Böcker i Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology-serien

A collection of essays by Alexander Rosenberg, discussing how Darwinian mechanisms account for human values, the character of social institutions, and the justification of our claims to knowledge in the sciences.

This book examines central topics in philosophy of biology, challenging the current evolutionary accounts of the female orgasm and analysing them for bias. It examines the concept of objectivity and the structure of evolutionary theory and unlocks the puzzle of the units of selection debates into four distinct aspects.

This book explores the epistemological and ethical issues at the foundations of environmental philosophy, emphasising the conservation of biodiversity. Sahota Sarkar criticises attempts to attribute intrinsic value to nature and defends an anthropocentric position on biodiversity conservation based on an untraditional concept of transformative value.

There is a paradox lying at the heart of the study of heredity. Genetic Analysis offers a deep and innovative understanding of our ways of thinking about heredity, written by one of the most important empirical scientists in the field.

This study surveys the history of thinking about species from Aristotle to modern biology to better understand the origin and significance of the species problem. It advocates a solution based on the idea of the division of conceptual labor, whereby species concepts function in different ways theoretically and operationally.

Do scientists discover facts about the distant past or do they, in some sense, make prehistory? In this book, Derek Turner argues that this problem has surprising and important consequences for the scientific realism debate. His book will be of interest to philosophers and scientists alike.

Reasoning in Biological Discoveries brings together a series of essays written and co-written by Lindley Darden that focus on one of the most heavily debated topics of scientific discovery. Darden summarizes the philosophy of discovery and elaborates the role that mechanisms play in biological discovery.

This book is a sustained examination of issues in the philosophy of ecology that have been a source of controversy since the emergence of ecology as an explicit scientific discipline.

These essays examine the developments in three fundamental biological disciplines - embryology, evolutionary biology, and genetics. These disciplines were in conflict for much of the twentieth century and the essays in this collection examine key methodological problems within these disciplines and the difficulties faced in overcoming the conflicts between them.

Neven Sesardic defends the view that it is both possible and useful to measure the separate contributions of heredity and environment to the explanation of human psychological differences. His book is a fresh and compelling intervention in a very contentious debate.

The question of whether biologists should continue to use the Linnaean hierarchy has been a hotly debated issue. Ereshefsky argues that biologists should abandon the Linnaean system and adopt an alternative that is in line with evolutionary theory. He then makes specific recommendations for a post-Linnaean method of classification.

This book is intended to help transform epistemology - the traditional study of knowledge - into a rigorous discipline by removing conceptual roadblocks and developing formal tools required for a fully naturalized epistemology.

This book examines from a multidisciplinary viewpoint the question of what we mean by setting sustainability as a goal for environmental management. The author explores ways to break down the disciplinary barriers to communication and deliberation about environment policy, and to integrate science and evaluations into a comprehensive environmental policy.

Ron Amundson examines two hundred years of scientific views on the evolution-development relationship from the perspective of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). This new perspective challenges several popular views about the history of evolutionary thought by claiming that many earlier authors had made history come out right for the Evolutionary Synthesis.

In this book, William S. Cooper outlines a theory of rationality in which logical law emerges as an intrinsic aspect of evolutionary biology. This biological perspective on logic, though at present unorthodox, could change traditional ideas about the reasoning process.

This book presents a collection of linked essays written by one of the leading philosophers of biology, Kim Sterelny, on the topic of biological evolution. These essays, some never before published, form a coherent whole that defends not just an overall conception of evolution, but also a distinctive take on cognitive evolution.

The Immune Self is a critical study of immunology from its origins at the end of the nineteenth century to its contemporary formulation. The book offers the first extended philosophical critique of immunology, in which the function of the term 'self' that underlies the structure of current immune theory is analysed.

This book offers a philosophical interpretation of the history of theoretical Darwinism, from its origins and early problems in the nineteenth century to the genetic theory of natural selection developed between 1920 and 1960. It will appeal to philosophers and historians of science and to evolutionary biologists.

Robert Brandon is one of the most important and influential of contemporary philosophers of biology. This collection of his recent essays covers all the traditional topics in the philosophy of evolutionary biology and as such could serve as an introduction to the field.

This book explores the nature of development against current trends in biological theory and practice and looks at the interrelations between development and evolution, an area of resurgent biological interest. Clearly written, it should be of interest to students and professionals in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of biology.

This fine collection of essays by a leading philosopher of science presents a defence of integrative pluralism as the best description for the complexity of scientific inquiry today. This book will be of interest to students and professionals in the philosophy of science.

Between 1940 and 1970, pioneers in the new field of cell biology discovered the operative parts of cells and their contributions to cell life. William Bechtel emphasises how mechanisms were discovered by cell biologists, focusing especially on the way in which new instruments made these inquiries possible.

This book examines the relationship between intelligence and environmental complexity, and in so doing links philosophy of mind to more general issues about the relations between organisms and environments.

David Hull, one of the dominant figures in contemporary philosophy of science, sets out in this 2001 volume a general analysis of a selection process that applies equally to biological evolution, the reaction of the immune system to antigens, operant learning, and social and conceptual change in science.

This important book brings findings and theories in biology and psychology to bear on the fundamental question in ethics of what it means to behave morally. It will be read with profit by a broad swathe of philosophers, as well as psychologists and biologists.

The papers collected in this 2001 volume, written by a pre-eminent figure in the field of Aristotle's philosophy and biology, examine Aristotle's approach to biological inquiry and explanation, his concepts of matter, form and kind, and his teleology.

Philosophy of Experimental Biology explores some central philosophical issues concerning scientific research in experimental biology, including genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, developmental biology, neurobiology, and microbiology. It seeks to make sense of the explanatory strategies, concepts, ways of reasoning, approaches to discovery and problem solving, tools, models and experimental systems deployed by scientific life science researchers and also integrates developments in historical scholarship, in particular the New Experimentalism. It concludes that historical explanations of scientific change that are based on local laboratory practice need to be supplemented with an account of the epistemic norms and standards that are operative in science. This book should be of interest to philosophers and historians of science as well as to scientists.

According to the received tradition, the language used to to refer to natural kinds in scientific discourse remains stable even as theories about these kinds are refined. In this illuminating book, Joseph LaPorte argues that scientists do not discover that sentences about natural kinds, like 'Whales are mammals, not fish', are true rather than false. Instead, scientists find that these sentences were vague in the language of earlier speakers and they refine the meanings of the relevant natural-kind terms to make the sentences true. Hence, scientists change the meaning of these terms, This conclusions prompts LaPorte to examine the consequences of this change in meaning for the issue of incommensurability and for the progress of science. This book will appeal to students and professional in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of language.

This 2001 book offers an examination of functional explanation as it is used in biology and the social sciences, and focuses on the kinds of philosophical presuppositions that such explanations carry with them. It tackles such questions as: why are some things explained functionally while others are not? What do the functional explanations tell us about how these objects are conceptualized? What do we commit ourselves to when we give and take functional explanations in the life sciences and the social sciences? McLaughlin gives a critical review of the debate on functional explanation in the philosophy of science. He discusses the history of the philosophical question of teleology, and provides a comprehensive review of the post-war literature on functional explanation. What Functions Explain provides a sophisticated and detailed Aristotelian analysis of our concept of natural functions, and offers a positive contribution to the ongoing debate on the topic.