E-Book Content
Biological Identity
Analytic metaphysics has recently discovered biology as a means of grounding metaphysical theories. This has resulted in long-standing metaphysical puzzles, such as the problems of personal identity and material constitution, being increasingly addressed by appeal to a biological understanding of identity. This development within metaphysics is in significant tension with the growing tendency among philosophers of biology to regard biological identity as a deep puzzle in its own right, especially following recent advances in our understanding of symbiosis, the evolution of multi-cellular organisms and the inherently dynamical character of living systems. Moreover, and building on these biological insights, the broadly substance ontological framework of metaphysical theories of biological identity appears problematic to a growing number of philosophers of biology who invoke process ontology instead. This volume addresses this tension, exploring to what extent it can be dissolved. For this purpose, the volume presents the first selection of essays exclusively focused on biological identity and written by experts in metaphysics, the philosophy of biology and biology. The resulting crossdisciplinary dialogue paves the way for a convincing account of biological identity that is both metaphysically constructive and scientifically informed, and will be of interest to metaphysicians, philosophers of biology and theoretical biologists. Anne Sophie Meincke is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Vienna. She works on metaphysics, philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind and action and their respective intersections. Her recent publications include the article “Autopoiesis, Biological Autonomy and the Process View of Life” (2019) and the edited volume Dispositionalism: Perspectives from Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (2020). John Dupré is Professor of Philosophy of Science and Director of the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences (Egenis) at the University of Exeter. His main field of expertise is the philosophy of biology, but he also has a longstanding interest in metaphysics. His recent publications include Processes of Life (2012) and Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology (2018), co-edited with Daniel Nicholson.
History and Philosophy of Biology
Series Editor: Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther is Associate Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).
This series explores significant developments in the life sciences from historical and philosophical perspectives. Historical episodes include Aristotelian biology, Greek and Islamic biology and medicine, Renaissance biology, natural history, Darwinian evolution, Nineteenth-century physiology and cell theory, Twentieth-century genetics, ecology, and systematics, and the biological theories and practices of non-Western perspectives. Philosophical topics include individuality, reductionism and holism, fitness, levels of selection, mechanism and teleology, and the nature-nurture debates, as well as explanation, confirmation, inference, experiment, scientific practice, and models and theories vis-à-vis the biological sciences. Authors are also invited to inquire into the “and” of this series. How has, does, and will the history of biology impact philosophical understandings of life? How can philosophy help us analyze the historical contingency of, and structural constraints on, scientific knowledge about biological processes and systems? In probing the interweaving of history and philosophy of biology, scholarly investigation could usefully turn to values, power, and potential future uses and abuses of biological knowledge. The scientific scope of the series includes evolutionary theory, environmental sciences, genomics, molecular biology, systems biology, biotechnolog