Bücher der Reihe Elements in the Philosophy of Biology

Taking a causal perspective, this Element examines to what extent and how developmental biology, having turned molecular about four decades ago, has been able to meet the vitalist challenge. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This Element introduces this literature and proposes a novel contribution. It defends a realist stance and offers a way of delineating genuine levels of selection by invoking the notion of a functional unit.

What is a stem cell? The very idea offers a new perspective on fundamental questions about biological development. This book traces the origins of the stem cell concept, its use in stem cell research today, and implications of the idea for stem cell experiments, results, and hoped-for clinical advances.

In this book, we consider three questions. What are ecological models? How are they tested? How do ecological models inform environmental policy and politics? Through several case studies, we see how these representations which idealize and abstract can be used to explain and predict complicated ecological systems. Additionally, we see how they bear on environmental policy and politics.

In this Element, Tudor Baetu explores the metaphysical inquiry into how mechanisms relate to issues such as causation, capacities and levels of organization, and epistemic issues related to the discovery of mechanisms and the intelligibility of mechanistic representations. He shows how the gap between them can be bridged.

This Element argues that knowledge of something's history makes a difference to how we engage with it aesthetically. This means that investigation of the deep past can contribute to aesthetic aims. Aesthetic engagement with fossils and landscapes is also crucial to explaining paleontology's epistemic successes.

What is the Darwinian revolution and why is it important for philosophers? These are the questions tackled in this Element. In four sections, the topics covered are the story of the revolution, the question of whether it really was a revolution, the nature of the revolution, and the implications for philosophy, both epistemology and ethics.

The role of mathematical modeling in modern evolutionary theory has raised concerns on how abstract formulae can say anything about empirical phenomena of evolution. This Element introduces philosophical approaches to this problem and proposes a new account according to which evolutionary models are based on causal and mathematical assumptions.

Biological accounts of art typically start with evolutionary, psychological or neurobiological theories. A more comprehensive framework, based also on the ecology of art and how art behaviors get expressed in engineered niches, can help us better understand the full range of art behaviors.