Download or read book Individuation Process and Scientific Practices written by Otávio Bueno and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What things count as individuals, and how do we individuate them? It is a classic philosophical question often tackled from the perspective of analytic metaphysics. This volume proposes that there is another channel by which to approach individuation -- from that of scientific practices. From this perspective, the question then becomes: How do scientists individuate things and, therefore, count them as individuals? This volume collects the work of philosophers of science to engage with this central philosophical conundrum from a new angle, highlighting the crucial topic of experimental individuation and building upon recent, pioneering work in the philosophy of science. An introductory chapter foregrounds the problem of individuation, arguing it should be considered prior to the topic of individuality. The following chapters address individuation and individuality from a variety of perspectives, with prominent themes being the importance of experimentation, individuation as a process, and pluralism in individuation's criteria. Contributions examine individuation in a wide range of sciences, including stem cell biology, particle physics, and community ecology. Other chapters examine the metaphysics of individuation, its bearing on realism/antirealism debates, and interrogate epistemic aspects of individuation in scientific practice. In exploring individuation from the philosophy of biology, physics, and other scientific subjects, this volume ultimately argues for the possibility of several criteria of individuation, upending the tenets of traditional metaphysics. It provides insights for philosophers of science, but also for scientists interested in the conceptual foundations of their work.
Download or read book Techno Scientific Practices written by Federica Russo and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-10-03 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In scholarly debates, as well as in everyday parlance, we tend to pull science and technology apart: science gives us theory, and technology applies it. In practice, however, science and technologies are highly intertwined. In Techno-Scientific Practices: An Informational Approach, Federica Russo looks at the practice of science and elucidates the role of technologies and instruments in the process of knowledge production. In this exercise, it becomes evident that technologies cannot be analyzed on their own, but always in relation to epistemic agents. Thus, Techno-Scientific Practices emphasizes the importance of analyzing the process of knowledge production in techno-scientific contexts, in which there is a triad of relations to look at: us, the instruments, and the world. The book thus builds bridges between the philosophy of science, philosophy of technology, and science and technology studies in an unprecedent way.
Download or read book Process Realism in Physics written by William Penn and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-07-03 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science should tell us what the world is like. However, realist interpretations of physics face many problems, chief among them the pessimistic meta induction. This book seeks to develop a realist position based on process ontology that avoids the traditional problems of realism. Primarily, the core claim is that in order for a scientific model to be minimally empirically adequate, that model must describe real experimental processes and dynamics. Any additional inferences from processes to things, substances or objects are not warranted, and so these inferences are shown to represent the locus of the problems of realism. The book then examines the history of physics to show that the progress of physical research is one of successive eliminations of thing interpretations of models in favor of more explanatory and experimentally verified process interpretations. This culminates in collections of models that cannot coherently allow for thing interpretations, but still successfully describe processes.
Download or read book Research Handbook on Legal Evolution written by Wojciech Zaluski and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2024-03-14 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adopting an evolutionary perspective, this Research Handbook presents novel and cutting-edge insights into the interdisciplinary field of legal evolution. Engaging with various scientific approaches, it provides a versatile analysis of legal evolution, examining the field as a whole as well as in the context of specific branches of law.
Download or read book Biological Identity written by Anne Sophie Meincke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analytic metaphysics has recently discovered biology as a means of grounding metaphysical theories. This has resulted in long-standing metaphysical puzzles, such as the problems of personal identity and material constitution, being increasingly addressed by appeal to a biological understanding of identity. This development within metaphysics is in significant tension with the growing tendency amongst philosophers of biology to regard biological identity as a deep puzzle in its own right, especially following recent advances in our understanding of symbiosis, the evolution of multi-cellular organisms and the inherently dynamical character of living systems. Moreover, and building on these biological insights, the broadly substance ontological framework of metaphysical theories of biological identity appears problematic to a growing number of philosophers of biology who invoke process ontology instead. This volume addresses this tension, exploring to what extent it can be dissolved. For this purpose, the volume presents the first selection of essays exclusively focused on biological identity and written by experts in metaphysics, the philosophy of biology and biology. The resulting cross-disciplinary dialogue paves the way for a convincing account of biological identity that is both metaphysically constructive and scientifically informed, and will be of interest to metaphysicians, philosophers of biology and theoretical biologists.
