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Charles Peirce’s Philosophy and the Intersection Between Biosemiotics and the Philosophy of Biology
Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy of signs, generally construed as the foundation of current semiotic theory, offers a theory of general perception with...
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The Explanatory Role of Machine Learning in Molecular Biology
The philosophical debate around the impact of machine learning in science is often framed in terms of a choice between AI and classical methods as...
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Analytic and Continental Approaches to Biology and Philosophy: David Hull and Marjorie Grene on ‘What Philosophy of Biology Is Not’
Gaining momentum during the last third of the twentieth century, the philosophy of biology is now a distinct field with its own debates, journals,...
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Scientists’ Views on the Ethics, Promises and Practices of Synthetic Biology: A Qualitative Study of Australian Scientific Practice
Synthetic biology is a broad term covering multiple scientific methodologies, technologies, and practices. Pairing biology with engineering, synbio...
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The minimal role of the higher categories in biology
Talk of higher categories (ranks) like Genus and Family is ubiquitous in biology. Yet there is widespread skepticism about these categories. We can...
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Unlike Agents: The Role of Correlation in Economics and Biology
While there are many important similarities between evolution in biology and learning in economics, we should be cautious when importing ideas from...
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A hapless mathematical contribution to biology
This is the story, told in the light of a new analysis of historical data, of a mathematical biology problem that was explored in the 1930s in Thomas...
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Vitalism and the Construction of Biology: A Historico-Epistemological Reflection
What is theHistorical epistemology historical epistemologyGayon, JeanOn historical epistemology of the life sciences? In what way does it differ from...
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That was the Philosophy of Biology that was: Mainx, Woodger, Nagel, and Logical Empiricism, 1929–1961
This article is a systematic critical survey of work done in the philosophy of biology within the logical empiricist tradition, beginning in the...
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Biology, Evolution and Life
Popper’s engagement with biology harked back to Logik (1935) and his participation in a meeting of the progressive Theoretical Biology...
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Politically Contested Terminology
This chapter introduces case studies centered on misuses of the words “racist” and “woman.” It argues that assertions involving misuses of...
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Scaffolds and scaffolding: an explanatory strategy in evolutionary biology
In recent years, the explanatory term “scaffold” has been gaining prominence in evolutionary biology. This notion has a long history in other areas,...
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Values in evolutionary biology: a comparison between the contemporary debate on organic progress and Canguilhem’s biological philosophy
The aim of this paper is to make a comparison and build up a dialogue between two different philosophical approaches to values in evolutionary...
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Concluding Remarks 2: Economics and Evolutionary Biology: An Overview of Their (Recent) Interactions
Over the past fifty years, the conceptual exchanges between evolutionary biology and economics have been greatly intensified. From these exchanges,...
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Function, Adaptation, and Design in Biology
The main misunderstanding of the etiological conception of the concept of function is to confuse this notion with the concept of adaptation. The...
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Keywords in Economics and Evolutionary Biology: Twenty Five Concepts
This section exposes twenty-five key concepts in evolutionary biology and in economics. Each concept is explicated first in evolutionary biology,...
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Revisiting abstraction and idealization: how not to criticize mechanistic explanation in molecular biology
Abstraction and idealization are the two notions that are most often discussed in the context of assumptions employed in the process of model...
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What is Causal Specificity About, and What is it Good for in Philosophy of Biology?
The concept of causal specificity is drawing considerable attention from philosophers of biology. It became the rationale for rejecting (and...
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Model-Theoretic Semantics for Politically Contested Terminology
This chapter explores the history of model-theoretic semantics, arguing that such theories can provide objective truth conditions for sentences...