United States
£ GBP
This book assesses the prospects of (re)adopting organization as a pivotal concept in biology. It shows how organization can nourish biological thinking and practice, by reconnecting with the idea of biology as the science of organized systems. The book provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art picture of the characterizations and uses of the concept of organization in both biological science and philosophy of biology. It also deals with a variety of themes – including evolution, organogenesis, heredity, cognition and ecology – with respect to which the concept of organization can guide the elaboration of original models and new experimental protocols. It will be of interest to biologists and scholars working in philosophy of science alike.
I. Historical and Conceptual Foundations
1. 'Organization': Its Conceptual History, Definition and Relationship to Other Fundamental Biological Concepts / Georg Toepfer
2. Varieties of Organicism - A Metacritique? / Charles T. Wolfe
3. Organization as Presupposition? On the Epistemological Implications in the Attitudinal Stance / Gertrudis Van de Vijver
4. 'Dogmatic' vs 'Legitimate' Organicism: Organization as Explanans and Explanandumin Biology / Daniel J. Nicholson
5. Does Organicism Really Need Organization? / Olivier Sartenaer
II. Origins of Life
6. A Structuralist Revival for Studies on the Origins of Life and Developmental Evolution / Johannes Jaeger & Wim Hordijk
7. On the Evolutionary Development of Biological Organization from Complex Prebiotic Chemistry / Kepa Ruiz- Mirazo & Alvaro Moreno
III. Development
8. An Organizational View on Development, with a Focus on Life Cycles / Leonardo Bich & Derek Skilling
9. Modelling Mammary Organogenesis from Biological First Principles: Cells and Organization of Constraints / Ana Soto & Mael Montevil
IV. Evolution
10. Extended Heredity and the Return of Organizational Thinking in Evolutionary Biology / Gaelle Pontarotti
11. Collaboration and the Evolution of Biological Complexity: An Organizational Perspective / Argyris Arnellos & Fred Keijzer
12. Organisms: Between a Kantian Approach and a Liberal Approach / Philippe Huneman
V. Ecology
13. Individuating Ecosystems by Ascribing Functions to their Parts / Victor Lefevre & Charbel El-Hani
14. Ecological Functions and Environmental Ethics / Nei Nunes-Neto & Felipe Lima
VI. Theoretical Biology
15. Studying Functional Organization with Systems Theory / Olaf Wolkenhauer
16. Organizational Principles of Autonomy / Bernd Rosslenbroich
17. On Taking an Organizational Approach to Cognition / Cliff Hooker
18. Biological Organization at the Crossroads between Conservation and Innovation / Mael Montevil, Matteo Mossio, Stuart Kauffman
Matteo Mossio is a philosopher of biology. He is charge de recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and full member of the IHPST, in Paris, France. Matteo Mossio works mainly in the philosophy and theory of biological autonomy, and has focused on concepts as organization, agency, function, emergence, identity and heredity. He published numerous articles in international philosophical and scientific journals and, in 2015, he coauthored with Alvaro Moreno a full monograph on autonomy, which received substantial coverage in the literature. Matteo Mossio teaches in the Philosophy Program of the University of Paris 1 Pantheon - Sorbonne.
