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2014

Brigandt, Ingo

Introduction: A characteristic feature of contemporary practice in the life sciences is the study of mechanisms; consequently, mechanisms have become one of the major issues currently discussed by philosophers of biology. Lindley Darden and Carl Craver have been at the forefront of creating this...

2007

Brigandt, Ingo

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...

2016

Brigandt, Ingo

Introduction: Do we really need another discussion of reduction in biology? After all, arguments for reductionism and for anti-reductionism have led to a stalemate, and philosophical investigations have come to focus on the topic of epistemic integration. Fortunately, Marie I. Kaiser takes a step...

2007

Brigandt, Ingo

Introduction: The biological process of development has always served as a focal point for empirical research and conceptual reflection on organisms and life in general. Many have drawn connections between development (ontogeny) and the history of life (phylogeny). The most recent manifestation...

2010

Brigandt, Ingo

Introduction: Reduction remains a live philosophical topic, encompassing metaphysical issues about the natural world, as well as epistemological and methodological questions about science. Germane to various philosophical notions, such as ontological determination, causation, explanation,...

2005

Brigandt, Ingo

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...

2006

Brigandt, Ingo

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...

2011

Brigandt, Ingo

Introduction: The core notion of Godfrey Smith’s account is that of a ‘Darwinian population’, which is “a population—a collection of particular things—that has the capacity to undergo evolution by natural selection” (page 6). A ‘Darwinian individual’ is a member of such an evolving population....

2003

Brigandt, Ingo

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)...

2005

Brigandt, Ingo

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...