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6Biodiversity and the Diversities of LifeRivista di Estetica 59 44-62. 2015.I am first going to develop a sort of cartography of the different meanings and usages of “biodiversity”, which will emphasize a few leitmotives. Next, to introduce some of these leitmotives, I will highlight two or three important elements in the process through which the term came to form a decisive role both for scientists from different fields linked to ecology, and the politicians or lawyers involved with the policies that govern the consequences of human actions on nature. In the conclusio…Read more
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14Natural sciencesIn Allen W. Wood & Songsuk Susan Hahn (eds.), The Cambridge history of philosophy in the nineteenth century (1790-1870), Cambridge University Press. 2011.
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51The neutral theory of biodiversity assumes that coexisting organisms are equally able to survive, reproduce and disperse, but predicts that stochastic fluctuations of these abilities drive diversity dynamics. It predicts remarkably well many biodiversity patterns, although substantial evidence for the role of niche variation across organisms seems contradictory. Here, we discuss this apparent paradox by exploring the meaning and implications of ecological equivalence. We address the question whe…Read more
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50Causal Parity and Externalisms: Extensions in Life and Mind (review)Minds and Machines 23 (3): 377-404. 2013.This paper questions the form and prospects of “extended theories” which have been simultaneously and independently advocated both in the philosophy of mind and in the philosophy of biology. It focuses on Extend Mind Theory (EMT) and Developmental Systems Theory (DST). It shows first that the two theories vindicate a parallel extension of received views, the former concerning extending cognition beyond the brain, the latter concerned with extending evolution and development beyond the genes. It …Read more
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214Topological explanations and robustness in biological sciencesSynthese 177 (2): 213-245. 2010.This paper argues that besides mechanistic explanations, there is a kind of explanation that relies upon “topological” properties of systems in order to derive the explanandum as a consequence, and which does not consider mechanisms or causal processes. I first investigate topological explanations in the case of ecological research on the stability of ecosystems. Then I contrast them with mechanistic explanations, thereby distinguishing the kind of realization they involve from the realization r…Read more
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26A Pluralist Framework to Address Challenges to the Modern Synthesis in Evolutionary TheoryBiological Theory 9 (2): 163-177. 2014.This paper uses formal Darwinism as elaborated by Alan Grafen to articulate an explanatory pluralism that casts light upon two strands of controversies running across evolutionary biology, viz., the place of organisms versus genes, and the role of adaptation. Formal Darwinism shows that natural selection can be viewed either physics-style, as a dynamics of alleles, or in the style of economics as an optimizing process. After presenting such pluralism, I argue first that whereas population geneti…Read more
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78Outlines of a theory of structural explanationsPhilosophical Studies 175 (3): 665-702. 2018.This paper argues that in some explanations mathematics are playing an explanatory rather than a representational role, and that this feature unifies many types of non-causal or non-mechanistic explanations that some philosophers of science have been recently exploring under various names. After showing how mathematics can play either a representational or an explanatory role by considering two alternative explanations of a same biological pattern—“Bergmann’s rule”—I offer an example of an expla…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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116Diversifying 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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412Titles, 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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45Individuality 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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75Emergence 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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56Assessing statistical views of natural selection: Room for non-local causation?Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4): 604-612. 2013.Recently some philosophers have emphasized a potentially irreconcilable conceptual antagonism between the statistical characterization of natural selection and the standard scientific discussion of natural selection in terms of forces and causes. Other philosophers have developed an account of the causal character of selectionist statements represented in terms of counterfactuals. I examine the compatibility between such statisticalism and counterfactually based causal accounts of natural select…Read more
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27From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality (edited book)MIT Press. 2013.Our 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 in…Read more
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3Kant's Critique Of Leibnizian Theory Of Organisms: An Unnoticed Cornerstone For Criticism?Yeditepe'de Felsefe (Philosophy at Yeditepe) 4
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89From the critique of judgment to the hermeneutics of nature: Sketching the fate of philosophy of nature after Kant (review)Continental Philosophy Review 39 (1): 1-34. 2006.This paper proposes an interpretative framework for some developments of the philosophy of nature after Kant. I emphasize the critique of the economy of nature in the Critique of judgement. I argue that it resulted in a split of a previous structure of knowledge; such a structure articulated natural theology and natural philosophy on the basis of the consideration of the order displayed by living beings, both in their internal organisation and their ecological distribution. The possibility of a …Read more
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112Emergence and adaptationMinds and Machines 18 (4): 493-520. 2008.I investigate the relationship between adaptation, as defined in evolutionary theory through natural selection, and the concept of emergence. I argue that there is an essential correlation between the former, and “emergence” defined in the field of algorithmic simulations. I first show that the computational concept of emergence (in terms of incompressible simulation) can be correlated with a causal criterion of emergence (in terms of the specificity of the explanation of global patterns). On th…Read more
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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 |