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20Revisiting darwinian teleology: A case for inclusive fitness as design explanationStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 76 101188. 2019.
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18How the Modern Synthesis Came to EcologyJournal of the History of Biology 52 (4): 635-686. 2019.Ecology in principle is tied to evolution, since communities and ecosystems result from evolution and ecological conditions determine fitness values. Yet the two disciplines of evolution and ecology were not unified in the twentieth-century. The architects of the Modern Synthesis, and especially Julian Huxley, constantly pushed for such integration, but the major ideas of the Synthesis—namely, the privileged role of selection and the key role of gene frequencies in evolution—did not directly or …Read more
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21The Modern Synthesis: Theoretical or Institutional Event?Journal of the History of Biology 52 (4): 519-535. 2019.This paper surveys questions about the nature of the Modern Synthesis as a historical event : was it rather theoretical than institutional? When and where did it actually happen? Who was involved? It argues that all answers to these questions are interrelated, and that systematic sets of answers define specific perspectives on the Modern Synthesis that are all complementary.
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Introduction: Time Between Metaphysics and Natural Sciences: From Physics to BiologyIn Philippe Huneman & Christophe Bouton (eds.), Time of Nature and the Nature of Time: Philosophical Perspectives of Time in Natural Sciences, Springer. 2017.
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28The Multifaceted Legacy of the Human Genome Program for Evolutionary Biology: An Epistemological PerspectivePerspectives on Science 27 (1): 117-152. 2019.
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47Naturalising purpose: From comparative anatomy to the ‘adventure of reason’Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (4): 649-674. 2006.Kant’s analysis of the concept of natural purpose in the Critique of judgment captured several features of organisms that he argued warranted making them the objects of a special field of study, in need of a special regulative teleological principle. By showing that organisms have to be conceived as self-organizing wholes, epigenetically built according to the idea of a whole that we must presuppose, Kant accounted for three features of organisms conflated in the biological sciences of the perio…Read more
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22Neutral Spaces and Topological Explanations in Evolutionary Biology: Lessons from Some Landscapes and MappingsPhilosophy of Science 85 (5): 969-983. 2018.I consider recent uses of the notion of neutrality in evolutionary biology and ecology, questioning their relevance to the kind of explanation recently labeled ‘topological explanation’. Focusing on fitness landscapes and genotype-phenotype maps, I explore the explanatory uses of neutral subspaces, as modeled in two perspectives: hyperdimensional fitness landscapes and RNA sequence-structure maps. I argue that topological properties of such spaces account for features of evolutionary systems: re…Read more
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8Temps de la nature, nature du temps: Etudes philosophiques sur le temps dans les sciences naturelles (edited book)CNRS Editions. 2018.Dans l'histoire de la philosophie, la question du temps a été abordée selon deux tendances opposées : le temps de la nature avec Aristote et le temps de la conscience avec Augustin. Ces deux formes irréductibles l'une à l'autre ont vu leur relation se complexifier, notamment avec la théorie de la relativité au début du XXe siècle, puis la mécanique quantique, qui ont bousculé notre perception et compréhension du temps. Cet ouvrage, écrit par des scientifiques et des philosophes, se concentre plu…Read more
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28Time of Nature and the Nature of Time: Philosophical Perspectives of Time in Natural Sciences (edited book)Springer. 2017.This volume addresses the question of time from the perspective of the time of nature. Its aim is to provide some insights about the nature of time on the basis of the different uses of the concept of time in natural sciences. Presenting a dialogue between philosophy and science, it features a collection of papers that investigate the representation, modeling and understanding of time as they appear in physics, biology, geology and paleontology. It asks questions such as: whether or not the noti…Read more
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24Realizability and the varieties of explanationStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 68 37-50. 2018.
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26Mapping an expanding territory: computer simulations in evolutionary biologyHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 36 (1): 60-89. 2014.The pervasive use of computer simulations in the sciences brings novel epistemological issues discussed in the philosophy of science literature since about a decade. Evolutionary biology strongly relies on such simulations, and in relation to it there exists a research program (Artificial Life) that mainly studies simulations themselves. This paper addresses the specificity of computer simulations in evolutionary biology, in the context (described in Sect. 1) of a set of questions about their sc…Read more
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28Kant’s Concept of Organism Revisited: A Framework for a Possible Synthesis between Developmentalism and Adaptationism?The Monist 100 (3): 373-390. 2017.
