Everything Flows Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
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 Dupré 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.Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology is an excellent example of the skillful sampling of an on-going approach in philosophy of science. The sampling quite obviously emerged from intensive live discussions among the authors and stands in sharp contrast to the haphazardly put together collections that seem to dominate the field these days. It is an insightful and surprisingly lively read. I especially warmly recommend it to those philosophers exposed chiefly to the standard topics and approaches in philosophy of biology and in philosophy of science more generally.
Slobodan Perović, Metascience
I highly recommend this insightful and lively collection.
Slobodan Perović, University of Belgrade, Metascience
This is an important book in the development of biological explanation and understanding ... Essential.
L. C. Archie, CHOICE
This anthology heralds a revolution in the philosophy of biology, arguing that the long-standing dominance of the mechanistic framework should finally come to an end. Ambitious and innovative, yet cogent and empirically grounded, Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré's Everything Flows is a must read for anyone interested in understanding new directions in the investigation of the biological world.
Katherine Valde, Philosophy of Science
Everything Flows is an impressive collection and a worthwhile read for metaphysicians, philosophers of science, and biologists...Whether or not support for processualism will grow or dwindle remains to be seen; irrespective, the book stands as an absorbing study of a specific moment in analytic philosophy of biology, and a manifesto for a distinctive movement in that field
Adam Ferner, BJPS Review of Books
Nicholson and Dupré's Everything Flows is an excellent, multiperspectival effort to raise awareness about the metaphysical assumptions and problems that underlie the dominant orientation in mainstream biology, namely, that of mechanistic neo-Darwinism with its substance outlook, and to display why the process-relational alternative is to be embraced instead.
Adam C. Scarfe, Process Studies
This book appears at a time when genocentric mechanism has been widely disseminated to the public even as cutting-edge biologists and philosophers have been pulling the rug out from under it ... One of the uses of this book for philosophers will be to counter the metaphysical enshrinement of a false, but widespread impression about genes ... It is true that Everything Flows assumes philosophical and biological literacy, but it is also true that it does a very good job teaching both.
David Depew, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences