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Taking the Naturalistic Turn, Or How Real Philosophy of Science Is Done
This innovative book presents candid, informal debates among scholars who examine the benefits and problems of studying science in the same way that scientists study the natural world.
Modularity
Modularity—the attempt to understand systems as integrations of partially independent and interacting units—is today a dominant theme in the life sciences, cognitive science, and computer science. The concept goes back at least implicitly to the Scientific (or Copernican) Revolution, and can be found behind later theories of phrenology, physiology, and genetics; moreover, art, engineering, and mathematics rely on modular design principles. This collection broadens the scientific discussion of modularity by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, including artificial life, cognitive science, economics, evolutionary computation, developmental and evolutionary biology, ling...
EPSA Philosophical Issues in the Sciences
This volume collects papers presented at the Founding Conference of the European Philosophy of Science Association meeting, held November 2007. It provides an excellent overview of the state of the art in philosophy of science in different European countries.
Evolution and Literary Theory
Over the past two decades, poststructuralism in its myriad forms has come to dominate literary criticism to the exclusion of virtually any other point of view. Few scholars have escaped the coercive authority of its programmatic radicalism. In Evolution and Literary Theory, Joseph Carroll vigorously attacks the foundational principles of poststructuralism and offers in their stead a bold new theory that situates literary criticism within the matrix of evolutionary theory.
Multicellularity
Scholars consider the origins and consequences of the evolution of multicellularity, addressing a range of organisms, experimental protocols, theoretical concepts, and philosophical issues. The evolution of multicellularity raises questions regarding genomic and developmental commonalities and discordances, selective advantages and disadvantages, physical determinants of development, and the origins of morphological novelties. It also represents a change in the definition of individuality, because a new organism emerges from interactions among single cells. This volume considers these and other questions, with contributions that explore the origins and consequences of the evolution of multic...
Structuralism and Form in Literature and Biology
The book considers biology in parallel with philosophical structuralism in order to argue that notions of form in the organism are analogous to similar ideas in structuralist philosophy and literary theory. This analogy is then used to shed light on debates among biological scientists from the turn of the 19th century to the present day, including Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Dawkins, Crick, Goodwin, Rosen and West-Eberhard. The book critiques the endorsement of genetic manipulation and bioengineering as keys to solving agricultural and environmental problems, suggesting that alternative models have been marginalized in the promotion of this discourse. Drawing from the work of philosophers including Cassirer, Saussure, Jakobson and Foucault the book ultimately argues that methods based on agroecology, supported by molecular applications (such as marker-assisted selection, MAS), can both advance agricultural development and remain focused on the whole organism.
Evolution, Cognition, and Realism
This collection of essays originated from an interdisciplinary conference on 'Evolutionary Epistemology' held in Pittsburgh in December of 1988 under the sponsorship of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Philosophy of Science. Contents: Epistemological Roles for Selection Theory, by Donald T. Campbell; Evolutionary Models of Science, by Ronald N. Giere; Should Epistemologists Take Darwin Seriously? by Michael Bradie; Natural Selection, Justification, and Inference to the Best Explanation, by Alan H. Goldman; Interspecific Competition, Evolutionary Epistemology, and Ecology, by Kristin Shrader-Frechette; Toward Making Evolutionary Epistemology into a Truly Naturalized Epistemology, by William Bechtel; Confessions of a Creationist, by C. Kenneth Waters. Co-published with the Center for Philosophy of Science.
Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition
Empirical and philosophical perspectives on scaffolding that highlight the role of temporal and temporary resources in development across concepts of culture, cognition, and evolution. "Scaffolding" is a concept that is becoming widely used across disciplines. This book investigates common threads in diverse applications of scaffolding, including theoretical biology, cognitive science, social theory, science and technology studies, and human development. Despite its widespread use, the concept of scaffolding is often given short shrift; the contributors to this volume, from a range of disciplines, offer a more fully developed analysis of scaffolding that highlights the role of temporal and t...
Critical Ethology and Post-Anthropocentric Ethics
The primary purpose of this book is to contribute to an overcoming of the traditional separation between humanties and life sciences which, according to the authors, is required today both by the developments of these disciplines and by the social problems they have to face. The volume discusses the theoretical, epistemological and ethical repercussions of the main acquisitions obtained in the last decades from the behavioral sciences. Both the authors are inspired by the concept of a “critical ethology”, oriented to archive the nature/culture and human/animal dichotomies. The book proposes a theoretical and methodological restructuring of the comparative study of the animal behavior, le...
Evolutionary Systems
The three well known revolutions of the past centuries - the Copernican, the Darwinian and the Freudian - each in their own way had a deflating and mechanizing effect on the position of humans in nature. They opened up a richness of disillusion: earth acquired a more modest place in the universe, the human body and mind became products of a long material evolutionary history, and human reason, instead of being the central, immaterial, locus of understanding, was admitted into the theater of discourse only as a materialized and frequently out-of-control actor. Is there something objectionable to this picture? Formulated as such, probably not. Why should we resist the idea that we are in certa...
