuality thesis, that species are individuals, and not classes, sets, or kinds. I offer three complementary presentations of this thesis. First, as a way of resolving an inconsistent triad about natural kinds; second, as a phylogenetic systematics theoretical perspective; and, finally, as a novel recursive account of an evolved character. These approaches do different sorts of work, serving different interests. Presenting them together produces a taxonomy of the debates over the thesis, and isolates ways (...)
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  • Hegel's Essentialism. Natural Kinds and the Metaphysics of Explanation in Hegel's Theory of ‘the Concept’.Franz Knappik - 2016 - European Journal of Philosophy 24 (4):760-787.
    Several recent interpretations see Hegel's theory of the Concept as a form of conceptual realism, according to which finite reality is articulated by objectively existing concepts. More precisely, this theory has been interpreted as a version of natural kind essentialism, and it has been proposed that its function is to account for the possibility of genuine explanations. This suggests a promising way to reconstruct the argument that Hegel's theory of objective concepts is based on—an argument that shows that the possibility (...)
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  • Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution.Christopher J. Austin - 2017 - Synthese 194 (7):2539-2556.
    The advent of contemporary evolutionary theory ushered in the eventual decline of Aristotelian Essentialism (Æ) – for it is widely assumed that essence does not, and cannot have any proper place in the age of evolution. This paper argues that this assumption is a mistake: if Æ can be suitably evolved, it need not face extinction. In it, I claim that if that theory’s fundamental ontology consists of dispositional properties, and if its characteristic metaphysical machinery is interpreted within the framework (...)
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  • Recent work on human nature: Beyond traditional essences.Maria Kronfeldner, Neil Roughley & Georg Toepfer - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (9):642-652.
    Recent philosophical work on the concept of human nature disagrees on how to respond to the Darwinian challenge, according to which biological species do not have traditional essences. Three broad kinds of reactions can be distinguished: conservative intrinsic essentialism, which defends essences in the traditional sense, eliminativism, which suggests dropping the concept of human nature altogether, and constructive approaches, which argue that revisions can generate sensible concepts of human nature beyond traditional essences. The different constructive approaches pick out one or (...)
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  • The Representationalism versus Relationalism Debate: Explanatory Contextualism about Perception.Bence Nanay - 2015 - European Journal of Philosophy 23 (2):321-336.
    There are two very different ways of thinking about perception. According to representationalism, perceptual states are representations: they represent the world as being a certain way. They have content, which may or may not be different from the content of beliefs. They represent objects as having properties, sometimes veridically, sometimes not. According to relationalism, perception is a relation between the agent and the perceived object. Perceived objects are literally constituents of our perceptual states and not of the contents thereof. Perceptual (...)
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  • Why It Is Time To Move Beyond Nagelian Reduction.Marie I. Kaiser - 2012 - In D. Dieks, S. Hartmann, T. Uebel & M. Weber (eds.), Probabilities, Laws and Structure. Springer. pp. 255-272.
    In this paper I argue that it is finally time to move beyond the Nagelian framework and to break new ground in thinking about epistemic reduction in biology. I will do so, not by simply repeating all the old objections that have been raised against Ernest Nagel’s classical model of theory reduction. Rather, I grant that a proponent of Nagel’s approach can handle several of these problems but that, nevertheless, Nagel’s general way of thinking about epistemic reduction in terms of (...)
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  • New Essentialism in Biology.Olivier Rieppel - 2010 - Philosophy of Science 77 (5):662-673.
    The architects of the modern synthesis banned essentialism from evolutionary theory. This rejection of essentialism was motivated by Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and the continuity of evolutionary transformation. Contemporary evolutionary biology witnesses a renaissance of essentialism in three contexts: “origin essentialism” with respect to species and supraspecific taxa, the bar coding of species on the basis of discontinuities of DNA variation between populations, and the search for laws of evolutionary developmental biology. Such “new essentialism” in contemporary biology must be (...)
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  • Science and Human Nature.Richard Samuels - 2012 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 70:1-28.
