Everything Flows Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology

by Nicholson, Daniel J.; Dupre, John

• ISBN13: 9780191824685
• ISBN10: 0191824682
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2018-07-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

Daniel J. Nicholson is a research fellow currently based at Egenis, The Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, at the University of Exeter. Previously, he held appointments at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas in Tel Aviv, as well as at the Konrard Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research near Vienna. His work is characterized by an integrated and strongly interdisciplinary approach to the history and philosophy of biology, with a specific interest in the ontology of living systems and the adequacy of mechanistic explanations to make sense of them. He is also interested in general topics in the philosophy of science and in theoretical biology, broadly construed.

John Dupre is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Egenis, The Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, at the University of Exeter. He has formerly held posts at Oxford, Birkbeck College, London, and Stanford, and visiting chairs at the University of Amsterdam and Cambridge. He has wide-ranging interests in the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of science generally, and naturalistic, empirically grounded metaphysics. He is a former president of the British Society for Philosophy of Science, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Table of Contents

Foreword, Johannes Jaeger
Part I: Introduction
1. Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, John Dupre & Daniel J. Nicholson
Part II: Metaphysics
2. Processes and Precipitates, Peter Simons
3. Dispositionalism: A Dynamic Theory of Causation, Rani Lill Anjum & Stephen Mumford
4. Biological Processes: Criteria of Identity and Persistence, James DiFrisco
5. Genidentity and Biological Processes, Thomas Pradeu
6. Ontological Tools for the Process Turn in Biology: Some Basic Notions of General Process Theory, Johanna Seibt
Part III: Organisms
7. Reconceptualizing the Organism: From Complex Machine to Flowing Stream, Daniel J. Nicholson
8. Objectcy and Agency: Towards a Methodological Vitalism, Denis Walsh
9. Symbiosis, Transient Biological Individuality, and Evolutionary Processes, Frederic Bouchard
10. From Organizations of Processes to Organisms and Other Biological Individuals, Argyris Arnellos
Part IV: Development and Education
11. Developmental Systems Theory as a Process Theory, Paul Griffiths & Karola Stotz
12. Waddington's Processual Epigenetics and the Debate over Cryptic Variability, Flavia Fabris
13. Capturing Processes: The Interplay of Modelling Strategies and Conceptual Understanding in Developmental Biology, Laura Nuno de la Rosa
14. Intersecting Processes are Necessary Explanantia for Evolutionary Biology, but Challenge Retrodiction, Eric Bapteste & Gemma Anderson
Part IV: Implications and Applications
15. A Process Ontology for Macromolecular Biology, Stephan Guttinger
16. A Processual Perspective on Cancer, Marta Bertolaso & John Dupre
17. Measuring the World: Olfaction as a Process Model of Perception, Ann-Sophie Barwich
18. Persons as Biological Processes: A Bio-Processual Way Out of the Personal Identity Dilemma, Anne Sophie Meincke