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Topological and mechanistic explanations in biology (Proceedings of the CAPE International Workshops, 2012. Part I: IHPST, Paris - CAPE, Kyoto philosophy of biology workshop)CAPE Studies in Applied Philosophy and Ethics Series 1 127-137. 2013.November 4th-5th, 2012 at Kyoto University. Organizers: Hisashi Nakao & Pierre-Alain Braillard.
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7Organisms: Between a Kantian Approach and a Liberal ApproachIn Matteo Mossio (ed.), Organization in Biology, Springer. pp. 127-157. 2023.The concept of “organism” has been central to modern biology, with its definition and philosophical implications evolving since the nineteenth century. In contemporary biology, the divide between developmental and physiological approaches and evolutionary approaches has influenced the definition of organism. The convergence between molecular biology and evolutionary biology has led to the term “suborganismal biology,” while the return to the organism has been characterized by animal behavior stu…Read more
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92Dynamical emergence and computation: An introduction (review)Minds and Machines 18 (4): 425-430. 2008.
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6Entre les légumes et les poissonsCahiers Philosophiques 172 (1): 43-60. 2023.La question qu’on nomme aujourd’hui des « genres naturels » en métaphysique porte sur les « jointures » du monde : quelles classes de choses constituent le monde et existent réellement? Si nominalistes et réalistes s’opposent depuis longtemps sur la possibilité même de répondre à cette question, les sciences modernes proposent des découpages en genres naturels qui contrastent souvent avec l’image naturelle du monde. Cet article se concentre sur les genres naturels en biologie. Après avoir présen…Read more
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8Why?: The Philosophy Behind the QuestionStanford University Press. 2023.A philosopher explores the many dimensions of a beguilingly simple question. Why did triceratops have horns? Why did World War I occur? Why does Romeo love Juliet? And, most importantly, why ask why? Through an analysis of these questions and others, philosopher Philippe Huneman describes the different meanings of "why," and how those meanings can, and should (or should not), be conflated. As Huneman outlines, there are three basic meanings of why: the cause of an event, the reason of a belief, …Read more
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16Generalizing Darwinism as a Topic for Multidisciplinary DebateIn Agathe du Crest, Martina Valković, André Ariew, Hugh Desmond, Philippe Huneman & Thomas A. C. Reydon (eds.), Evolutionary Thinking Across Disciplines: Problems and Perspectives in Generalized Darwinism, Springer Verlag. pp. 2147483647-2147483647. 2023.The ideas Darwin published in On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man in the nineteenth century continue to have a major impact on our current understanding of the world in which we live and the place that humans occupy in it. Darwin’s theories constitute the core of the contemporary life sciences, and elicit enduring fascination as a potentially unifying basis for various branches of biology and the biomedical sciences. They can be used to understand the biological ground of human cogni…Read more
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28Evolutionary Thinking Across Disciplines: Problems and Perspectives in Generalized Darwinism (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2023.This volume aims to clarify the epistemic potential of applying evolutionary thinking outside biology, and provides a survey of the current state of the art in research on relevant topics in the life sciences, the philosophy of science, and the various areas of evolutionary research outside the life sciences. By bringing together chapters by evolutionary biologists, systematic biologists, philosophers of biology, philosophers of social science, complex systems modelers, psychologists, anthropolo…Read more
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8Introduction: Jean Gayon (1949–2018), Philosopher and Historian of the Life SciencesIn Philosophy, History and Biology: Essays in Honour of Jean Gayon, Springer Verlag. pp. 1-9. 2023.Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris 1–Panthéon-Sorbonne since 2000, former director of the Institute of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST) of the CNRS, Jean Gayon (1949–2018) died on April 28th 2018 following a long illness that he faced with determination and courage.
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3Doing Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology with Jean GayonIn Pierre-Olivier Méthot (ed.), Philosophy, History and Biology: Essays in Honour of Jean Gayon, Springer Verlag. pp. 297-309. 2023.Throughout my university career, and since I began my Ph.D., Jean Gayon was there. Unlike many contributors to this volume, to the early or mid-career researchers who do French philosophy of biology today, I did not know Jean as a dissertation supervisor or a professor, but as a dissertation examiner, as expert witness to the beginning of my career and as indisputable scientific authority. For fifteen years I have been doing philosophy of evolutionary biology with Jean Gayon. In this chapter, I …Read more
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439Ever since its inception, the theory of evolution has been reified into an “-ism”: Darwinism. While biologists today tend to shy away from the term in their research, the term is still actively used in the broader academic and societal contexts. What exactly is Darwinism, and how precisely are its various uses and abuses related to the scientific theory of evolution? Some call for limiting the meaning of the term “Darwinism” to its scientific context; others call for its abolition; yet others cl…Read more
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77Naturalising 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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12Introduction: 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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4Titles, uses and instructions of use: the function of art and artefactsFacta Philosophica 9 (2): 3-21. 2007.For us, the word "technique" connotes the world of technological artefacts, each of them having their own function. Nevertheless, this word comes from the old Greek word technè, which meant both arts and technology, and could in the medieval times be accurately translated in latin by "ars". Indeed, "ars" shared the same ambiguity as technè, as does the German Kunst, since künstlich is used as much for "artistic" as for "artificial". But when the "liberal arts" began to include painting, sculptur…Read more
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13Challenging the Modern Synthesis: Adaptation, Development, and Inheritance (edited book)OUP Usa. 2017.Since its origin in the early 20th century, the modern synthesis theory of evolution has grown to represent the orthodox view on the process of organic evolution. It is a powerful and successful theory. Its defining features include the prominence it accords to genes in the explanation of development and inheritance, and the role of natural selection as the cause of adaptation. Since the advent of the 21st century, however, the modern synthesis has been subject to repeated and sustained challeng…Read more
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17Death: Perspectives from the Philosophy of BiologySpringer Verlag. 2023.This book addresses several key issues in the biological study of death with the intent of capturing their genealogy, the assumptions and presuppositions they make, and the way that they open specific new research avenues. The book is divided into two sections: the first considers physiology and the second evolutionary biology. Huneman explains that biologists in the late 1950s put forth a research framework that evolutionarily accounts for death in terms of either an effect of the weakness of n…Read more
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1Bedau M. And Humphreys P. (eds.), Emergence. Contemporary readings, MIT Press, 2008 (review)History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 31 471-520. 2009.International audience.
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Adaptations in transitionsIn Frédéric Bouchard & Philippe Huneman (eds.), From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality, Mit Press. 2013.
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376The integrated information theory of agencyBrain and Behavioral Sciences 45. 2022.We propose that measures of information integration can be more straightforwardly interpreted as measures of agency rather than of consciousness. This may be useful to the goals of consciousness research, given how agency and consciousness are “duals” in many (although not all) respects.
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3IrreversibilitätIn Michael Fuchs (ed.), Handbuch Alter Und Altern: Anthropologie – Kultur – Ethik, J.b. