Books in the Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology series

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 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.

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.

In this volume Smith examines the early modern science of generation. Analyzing how it influenced the contemporary treatment of traditional philosophical questions, it also demonstrates how philosophical presuppositions about mechanism, substance, and cause informed the interpretations offered by those conducting empirical research on animal reproduction.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first book to offer a historical perspective on the relation of biology and ethics. The essays, by leading scholars in the field, ask such questions as whether humans are innately selfish, and whether there are particular facets of human nature that bear directly on social practices.

This collection of essays renews the question: what are genes? This book is unique in that it is the first interdisciplinary volume, written by philosophers, historians and working scientists, solely devoted to the quest for the gene.

Adaptationism and Optimality combines contributions from biologists and philosophers, and offers a systematic treatment of foundational, conceptual, and methodological issues surrounding the theory of adaptationism. It presents an up-to-date view of adaptationism and reflects the dramatic changes in our understanding of evolution that have occurred in the last twenty years.

Adaptationism and Optimality combines contributions from biologists and philosophers, and offers a systematic treatment of foundational, conceptual, and methodological issues surrounding the theory of adaptationism. It presents an up-to-date view of adaptationism and reflects the dramatic changes in our understanding of evolution that have occurred in the last twenty years.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

First published in 2000, this set of essays by some of the best names in philosophy of science explores a range of diverse issues in the intersection of biology and epistemology. The studies, taken together, help to develop and deepen our understanding of how biology works and what counts as warranted knowledge.

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.

What makes a biological entity an individual? Jack Wilson shows that past philosophers have failed to explicate the conditions an entity must satisfy to be a living individual. He explores the reason for this failure and explains why we should limit ourselves to examples involving real organisms rather than thought experiments. This book explores and resolves paradoxes that arise when one applies past notions of individuality to biological examples beyond the conventional range and presents an analysis of identity and persistence. The book's main purpose is to bring together two lines of research, theoretical biology and metaphysics, which have dealt with the same subject in isolation from one another. Wilson explains an alternative theory about biological individuality which solves problems which cannot be addressed by either field alone. He presents a more fine-grained vocabulary of individuation based on diverse kinds of living things, allowing him to clarify previously muddled disputes about individuality in 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.

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 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.

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.

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.