    There is a puzzling tension in contemporary scientific attitudes towards human nature. On the one hand, evolutionary biologists correctly maintain that the traditional essentialist conception of human nature is untenable; and moreover that this is obviously so in the light of quite general and exceedingly well-known evolutionary considerations. On the other hand, talk of human nature abounds in certain regions of the sciences, especially in linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. In this paper I articulate a conception of human nature that (...)
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  • The Negative View of Natural Selection.Jonathan Birch - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2):569-573.
    An influential argument due to Elliott Sober, subsequently strengthened by Denis Walsh and Joel Pust, moves from plausible premises to the bold conclusion that natural selection cannot explain the traits of individual organisms. If the argument were sound, the explanatory scope of selection would depend, surprisingly, on metaphysical considerations concerning origin essentialism. I show that the Sober-Walsh-Pust argument rests on a flawed counterfactual criterion for explanatory relevance. I further show that a more defensible criterion for explanatory relevance recently proposed by (...)
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  • Singularist Semirealism.Bence Nanay - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (2):371-394.
    This paper proposes to carve out a new position in the scientific realism/antirealism debate and argue that it captures some of the most important realist and some of the most important antirealist considerations. The view, briefly stated, is that there is always a fact of the matter about whether the singular statements science gives us are literally true, but there is no fact of the matter about whether the non-singular statements science gives us are literally true. I call this view (...)
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  • Biological essentialism and the tidal change of natural kinds.John S. Wilkins - 2013 - Science & Education 22 (2):221-240.
    The vision of natural kinds that is most common in the modern philosophy of biology, particularly with respect to the question whether species and other taxa are natural kinds, is based on a revision of the notion by Mill in A System of Logic. However, there was another conception that Whewell had previously captured well, which taxonomists have always employed, of kinds as being types that need not have necessary and sufficient characters and properties, or essences. These competing views employ (...)
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  • Introduction: Lessons from the Scientific Butchery.Matthew H. Slater & Andrea Borghini - 2011 - In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Matthew H. Slater (eds.), Carving nature at its joints: natural kinds in metaphysics and science. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
    Good chefs know the importance of maintaining sharp knives in the kitchen. What’s their secret? A well-worn Taoist allegory offers some advice. The king asks about his butcher’s impressive knifework. “Ordinary butchers,” he replied “hack their way through the animal. Thus their knife always needs sharpening. My father taught me the Taoist way. I merely lay the knife by the natural openings and let it find its own way through. Thus it never needs sharpening” (Kahn 1995, vii; see also Watson (...)
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  • A plea for human nature.Edouard Machery - 2008 - Philosophical Psychology 21 (3):321 – 329.
    Philosophers of biology, such as David Hull and Michael Ghiselin, have argued that the notion of human nature is incompatible with modern evolutionary biology and they have recommended rejecting this notion. In this article, I rebut this argument: I show that an important notion of human nature is compatible with modern evolutionary biology.
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  • The function argument for ascribing interests.Parisa Moosavi - 2024 - Synthese 203 (5):1-22.
    In the debate over the moral status of nonsentient organisms, biocentrists argue that all living things, including nonsentient ones, have interests of their own. They often defend this claim by arguing that living organisms are goal-directed, functionally organized systems. This argument for ascribing interests has faced a serious challenge that is sometimes called the Problem of Scope. Critics have argued that ascribing interests on the basis of functional organization would have implausible implications regarding the scope of the argument, such as (...)
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  • Two sorts of biological kind terms: The cases of ‘rice’ and ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’.Michael Devitt & Brian Porter - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):479-505.
    Experiments have led some philosophers to conclude that the reference determination of natural kind terms is neither simply descriptive nor simply causal-historical. Various theories have been aired to account for this, including ambiguity, hybrid, and different-idiolects theories. Devitt and Porter (2021) hypothesized that some terms are covered by one theory, some another, with a place for all the proposed theories. The present paper tests hypotheses that the term ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’ is simply causal-historical but the term ‘rice’ is hybrid. (...)
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  • The minimal role of the higher categories in biology.Michael Devitt - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 38 (1):1-9.
    Talk of higher categories (ranks) like Genus and Family is ubiquitous in biology. Yet there is widespread skepticism about these categories. We can locate the source of this skepticism in the lack of “robust concepts” for these categories, robust theories of what it is to be in a certain category. A common defense of category talk is that its virtues are “just pragmatic and not theoretic”. But this strains credulity. We should suppose rather that talk of the higher categories does (...)