Download or read book Inter identities in Life Mind and Society written by Arantza Etxeberria and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2021-08-18 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pragmatism s Evolution written by Trevor Pearce and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An important contribution . . . invaluable to anyone interested in the history of pragmatism and the influence of biology and evolution on pragmatic thinkers.” —Richard J. Bernstein, The New School for Social Research, author of The Pragmatic Turn In Pragmatism’s Evolution, Trevor Pearce demonstrates that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism owes an enormous debt to specific biological debates in the late 1800s, especially those concerning the role of the environment in development and evolution. Many are familiar with John Dewey’s 1909 assertion that evolutionary ideas overturned two thousand years of philosophy—but what exactly happened in the fifty years prior to Dewey’s claim? What form did evolutionary ideas take? When and how were they received by American philosophers? Although the various thinkers associated with pragmatism—from Charles Sanders Peirce to Jane Addams and beyond—were towering figures in American intellectual life, few realize the full extent of their engagement with the life sciences. In his analysis, Pearce focuses on a series of debates in biology from 1860 to 1910—from the instincts of honeybees to the inheritance of acquired characteristics—in which the pragmatists were active participants. If we want to understand the pragmatists and their influence, Pearce argues, we need to understand the relationship between pragmatism and biology. “Pragmatism’s Evolution is about the role of evolution, as a theory, in American pragmatism, as well as the early evolution of pragmatism itself.” —Isis “Superb.” —Metascience “[An] important book.” —Acta Biotheoretica “A significant and edifying work.” —Choice “Pearce has done something remarkable and all too rare: written a book at the intersection of philosophy, science, and history that is equally excellent in all three respects.” —International Journal of Philosophical Studies
Download or read book Philosophers Look at Quantum Mechanics written by Alberto Cordero and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume explores the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. It features papers from venues of the International Ontology Congress (IOC) up to 2016. IOC is a worldwide platform for dialogue and reflection on the interactions between science and philosophy. The collection features philosophers as well as physicists, including David Albert, Harvey Brown, Jeffrey Bub, Otávio Bueno, James Cushing, Steven French, Victor Gomez-Pin, Carl Hoefer, Simon Kochen, Peter Lewis, Tim Maudlin, Peter Mittlestatedt, Roland Omnès, Juha Saatsi, Albert Solé, David Wallace, and Anton Zeilinger. Since the early days of quantum mechanics, philosophers have studied the subject with growing technical skill and fruitfulness. Their efforts have unveiled intellectual bridges between physics and philosophy. These connections have helped fuel the contemporary debate about the scope and limits of realism and understanding in the interpretation of physical theories and scientific theories in general. The philosophical analysis of quantum mechanics is now one of the most sophisticated and productive areas in contemporary philosophy, as the papers in this collection illustrate.
Download or read book Narrative Science written by Mary S. Morgan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first systematic analysis of the ways scientists have used narrative in their research.
Download or read book Biological Individuality written by Alison K. McConwell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-31 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element develops a view about biological individuality's value in two ways: while biological individuality matters for its theoretical and methodological roles in the production of scientific knowledge, its historical use in promoting the politics of social ideologies concerning progress and perfection of humanity's evolutionary future must not be ignored. Recent trends in biological individuality are analyzed and set against the history of evolutionary thought drawing from the early twentieth century.
