Books in the History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences series

This book takes a new approach to the debate on causal pluralism in the philosophy of biology by asking how useful pluralism is instead of debating its truth.

This book explains the ethical and conceptual tensions in the use of psychopathy in different countries, including America, Canada, the UK, Croatia, Australia, and New Zealand.

This book offers to the international reader a collection of original articles of some of the most skillful historians and philosophers of biology currently working in Latin American universities. During the last decades, increasing attention has been paid in Latin America to the history and philosophy of biology, but since many local authors prefer to write in Spanish or in Portuguese, their ideas have barely crossed the boundaries of the continent. This volume aims to remedy this state of things, providing a good sample of this production to the English speaking readers, bringing together contributions from researchers working in Brazilian, Argentinean, Chilean, Colombian and Mexican universities.The stress on the regional provenance of the authors is not intended to suggest the existence of something like a Latin American history and philosophy of biology, supposedly endowed with distinctive features. On the contrary, the editors firmly believethat advances in this field can be achieved only by stimulating the integration in the international debate. Based on this assumption, the book focuses on two topics, life and evolution, and presents a selection of contributions addressing issues such as the history of the concept of life, the philosophical reflection on life manipulation and life extension, the structure and development of evolutionary theory as well as human evolution.Life and Evolution ¿ Latin American Essays on the History and Philosophy of Biology will provide the international reader with a rather complete picture of the ongoing research in the history and philosophy of biology in Latin America, offering a snapshot of this dynamic community. It will also contribute to contextualize and develop the debate concerning life and evolution, and the relation between the two phenomena.

This book offers to the international reader a collection of original articles of some of the most skillful historians and philosophers of biology currently working in Latin American universities. During the last decades, increasing attention has been paid in Latin America to the history and philosophy of biology, but since many local authors prefer to write in Spanish or in Portuguese, their ideas have barely crossed the boundaries of the continent. This volume aims to remedy this state of things, providing a good sample of this production to the English speaking readers, bringing together contributions from researchers working in Brazilian, Argentinean, Chilean, Colombian and Mexican universities.The stress on the regional provenance of the authors is not intended to suggest the existence of something like a Latin American history and philosophy of biology, supposedly endowed with distinctive features. On the contrary, the editors firmly believe that advances in this field can be achieved only by stimulating the integration in the international debate. Based on this assumption, the book focuses on two topics, life and evolution, and presents a selection of contributions addressing issues such as the history of the concept of life, the philosophical reflection on life manipulation and life extension, the structure and development of evolutionary theory as well as human evolution.Life and Evolution ¿ Latin American Essays on the History and Philosophy of Biology will provide the international reader with a rather complete picture of the ongoing research in the history and philosophy of biology in Latin America, offering a snapshot of this dynamic community. It will also contribute to contextualize and develop the debate concerning life and evolution, and the relation between the two phenomena.

Both issues unfolded against the background of a romantic national culture of Western Europe in the 19th century: Jews, primarily from Eastern Europe, began to believe these notions and soon they took the lead in the re-formulation of Jewish and Zionist existence.

This book develops a philosophical account that reveals the major characteristics that make an explanation in the life sciences reductive and distinguish them from non-reductive explanations.

This book examines important questions in evolutionary biology, including how evolutionary innovations are generated and the origin of new constructional principles and new organs. It also scrutinizes the beginning of the major evolutionary transitions.

The World Health Organization states that depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and predicts that by 2030 the epidemic of depression raging across the world will be the single biggest contributor to the overall burden of disease of all health conditions.

This volume presents an innovative look at early modern medicine and natural philosophy as historically interrelated developments. The individual chapters chart this interrelation in a variety of contexts, from the Humanists who drew on Hippocrates, Galen, and Aristotle to answer philosophical and medical questions, to medical debates on the limits and power of mechanism, and on to eighteenth-century controversies over medical materialism and 'atheism.'The work presented here broadens our understanding of both philosophy and medicine in this period by illustrating the ways these disciplines were in deep theoretical and methodological dialogue and by demonstrating the importance of this dialogue for understanding their history.Taken together, these papers argue that to overlook the medical context of natural philosophy and the philosophical context of medicine is to overlook fundamentally important aspects of these intellectual endeavors.

This open access book features essays written by philosophers, biologists, ecologists and conservation scientists facing the current biodiversity crisis.

This anthology of essays presents a sample of studies from recent philosophy of medicine addressing issues which attempt to answer very general (interdependent) questions: (a) what is a disease and what is health?

Chapters on slavery and the self and the development of an understanding of Dualism bring this examination up to date on the latest 21st century work in the field. At the heart of this book is the matter of how we define the problem of consciousness itself: has there been any progress in our understanding of the working of mind and brain?

In this book, philosophers of biology explore central concepts and key issues in biology education. It covers a variety of topics ranging from traditional ones to contemporary ones, such as genomics, systems biology or evolutionary developmental biology.

Current Perspectives on Sexual Selection

This volume explores issues in the philosophy of science relating to biology and economics. It interrogates the concepts of mechanism and causality in these disciplines and draws careful juxtapositions between philosophical apparatus and scientific practice.