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The New Mechanical Philosophy
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 279

The New Mechanical Philosophy

This volume argues for a new image of science that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, casting the work of science as an effort to understand those mechanisms. Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them in physical, life, and social sciences.

Theistic Evolution
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 335

Theistic Evolution

Deeply rooted in the classical tradition, this book develops a contemporary, re-imagined proposal of an Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective on theistic evolution.

Conflicting Models for the Origin of Life
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 516

Conflicting Models for the Origin of Life

Conflicting Models for the Origin of Life Conflicting Models for the Origin of Life provides a forum to compare and contrast the many hypotheses that have been put forward to explain the origin of life. There is a revolution brewing in the field of Origin of Life: in the process of trying to figure out how Life started, many researchers believe there is an impending second creation of life, not necessarily biological. Up-to-date understanding is needed to prepare us for the technological, and societal changes it would bring. Schrodinger’s 1944 “What is life?” included the insight of an information carrier, which inspired the discovery of the structure of DNA. In “Conflicting Models o...

Examining Philosophy Itself
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 306

Examining Philosophy Itself

One of the most distinctive features of philosophy is self-reflection and by exploring novel philosophical methods, this book examines some of the most important metaphilosophical issues. Shows that philosophers are not only concerned with metaphysical, epistemological, conceptual, ethical, and aesthetic issues of things around us, but how they also pay serious attention to the nature, value, methods, and development of philosophy itself Explores some of the most important metaphilosophical issues: Is philosophy progressive? Are metaphysical claims meaningful? What is the aim of philosophy? Should analytic metaphysics be replaced by naturalised metaphysics? What is the prospect of a digital approach to philosophy of science? Can poetry play a substantial role in philosophy? Revisits the value and significance of philosophy and examines new directions in metaphilosophy Features 12 essays with contributions by leading philosophers across the globe

LIFE
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 671

LIFE

LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry examines nature, cognition and society as an interwoven tapestry across disciplinary boundaries. This volume explores how information and communication are instrumental in and for living systems, acknowledging an integrative account of media as environments and technologies. The aim of the collection is a fuller and richer account of everyday life through a spectrum of insights from internationally known scholars of the natural sciences (physical and life sciences), social sciences and the arts. How or should life be defined? If life is a medium, how is it mediated? Viewed as interactions, transactions and contexts of ecosystems, life can be recognized throu...

A Critical Reflection on Automated Science
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 302

A Critical Reflection on Automated Science

This book provides a critical reflection on automated science and addresses the question whether the computational tools we developed in last decades are changing the way we humans do science. More concretely: Can machines replace scientists in crucial aspects of scientific practice? The contributors to this book re-think and refine some of the main concepts by which science is understood, drawing a fascinating picture of the developments we expect over the next decades of human-machine co-evolution. The volume covers examples from various fields and areas, such as molecular biology, climate modeling, clinical medicine, and artificial intelligence. The explosion of technological tools and drivers for scientific research calls for a renewed understanding of the human character of science. This book aims precisely to contribute to such a renewed understanding of science.

A Pluralist’s Guide to Solving Molyneux’s Problem
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 248

A Pluralist’s Guide to Solving Molyneux’s Problem

This book presents a novel pluralist strategy for answering Molyneux’s 300+-year-old conundrum: Would a person, born blind but given sight, identify a shape previously known only by their touch? The author interweaves historical scholarship with contemporary philosophical work and empirical research on animal, infant, and adult human perception. The author argues that we need a new approach to Molyneux’s problem because we do not know what the problem is really about, and it is untestable because a Molyneux subject cannot be physically realized. He criticizes Molyneux’s question for its simplistic taxonomy of "the blind" that groups significant individual differences into a singular on...

The Dynamics of Science
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 276

The Dynamics of Science

Millions of scientific articles are published each year, making it difficult to stay abreast of advances within even the smallest subdisciplines. Traditional approaches to the study of science, such as the history and philosophy of science, involve closely reading a relatively small set of journal articles. And yet many questions benefit from casting a wider net: Is most scientific change gradual or revolutionary? What are the key sources of scientific novelty? Over the past several decades, a massive effort to digitize the academic literature and equip computers with algorithms that can distantly read and analyze a digital database has taken us one step closer to answering these questions. The Dynamics of Science brings together a diverse array of contributors to examine the largely unexplored computational frontiers of history and philosophy of science. Together, they reveal how tools and data from automated textual analysis, or machine “reading,” combined with methods and models from game theory and cultural evolutionary theory, can begin to answer fundamental questions about the nature and history of science.

Functions: selection and mechanisms
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 241

Functions: selection and mechanisms

This volume handles in various perspectives the concept of function and the nature of functional explanations, topics much discussed since two major and conflicting accounts have been raised by Larry Wright and Robert Cummins’ papers in the 1970s. Here, both Wright’s ‘etiological theory of functions’ and Cummins’ ‘systemic’ conception of functions are refined and elaborated in the light of current scientific practice, with papers showing how the ‘etiological’ theory faces several objections and may in reply be revisited, while its counterpart became ever more sophisticated, as researchers discovered fresh applications for it. Relying on a firm knowledge of the original posi...

Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 373

Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010

Vitalism is understood as impacting the history of the life sciences, medicine and philosophy, representing an epistemological challenge to the dominance of mechanism over the last 200 years, and partly revived with organicism in early theoretical biology. The contributions in this volume portray the history of vitalism from the end of the Enlightenment to the modern day, suggesting some reassessment of what it means both historically and conceptually. As such it includes a wide range of material, employing both historical and philosophical methodologies, and it is divided fairly evenly between 19th and 20th century historical treatments and more contemporary analysis. This volume presents a significant contribution to the current literature in the history and philosophy of science and the history of medicine.