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12Individual-level mechanisms in ecology and evolutionIn William C. Bausman, Janella K. Baxter & Oliver M. Lean (eds.), From biological practice to scientific metaphysics, University of Minnesota Press. 2023.
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12Health-Oriented Environmental Categories, Individual Health Environments, and the Concept of Environment in Public HealthHealth Care Analysis 32 (2): 141-164. 2024.The term ‘environment’ is not uniformly defined in the public health sciences, which causes crucial inconsistencies in research, health policy, and practice. As we shall indicate, this is somewhat entangled with diverging pathogenic and salutogenic perspectives (research and policy priorities) concerning environmental health. We emphasise two distinct concepts of environment in use by the World Health Organisation. One significant way these concepts differ concerns whether the social environment…Read more
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Potentiality in Biology; Andreas HüttemannIn Kristina Engelhard & Michael Quante (eds.), Handbook of Potentiality, Springer. 2018.
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64Was ist gute Wissenschaft? Philip KitcherIn Johannes Müller-Salo (ed.), Analytische Philosophie. Eine Einführung. pp. 111-123. 2020.
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546Broadening the problem agenda of biological individuality: individual differences, uniqueness and temporalityBiology and Philosophy 36 (2): 1-28. 2021.Biological individuality is a notoriously thorny topic for biologists and philosophers of biology. In this paper we argue that biological individuality presents multiple, interconnected questions for biologists and philosophers that together form a problem agenda. Using a case study of an interdisciplinary research group in ecology, behavioral and evolutionary biology, we claim that a debate on biological individuality that seeks to account for diverse practices in the biological sciences should…Read more
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429What is an animal personality?Biology and Philosophy 36 (1): 1-25. 2021.Individuals of many animal species are said to have a personality. It has been shown that some individuals are bolder than other individuals of the same species, or more sociable or more aggressive. In this paper, we analyse what it means to say that an animal has a personality. We clarify what an animal personality is, that is, its ontology, and how different personality concepts relate to each other, and we examine how personality traits are identified in biological practice. Our analysis show…Read more
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732ComplexityIn Dubitzsky, Wolkenhauer, Cho & Yokota (eds.), Encyclopedia of Systems Biology, Springer. pp. 456-460. 2013.This is a contribution to the encyclopedia of systems biology on complexity.
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1079The Metaphysics of Constitutive Mechanistic PhenomenaBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (3). 2017.The central aim of this article is to specify the ontological nature of constitutive mechanistic phenomena. After identifying three criteria of adequacy that any plausible approach to constitutive mechanistic phenomena must satisfy, we present four different suggestions, found in the mechanistic literature, of what mechanistic phenomena might be. We argue that none of these suggestions meets the criteria of adequacy. According to our analysis, constitutive mechanistic phenomena are best understo…Read more
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528Interdisciplinarity in Philosophy of ScienceJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 45 (1): 59-70. 2014.This paper examines various ways in which philosophy of science can be interdisciplinary. It aims to provide a map of relations between philosophy and sciences, some of which are interdisciplinary. Such a map should also inform discussions concerning the question “How much philosophy is there in the philosophy of science?” In Sect. 1, we distinguish between synoptic and collaborative interdisciplinarity. With respect to the latter, we furthermore distinguish between two kinds of reflective forms…Read more
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427Philosophie der LebenswissenschaftenInformation Philosophie 4 14-27. 2013.This paper summarizes (in German) recent tendencies in the philosophy of the life sciences.
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61Problems and Prospects of Interdisciplinary Philosophy of Science: A Report from the WorkbenchBriefe Zur Interdisziplinarität 15 32-41. 2015.Early-career philosophers of science often find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place, facing conflicting demands. While they have to meet the rigorous standards of a career in philosophy, they are at the same time expected to possess detailed knowledge of the sciences they study. By pulling in different directions, these two poles can be difficult to bridge. Interdisciplinarily engaged philosophers of science face not just an increased workload but also institutional conditions that…Read more
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64Philip Kitcher – Pragmatic Naturalism. (edited book)ontos. 2013.Philip Kitcher is one of the most distinguished philosophers of our days. Since the rise of philosophy of biology in the 1960s Kitcher has deeply influenced and inspired many of the debates in this field. Among his most important books are The Advancement of Science (1993), In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology (2003), and Science in a Democratic Society (2011). However, Kitcher’s philosophical interest is not restricted to the philosophy of science. Rather, he has also made g…Read more
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27This is a book review of Lidgard & Nyhart's edited collection on biological individuality that is aimed at integrating scientific, philosophical, and historical perspectives.
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473Normativity in the Philosophy of ScienceMetaphilosophy 50 (1-2): 36-62. 2019.This paper analyzes what it means for philosophy of science to be normative. It argues that normativity is a multifaceted phenomenon rather than a general feature that a philosophical theory either has or lacks. It analyzes the normativity of philosophy of science by articulating three ways in which a philosophical theory can be normative. Methodological normativity arises from normative assumptions that philosophers make when they select, interpret, evaluate, and mutually adjust relevant empiri…Read more
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22ENCODE and the parts of the human genomeStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 72 (C): 28-37. 2018.This paper examines a specific kind of part-whole relations that exist in the molecular genetic domain. The central question is under which conditions a particular molecule, such as a DNA sequence, is a biological part of the human genome. I address this question by analyzing how biologists in fact partition the human genome into parts. This paper thus presents a case study in the metaphysics of biological practice. I develop a metaphysical account of genomic parthood by analyzing the investigat…Read more
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520On the Limits of Causal Modeling: Spatially-Structurally Complex Biological PhenomenaPhilosophy of Science 83 (5): 921-933. 2016.This paper examines the adequacy of causal graph theory as a tool for modeling biological phenomena and formalizing biological explanations. I point out that the causal graph approach reaches it limits when it comes to modeling biological phenomena that involve complex spatial and structural relations. Using a case study from molecular biology, DNA-binding and -recognition of proteins, I argue that causal graph models fail to adequately represent and explain causal phenomena in this field. The i…Read more
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284The Limits of Reductionism in the Life SciencesHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 33 (4): 453-476. 2011.In the contemporary life sciences more and more researchers emphasize the “limits of reductionism” (e.g. Ahn et al. 2006a, 709; Mazzocchi 2008, 10) or they call for a move “beyond reductionism” (Gallagher/Appenzeller 1999, 79). However, it is far from clear what exactly they argue for and what the envisioned limits of reductionism are. In this paper I claim that the current discussions about reductionism in the life sciences, which focus on methodological and explanatory issues, leave the concep…Read more
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499Individuating Part-whole Relations in the Biological WorldIn O. Bueno, R. Chen & M. B. Fagan (eds.), Individuation across Experimental and Theoretical Sciences, Oxford University Press. 2018.What are the conditions under which one biological object is a part of another biological object? This paper answers this question by developing a general, systematic account of biological parthood. I specify two criteria for biological parthood. Substantial Spatial Inclusionrequires biological parts to be spatially located inside or in the region that the natural boundary of t he biological whole occupies. Compositional Relevance captures the fact that a …Read more
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502Well-Ordered Philosophy? Reflections on Kitcher's Proposal for a Renewal of Philosophy.In Marie I. Kaiser & Ansgar Seide (eds.), Philip Kitcher – Pragmatic Naturalism., Ontos. pp. 161-174. 2013.In his recent article Philosophy Inside Out, Philip Kitcher presents a metaphilosophical outlook that aims at nothing less than a renewal of philosophy. His idea is to draw philosophers’ attention away from “timeless questions” in the so-called “core areas” of philosophy. Instead, philosophers should address questions that matter to human lives. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to reconstruct Kitcher’s view of how philosophy should be renewed; second, to point out some difficulties relat…Read more
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445An Ontic Account of Explanatory Reduction in BiologyKölner Hochschulschriften. 2012.Convincing disputes about explanatory reductionism in the philosophy of biology require a clear and precise understanding of what a reductive explanation in biology is. The central aim of this book is to provide such an account by revealing the features that determine the reductive character of a biological explanation. Chapters I-IV provide the ground, on which I can then, in Chapter V, develop my own account of explanatory reduction in biology: Chapter I reveals the meta-philosophical assumpti…Read more
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249ReductionIn W. Dubitzky, O. Wolkenhauer, K.-H. Cho & H. Yokota (eds.), Encyclopedia of Systems Biology, Vol. X, Springer. pp. 1827-1830. 2013.This is a contribution to the encyclopedia of systems biology on reduction.