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  • Defending Intrinsic Biological Essentialism.Michael Devitt - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (1):67-82.
    In “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism,” I went against the consensus in the philosophy of biology by arguing that a Linnaean taxon, including a species, has an essence that is, at least partly,...
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  • Individual essentialism in biology.Michael Devitt - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (5-6):39.
    A few philosophers of biology have recently explicitly rejected Essential Membership, the doctrine that if an individual organism belongs to a taxon, particularly a species, it does so essentially. But philosophers of biology have not addressed the broader issue, much discussed by metaphysicians on the basis of modal intuitions, of what is essential to the organism. In this paper, I address that issue from a biological basis, arguing for the Kripkean view that an organism has a partly intrinsic, partly historical, (...)
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  • It’s for your own good: natural law and the good life.Playford Richard Charles - 2017 - Dissertation, University of Reading
    The goal of this thesis is to create a distinctively Aristotelian-Thomistic ethical schema. I shall do this in four stages. First, in chapter one, I am going to present a summary of Aristotelian metaphysics. I will present a slightly Thomistic take on Aristotelian metaphysics specifically when it comes to the distinction between accidental and substantial form. However, I will present a more classically Aristotelian account when it comes to the source of teleology. Along the way I will explore whether science (...)
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  • Reframing the Ethical Issues in Part-Human Animal Research: The Unbearable Ontology of Inexorable Moral Confusion.Matthew H. Haber & Bryan Benham - 2012 - American Journal of Bioethics 12 (9):17-25.
    Research that involves the creation of animals with human-derived parts opens the door to potentially valuable scientific and therapeutic advances, yet invokes unsettling moral questions. Critics and champions alike stand to gain from clear identification and careful consideration of the strongest ethical objections to this research. A prevailing objection argues that crossing the human/nonhuman species boundary introduces inexorable moral confusion (IMC) that warrants a restriction to this research on precautionary grounds. Though this objection may capture the intuitions of many who (...)
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  • Organismal Natures.Devin Henry - 2008 - Apeiron (3):47-74.
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  • Typology Reconfigured: From the Metaphysics of Essentialism to the Epistemology of Representation.Alan C. Love - 2008 - Acta Biotheoretica 57 (1-2):51-75.
    The goal of this paper is to encourage a reconfiguration of the discussion about typology in biology away from the metaphysics of essentialism and toward the epistemology of classifying natural phenomena for the purposes of empirical inquiry. First, I briefly review arguments concerning ‘typological thinking’, essentialism, species, and natural kinds, highlighting their predominantly metaphysical nature. Second, I use a distinction between the aims, strategies, and tactics of science to suggest how a shift from metaphysics to epistemology might be accomplished. Typological (...)
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  • Aquinas on Sin, Essence, and Change: Applying the Reasoning on Women to Evolution in Aquinas.Julie Loveland Swanstrom - 2021 - Zygon 56 (2):467-480.
    Aberrations and variations within kinds of creatures required explanation to Western medievals, who took the Genesis creation narratives together with Aristotelian species to imply that change was limited to within species; consequently, species were presumed static. Medieval philosophers often explained variation—including “new” kinds like mules—as due to problems in procreation/gestation (following Aristotle) or by sin. I argue that Aquinas's explanation of variation in women, people with disabilities, and mules suggests that Aquinas cannot be taken to entirely reject the possibility of (...)
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  • Hegel and Arguments for Natural Kind Essentialism.Franz Knappik - 2021 - Hegel Bulletin 42 (3):368-394.
    Natural Kind Essentialism is the view that the objects of sciences like physics, chemistry and biology fall into natural kinds, and that such kinds have essences—sets of properties possession of which is necessary and sufficient for kind-membership. Since Putnam and Kripke brought NKE back onto the philosophical agenda, it has found many advocates. But comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of how this view can be positively motivated. After illustrating the current need for an argument for NKE (...)
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  • A Carnivorous Rejoinder to Bruers and Erdös.Timothy Hsiao - 2015 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28 (6):1127-1138.
