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2002
The title \"What Functions Explain\" reflects the way in which Peter McLaughlin addresses the topic of functional explanation. The aim of his discussion is not to assess which philosophical account of functional explanation is the right one or how the concept of functional explanation should best...
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2002
Introduction: Systematics has always been an important topic for philosophy of biology. Nonetheless, philosophical books dealing with this subject alone are very rare. Marc Ereshefsky, known for his contributions in the philosophy of taxonomy, now gives an encompassing treatment of systematics,...
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2002
Introduction: Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould are both dedicated Darwinians. Despite this, for the last few decades these two scientists have argued fiercely about how evolutionary history and mechanisms are to be viewed. The debate has been fought out before a general, rather than...
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Review: The Mind's Arrows: Bayes Nets and Graphical Causal Models in Psychology by Clark Glymour
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Introduction: Amongst people working in statistics, computer science, and philosophy, Bayes nets are a well- known tool to model causal structures. Besides other things this approach provides ways for obtaining causal relationships out of statistical data. The idea is that existing (conditional)...
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2003
Introduction: Even though Psillos’s latest book is called Causation and Explanation, it is actually a unified discussion of causation, laws, and explanation. Despite the fact that these three topics are interconnected, it is rare to have detailed treatment of all of them. Psillos does not really...
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[Review of the book Embryology, Epigenesis, and Evolution: Taking Development Seriously, by Jobert]
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Introduction: In the last few decades, the fields of genetics and molecular biology have been of substantial importance for the philosophy of biology. The same does not quite hold for developmental biology, despite some philosophical discussions of development. Jason Robert’s recent book...
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2005
Introduction: Neo-Darwinism coined a particular picture of evolution: the explanation of adaptation and speciation as the central goals of evolutionary theory, and natural selection as the only directing cause in evolution. Recently, evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) became an...
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2006
Introduction: Traditionally, studies in the philosophy of biology have been strongly centered on evolutionary biology and systematics. To be sure, during the last four decades the field of molecular biology has been subject to substantial philosophical discussion as well. Still, discussions of...
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[Review of the book Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives, by P.K. Stanford]
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Introduction: What makes Kyle Stanford’s book on scientific realism so valuable to philosophers of science is that it both presents new philosophical ideas and bases its argument on a detailed study of the history of science. While scientific realism—the idea that our most well‐confirmed theories...
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2007
Introduction: Reductionism in the Philosophy of Science develops a novel account of reduction in science and applies it to the relationship between classical and molecular genetics. However, rather than addressing the epistemological issues that have been essential to the reductionism debate in...