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709Der evolutionäre Naturalismus in der EthikIn Jochen Oehler (ed.), Der Mensch - Evolution, Natur und Kultur: Beiträge zu unserem heutigen Menschenbild, Springer. pp. 261-283. 2010.Charles Darwin hat eindrucksvoll gezeigt, dass der Mensch ebenso wie alle anderen Lebewesen ein Produkt der biologischen Evolution ist. Die sich an Darwin anschließende Forschung hat außerdem plausibel gemacht, dass sich nicht nur viele der körperlichen Merkmale des Menschen, sondern auch (zumindest einige) seiner Verhaltensdispositionen in adaptiven Selektionsprozessen herausgebildet haben. Die Vorstellung, dass auch die menschliche Moralität evolutionär bedingt ist, scheint daher auf den erste…Read more
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964Pragmatism, Realism, and Science. From Argument to PropagandaIn Andreas Vieth (ed.), Richard Rorty: His Philosophy Under Discussion, Verlag. pp. 65-78. 2005.Richard Rorty is well known as a propagandist of pragmatism and of a "post-philosophical" culture in which many traditional philosophical debates are dismissed as outrightly fruitless. The paper is mainly concerned with Rorty's dismissal of the realism-antirealism debate. The shift from argument to propaganda which is typical of much of Rorty's reasoning is critically investigated from different perspectives. In particular, it is argued that Rorty cannot convincingly establish a pragmatist posit…Read more
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354Philosophy of MicrobiologyInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 29 (2): 224-228. 2015.Book Review Philosophy of Microbiology MAUREEN A. O’MALLEY
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143Why It Is Time To Move Beyond Nagelian ReductionIn D. Dieks, S. Hartmann, T. Uebel & M. Weber (eds.), Probabilities, Laws and Structure, Springer. pp. 255-272. 2012.In this paper I argue that it is finally time to move beyond the Nagelian framework and to break new ground in thinking about epistemic reduction in biology. I will do so, not by simply repeating all the old objections that have been raised against Ernest Nagel’s classical model of theory reduction. Rather, I grant that a proponent of Nagel’s approach can handle several of these problems but that, nevertheless, Nagel’s general way of thinking about epistemic reduction in terms of theories and th…Read more
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447L'explication en biologieIn F. Merlin & T. Hoquet (eds.), Précis de Philosophie de la biologie [Handbook Philosophy of Biology], Vuibert Press. pp. 143-155. 2014.
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244Biological PartsIn H. Burkhardt, J. Seibt & G. Imaguire (eds.), Handbook of Mereology, Philosophia Verlag Gmbh. pp. 97-100. 2017.
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13Explanation in the special science: The case of biology and history (edited book)Springer. 2014.Biology and history are often viewed as closely related disciplines, with biology informed by history, especially in its task of charting our evolutionary past. Maximizing the opportunities for cross-fertilization in these two fields requires an accurate reckoning of their commonalities and differences-precisely what this volume sets out to achieve. Specially commissioned essays by a team of recognized international researchers cover the full panoply of topics in these fields and include notable…Read more
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413Themen aus den LebenswissenschaftenIn Markus Andreas Schrenk (ed.), Handbuch Metaphysik (German), Metzler. 2017.
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64Explanation in Evo-DevoIn de la Rosa L. N. & Müller G. B. (eds.), Evolutionary Developmental Biology - A Reference Guide, Springer. 2021.Evo-devo is a multidisciplinary field that investigates the interplay between evolutionary and developmental processes and brings together different kinds of explanatory strategies. This chapter examines the structure of paradigmatic explanations in evo-devo (e.g., the explanation of the origin of an evolutionary novelty) and raises philosophical questions about explanation in evo-devo. Much research in evo-devo is concerned with studying the developmental mechanisms that constrain and facilitat…Read more
University of Cologne
PhD, 2012
Bielefeld, NRW, Germany
Areas of Specialization
Metaphilosophy |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Epistemology |