    In an earlier paper, I defended the moral permissibility of eating meat against sentience-based arguments for moral vegetarianism. The crux of my argument was that sentience is not an intrinsically morally salient property, and that animals lack moral status because they lack a root capacity for rational agency. Accordingly, it is morally permissible to consume meat even if doing so is not strictly necessary for our nutrition. This paper responds to critiques of my argument by Bruers :705–717, 2015) and Erdös. (...)
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  • Environmental Ethics.Roberta L. Millstein - 2013 - In Kostas Kampourakis (ed.), The Philosophy of Biology: a Companion for Educators. Dordrecht: Springer.
    A number of areas of biology raise questions about what is of value in the natural environment and how we ought to behave towards it: conservation biology, environmental science, and ecology, to name a few. Based on my experience teaching students from these and similar majors, I argue that the field of environmental ethics has much to teach these students. They come to me with pent-up questions and a feeling that more is needed to fully engage in their subjects, and (...)
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  • (1 other version)Special Issue: Philosophical Considerations in the Teaching of Biology. Part II, Evolution, Development and Genetics.Kostas Kampourakis (ed.) - 2013 - Springer (Science & Education).
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  • Population thinking as trope nominalism.Bence Nanay - 2010 - Synthese 177 (1):91 - 109.
    The concept of population thinking was introduced by Ernst Mayr as the right way of thinking about the biological domain, but it is difficult to find an interpretation of this notion that is both unproblematic and does the theoretical work it was intended to do. I argue that, properly conceived, Mayr’s population thinking is a version of trope nominalism: the view that biological property-types do not exist or at least they play no explanatory role. Further, although population thinking has been (...)
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  • Species Natures: A Critique of Neo-Aristotelian Ethics.Tim Lewens - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (280):480-501.
    This paper examines the neo-Aristotelian account of species natures as ‘life-forms’, which we owe to Philippa Foot, Michael Thompson and their defenders. I begin by developing two problems for their view: a problem of underdetermination and a problem generated by psychological work on ‘folk essentialism’. I move on to consider their important transcendental argument, which suggests that claims about life-forms are presupposed by all efforts to describe the organic world. In response, I sketch a neo-Kantian projectivist position, which agrees that (...)
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  • Multiplicity of Research Programs in the Biological Systematics: A Case for Scientific Pluralism.Igor Y. Pavlinov - 2020 - Philosophies 5 (2):7.
    Biological diversity (BD) explored by biological systematics is a complex yet organized natural phenomenon and can be partitioned into several aspects, defined naturally with reference to various causal factors structuring biota. These BD aspects are studied by particular research programs based on specific taxonomic theories (TTs). They provide, in total, a framework for comprehending the structure of biological systematics and its multi-aspect relations to other fields of biology. General principles of individualizing BD aspects and construing TTs as quasi-axiomatics are briefly (...)
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  • Species Pluralism: Conceptual, Ontological, and Practical Dimensions.Justin Bzovy - unknown
    Species are central to biology, but there is currently no agreement on what the adequate species concept should be, and many have adopted a pluralist stance: different species concepts will be required for different purposes. This thesis is a multidimensional analysis of species pluralism. First I explicate how pluralism differs monism and relativism. I then consider the history of species pluralism. I argue that we must re-frame the species problem, and that re-evaluating Aristotle's role in the histories of systematics can (...)
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  • Ancestor of the new archetypal biology: Goethe’s dynamic typology as a model for contemporary evolutionary developmental biology.Mark F. Riegner - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4b):735-744.
    As understood historically, typological thinking has no place in evolutionary biology since its conceptual framework is viewed as incompatible with population thinking. In this article, I propose that what I describe as dynamic typological thinking has been confused with, and has been overshadowed by, a static form of typological thinking. This conflation results from an inability to grasp dynamic typological thinking due to the overlooked requirement to engage our cognitive activity in an unfamiliar way. Thus, analytical thinking alone is unsuited (...)
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  • De humanos y líquenes.Davide Vecchi - 2014 - Scientiae Studia 12 (2):331-357.
