Matthew Slater

Richard Boyd has long campaigned for a view of natural kinds he calls the Homeostatic Property Cluster account. This account has been particularly exciting for philosophers of biology unhappy with traditional essentialism about natural kinds and the views that biological kinds are, in one way or another, “historical entities”. Though defenders of HPC kinds have done much to further articulate the view, many questions about the account remain. One pressing question concerns the way in which HPC kinds are supposed to accommodate our inductive and explanatory practices via causal, homeostatic mechanisms. In addressing the question, I am led to an alternative conception of what a property cluster kind might be. I call my alternative, in deference to its Boydian origins, the Stable Property Cluster account of natural kinds. Rather than emphasizing homeostasis or causal mechanism, the SPC account emphasizes the stability of a property cluster over the various ways stability may be maintained. In virtue of this modest change of emphasis, the SPC account does not advertise itself as an account of a kind of natural kind — it is, I think, an attractive candidate for a general natural kind concept, able to accommodate the diversity of natural kinds we find in the world.

Different chemical species are often cited as paradigm examples of structurally delimited natural kinds. While classificatory monism may thus seem plausible for simple molecules, it looks less attractive for complex biological macromolecules. I focus on the case of proteins that are most plausibly individuated by their functions. Is there a single, objective count of proteins? I argue that the vagaries of function individuation infect protein classification. We should be pluralists about macromolecular classification.

Talk of different types of cells is commonplace in the biological sciences. We know a great deal, for example, about human muscle cells by studying the same type of cells in mice. Information about cell type is apparently largely projectible across species boundaries. But what defines cell type? Do cells come pre-packaged into different natural kinds? Philosophical attention to these questions has been extremely limited [see e.g., Wilson (Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, pp 187–207, 1999; Genes and the Agents of Life, 2005; Wilson et al. Philos Top 35(1/2):189–215, 2007)]. On the face of it, the problems we face in individuating cellular kinds resemble those biologists and philosophers of biology encountered in thinking about species: there are apparently many different (and interconnected) bases on which we might legitimately classify cells. We could, for example, focus on their developmental history (a sort of analogue to a species’ evolutionary history); or we might divide on the basis of certain structural features, functional role, location within larger systems, and so on. In this paper, I sketch an approach to cellular kinds inspired by Boyd’s Homeostatic Property Cluster Theory, applying some lessons from this application back to general questions about the nature of natural kinds

Philosophical reflections on the environment began with early philosophers' invocation of a cosmology that mixed natural and supernatural phenomena. Today, the central philosophical problem posed by the environment involves not what it can teach us about ourselves and our place in the cosmic order but rather how we can understand its workings in order to make better decisions about our own conduct regarding it. The resulting inquiry spans different areas of contemporary philosophy, many of which are represented by the fifteen original essays in this volume. The contributors first consider conceptual problems generated by rapid advances in biology and ecology, examining such topics as ecological communities, adaptation, and scientific consensus. The contributors then turn to epistemic and axiological issues, first considering philosophical aspects of environmental decision making and then assessing particular environmental policies, including reparations, remediation, and nuclear power, from a normative perspective

The hard questions regarding identity, explicitly or implicitly, involve questions of time, therefore inheriting the complexities involved in the discussion of the concept of time. This book begins the discussion of the philosophy of time by posing the question of whether time exists or not. In ancient times, the reality of time was presupposed even if the concept did not have a clear-cut definition. Ironically, it was during the time when physicists seemed to gain a better scientific understanding of time that philosophers began questioning the reality of time. The discussion of identity begins with Locke’s notion that the identity of a person consists in nothing but memories and conscious experience, which are independent of the body.