Download or read book Contemporary Scientific Realism written by Timothy D. Lyons and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific realists claim we can justifiably believe that science is getting at the truth. However, they have faced historical challenges: various episodes across history appear to demonstrate that even strongly supported scientific theories can be overturned and left behind. In response, realists have developed new positions and arguments. As a result of specific challenges from the history of science, and realist responses, we find ourselves with an ever-increasing dataset bearing on the (possible) relationship between science and truth. The present volume introduces new historical cases impacting the debate and advances the discussion of cases that have only very recently been introduced. At the same time, shifts in philosophical positions affect the very kind of case study that is relevant. Thus, the historical work must proceed hand in hand with philosophical analysis of the different positions and arguments in play. It is with this in mind that the volume is divided into two sections, entitled "Historical Cases for the Debate" and "Contemporary Scientific Realism." All sides agree that historical cases are informative with regard to how, or whether, science connects with truth. Defying proclamations as early as the 1980s announcing the death knell of the scientific realism debate, here is that rare thing: a philosophical debate making steady and definite progress. Moreover, the progress it is making concerns one of humanity's most profound and important questions: the relationship between science and truth, or, put more boldly, the epistemic relation between humankind and the reality in which we find ourselves.
Download or read book The Scientific Imagination written by Peter Godfrey-Smith and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The imagination, our capacity to entertain thoughts and ideas "in the mind's eye," is indispensable in science as elsewhere in human life. Indeed, common scientific practices such as modeling and idealization rely on the imagination to construct simplified, stylized scenarios essential for scientific understanding. Yet the philosophy of science has traditionally shied away from according an important role to the imagination, wary of psychologizing fundamental scientific concepts like explanation and justification. In recent years, however, advances in thinking about creativity and fiction, and their relation to theorizing and understanding, have prompted a move away from older philosophical perspectives and toward a greater acknowledgement of the place of the imagination in scientific practice. Meanwhile, psychologists have engaged in significant experimental work on the role of the imagination in causal thinking and probabilistic reasoning. The Scientific Imagination delves into this burgeoning area of debate at the intersection of the philosophy and practice of science, bringing together the work of leading researchers in philosophy and psychology. Philosophers discuss such topics as modeling, idealization, metaphor and explanation, examining their role within science as well as how they affect questions in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language. Psychologists discuss how our imaginative capacities develop and how they work, their relationships with processes of reasoning, and how they compare to related capacities, such as categorization and counterfactual thinking. Together, these contributions combine to provide a comprehensive and exciting picture of the scientific imagination.
Download or read book Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences written by Daniel S. Brooks and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific philosophers examine the nature and significance of levels of organization, a core structural principle in the biological sciences. This volume examines the idea of levels of organization as a distinct object of investigation, considering its merits as a core organizational principle for the scientific image of the natural world. It approaches levels of organization--roughly, the idea that the natural world is segregated into part-whole relationships of increasing spatiotemporal scale and complexity--in terms of its roles in scientific reasoning as a dynamic, open-ended idea capable of performing multiple overlapping functions in distinct empirical settings. The contributors--scientific philosophers with longstanding ties to the biological sciences--discuss topics including the philosophical and scientific contexts for an inquiry into levels; whether the concept can actually deliver on its organizational promises; the role of levels in the development and evolution of complex systems; conditional independence and downward causation; and the extension of the concept into the sociocultural realm. Taken together, the contributions embrace the diverse usages of the term as aspects of the big picture of levels of organization. Contributors Jan Baedke, Robert W. Batterman, Daniel S. Brooks, James DiFrisco, Markus I. Eronen, Carl Gillett, Sara Green, James Griesemer, Alan C. Love, Angela Potochnik, Thomas Reydon, Ilya Tëmkin, Jon Umerez, William C. Wimsatt, James Woodward
Download or read book Species Problems and Beyond written by John S. Wilkins and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Species Problems and Beyond offers a collection of up-to-date essays discussing from an interdisciplinary perspective the many ramifications of the ‘Species Problem.’ The authors represent experts in the philosophy of biology, in species-level evolutionary investigations, and in biodiversity studies and conservation. Some of the topics addressed concern the context sensitivity of the term ‘species’; species as individuals, processes, natural kinds, or as ‘operative concepts’; species delimitation in the age of Big (genomic) Data; and taxonomic inflation and its consequences for conservation strategies. The carefully edited volume will be an invaluable resource for philosophers of biology and evolutionary biologists alike. – Olivier Rieppel, Rowe Family Curator of Evolutionary Biology, Negaunee Integrative Research Center, Field Museum, USA Species, or ‘the Species Problem’, is a topic in science, in the philosophy of science, and in general philosophy. In fact, it encompasses many aspects of the same problem, and these are dealt with in this volume. Species are often thought of as fundamental units of biological matter to be used in ecology, conservation, classification, and biodiversity. The chapters in this book present opposing views on the current philosophical and conceptual issues of the Species Problem in biology. Divided into four sections, Concepts and Theories, Practice and Methods, Ranks and Trees and Names, and Metaphysics and Epistemologies, the book is authored by biologists, philosophers, and historians, many leaders in their fields. Topics include ontology of species, definitions of both species category and units, species rank, speciation issues, nomenclature, ecology, and species conservation. Species Problems and Beyond aims to clarify the contemporary issues of the Species Problem. It is ideal for use in upper-level seminars and courses in Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Biology, Systematics and Taxonomy, and Phylogenetics/Cladistics, and for any scholar in these fields.
Download or read book Applying Mathematics written by Otávio Bueno and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is that when scientists need some piece of mathematics through which to frame their theory, it is there to hand? Bueno and French offer a new approach to the puzzle of the applicability of mathematics, through a detailed examination of a series of case studies from the history of twentieth-century physics.
Download or read book Biological Individuality written by Scott Lidgard and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-24 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Individuals are things that everybody knows—or thinks they do. Yet even scholars who practice or analyze the biological sciences often cannot agree on what an individual is and why. One reason for this disagreement is that the many important biological individuality concepts serve very different purposes—defining, classifying, or explaining living structure, function, interaction, persistence, or evolution. Indeed, as the contributors to Biological Individuality reveal, nature is too messy for simple definitions of this concept, organisms too quirky in the diverse ways they reproduce, function, and interact, and human ideas about individuality too fraught with philosophical and historical meaning. Bringing together biologists, historians, and philosophers, this book provides a multifaceted exploration of biological individuality that identifies leading and less familiar perceptions of individuality both past and present, what they are good for, and in what contexts. Biological practice and theory recognize individuals at myriad levels of organization, from genes to organisms to symbiotic systems. We depend on these notions of individuality to address theoretical questions about multilevel natural selection and Darwinian fitness; to illuminate empirical questions about development, function, and ecology; to ground philosophical questions about the nature of organisms and causation; and to probe historical and cultural circumstances that resonate with parallel questions about the nature of society. Charting an interdisciplinary research agenda that broadens the frameworks in which biological individuality is discussed, this book makes clear that in the realm of the individual, there is not and should not be a direct path from biological paradigms based on model organisms through to philosophical generalization and historical reification.
Download or read book Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon written by Andrea Bardin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This combination of historiography and theory offers the growing Anglophone readership interested in the ideas of Gilbert Simondon a thorough and unprecedented survey of the French philosopher’s entire oeuvre. The publication, which breaks new ground in its thoroughness and breadth of analysis, systematically traces the interconnections between Simondon’s philosophy of science and technology on the one hand, and his political philosophy on the other. The author sets Simondon’s ideas in the context of the epistemology of the late 1950s and the 1960s in France, the milieu that shaped a generation of key French thinkers such as Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida. This volume explores Simondon’s sources, which were as eclectic as they were influential: from the philosophy of Bergson to the cybernetics of Wiener, from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to the epistemology of Canguilhem, and from Bachelard’s philosophy of science to the positivist sociology and anthropology of luminaries such as Durkheim and Leroi-Gourhan. It also tackles aspects of Simondon’s philosophy that relate to Heidegger and Elull in their concern with the ontological relationship between technology and society and discusses key scholars of Simondon such as Barthélémy, Combes, Stiegler, and Virno, as well as the work of contemporary protagonists in the philosophical debate on the relevance of technique. The author’s intimate knowledge of Simondon’s language allows him to resolve many of th e semantic errors and misinterpretations that have plagued reactions to Simondon’s many philosophical neologisms, often drawn from his scientific studies.