    La versión estadística del concepto de naturaleza humana sigue siendo un concepto central en muchas ramas de las ciencias humanas. La clave del concepto es que existe un núcleo de fenotipos específicos que caracteriza a las especies biológicas, incluyendo la nuestra. Llamo a esta perspectiva esencialismo estadístico. Voy a sugerir que la tipicidad y la uniformidad fenotípica se consideran supuestos legítimos en muchas ciencias humanas, ya que el desarrollo biológico se interpreta como un proceso inherentemente conservador que utiliza sólo recursos (...)
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  • Aristotelian Explanation and Homology in Biology.Anne Siebels Peterson - 2020 - Ancient Philosophy Today 2 (1):45-69.
    In his account of epistēmē, the highest level of understanding attainable in philosophical inquiry, Aristotle articulates standards for the ideal explanations that confer this level of understanding. I argue that Aristotle's key standard for epistēmē is of central importance for the biological homology concept. The explanatory shortcoming that results from violating this standard has been vaguely articulated in recent literature on homology; Aristotle's account offers a more neutral and precise formulation of the shortcoming and its antidote. Further, the risk for (...)
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  • Natural Kinds and the Problem of Complex Essences.Travis Dumsday - 2010 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (4):619-634.
    Natural-kind essentialism faces an important but neglected difficulty: the problem of complex essences (PCE). This is the question of how to account for the unity of an instantiated kind-essence when that essence consists of multiple distinct properties, some of which lack an inherent necessary connection between them. My central goal here is to propose an essentialism-friendly solution to this problem. Along the way I also employ some points from that solution to argue for the necessary truth of essentialism (necessary, that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Barcodes and historical essences: a critique of the moderate version of intrinsic biological essentialism.Julio Torres Meléndez - 2019 - Humanities Journal of Valparaiso 14:75-89.
    The current tendency to moderate expectations that DNA barcode can be a method of discovering new species is due to the essentialist interpretation of this scientific analogy that is conceptually unsustainable. Something similar has happened in the philosophical field with the weakening of the initial versions of intrinsic biological essentialism. To examine the nature of this transition, I propose two principles that define a moderate EBI: one that assumes that the history of the taxon is metaphysically dependent on the evolution (...)
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  • Essence and Necessity, and the Aristotelian Modal Syllogistic: A Historical and Analytical Study.Daniel James Vecchio - unknown
    The following is a critical and historical account of Aristotelian Essentialism informed by recent work on Aristotle’s modal syllogistic. The semantics of the modal syllogistic are interpreted in a way that is motivated by Aristotle, and also make his validity claims in the Prior Analytics consistent to a higher degree than previously developed interpretative models. In Chapter One, ancient and contemporary objections to the Aristotelian modal syllogistic are discussed. A resolution to apparent inconsistencies in Aristotle’s modal syllogistic is proposed and (...)
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  • Darwinism.James Lennox - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Darwinism designates a distinctive form of evolutionary explanation for the history and diversity of life on earth. Its original formulation is provided in the first edition of On the Origin of Species in 1859. This entry first formulates ‘Darwin's Darwinism’ in terms of five philosophically distinctive themes: (i) probability and chance, (ii) the nature, power and scope of selection, (iii) adaptation and teleology, (iv) nominalism vs. essentialism about species and (v) the tempo and mode of evolutionary change. Both Darwin and (...)
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  • Classifying Life, Reconstructing History and Teaching Diversity: Philosophical Issues in the Teaching of Biological Systematics and Biodiversity.Thomas A. C. Reydon - 2013 - Science & Education 22 (2):189-220.
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  • Richard A. Richards: The Species Problem: A Philosophical Analysis.Thomas A. C. Reydon - 2013 - Science & Education 22 (2):381-389.
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  • Transhumanism, theological anthropology, and modern biological taxonomy.Travis Dumsday - 2017 - Zygon 52 (3):601-622.
    I examine the ways in which the theological and philosophical debate surrounding transhumanism might profit by a detailed engagement with contemporary biology, in particular with the mainline accounts of species and speciation. After a short introduction, I provide a very brief primer on species concepts and speciation in contemporary biological taxonomy. Then in a third section I draw out some implications for the prospects of our being able intentionally to intervene in human evolution for the production of new species out (...)
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