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11Introduction: the plurality of modelingHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 36 (1): 5-15. 2014.Philosophers of science have recently focused on the scientific activity of modeling phenomena, and explicated several of its properties, as well as the activities embedded into it. A first approach to modeling has been elaborated in terms of representing a target system: yet other epistemic functions, such as producing data or detecting phenomena, are at least as relevant. Additional useful distinctions have emerged, such as the one between phenomenological and mechanistic models. In biological…Read more
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23The behavioural ecology of irrational behavioursHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (3): 23. 2017.Natural selection is often envisaged as the ultimate cause of the apparent rationality exhibited by organisms in their specific habitat. Given the equivalence between selection and rationality as maximizing processes, one would indeed expect organisms to implement rational decision-makers. Yet, many violations of the clauses of rationality have been witnessed in various species such as starlings, hummingbirds, amoebas and honeybees. This paper attempts to interpret such discrepancies between eco…Read more
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Introduction à la phénoménologie, coll. « Cursus »Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 188 (4): 510-510. 1998.
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49Our intuitive assumption that only organisms are the real individuals in the natural world is at odds with developments in cell biology, ecology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and other fields. Although organisms have served for centuries as nature's paradigmatic individuals, science suggests that organisms are only one of the many ways in which the natural world could be organized. When living beings work together--as in ant colonies, beehives, and bacteria-metazoan symbiosis--new collective …Read more
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119Diversifying the picture of explanations in biological sciences: ways of combining topology with mechanismsSynthese 195 (1): 115-146. 2018.Besides mechanistic explanations of phenomena, which have been seriously investigated in the last decade, biology and ecology also include explanations that pinpoint specific mathematical properties as explanatory of the explanandum under focus. Among these structural explanations, one finds topological explanations, and recent science pervasively relies on them. This reliance is especially due to the necessity to model large sets of data with no practical possibility to track the proper activit…Read more
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413Titles, Uses and Instructions of Use: The Status of Intention in Art and ArtefactsFacta Philosophica 9 (1): 3-21. 2007.
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5Classification, Disease, and Evidence (edited book)Springer Science + Business. 2014.This anthology of essays presents a sample of studies from recent philosophy of medicine addressing issues which attempt to answer very general (interdependent) questions: (a) what is a disease and what is health? (b) How do we (causally) explain diseases? (c) And how do we distinguish diseases, i.e. define classes of diseases and recognize that an instance X of disease belongs to a given class B? (d) How do we assess and choose cure/ therapy?
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36The problem of generation has been, for Kant scholars, a kind of test of Kant's successive concepts of finality. Although he deplores the absence of a naturalistic account of purposiveness (and hence of reproduction) in his pre-critical writings, in the First Critique he nevertheless presents a "reductionist" view of finality in the Transcendental Dialectic's Appendices. This finality can be used only as a language, extended to the whole of nature, but which must be filled with mechanistic expla…Read more
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60On Probabilities in Biology and PhysicsErkenntnis 80 (S3): 433-456. 2015.This volume focuses on various questions concerning the interpretation of probability and probabilistic reasoning in biology and physics. It is inspired by the idea that philosophers of biology and philosophers of physics who work on the foundations of their disciplines encounter similar questions and problems concerning the role and application of probability, and that interaction between the two communities will be both interesting and fruitful. In this introduction we present the background t…Read more
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46Individuality as a Theoretical Scheme. II. About the Weak Individuality of Organisms and EcosystemsBiological Theory 9 (4): 374-381. 2014.Following a previous elaboration of the concept of weak individuality and some examples of its instances in ecology and biology, the article focuses on general features of the concept, arguing that in any ontological field individuals are understood on the basis of our knowledge of interactions, through the application of these general formulas for extracting individuals from interactions. Then, the specificities of the individuality in the sense of this weak concept are examined in ecology; I c…Read more
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76Emergence made ontological? Computational versus combinatorial approachesPhilosophy of Science 75 (5): 595-607. 2008.I challenge the usual approach of defining emergence in terms of properties of wholes “emerging” upon properties of parts. This approach indeed fails to meet the requirement of nontriviality, since it renders a bunch of ordinary properties emergent; however, by defining emergence as the incompressibility of a simulation process, we have an objective meaning of emergence because the difference between the processes satisfying the incompressibility criterion and the other processes does not depend…Read more
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Computer sciences meet evolutionary biology: issues in gradualismIn Torres Juan, Pombo Olga, Symons John & Rahman Shahid (eds.), Special sciences and the Unity of Science, Springer. 2012.
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University of Paris 1 Panthéon-SorbonneDepartment for Teaching and Research in Philosophy (UFR10)Regular Faculty
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Centre National de la Recherche ScientifiqueInstitute for the History and Philosophy of Science and TechnologyRegular Faculty
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Biology |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |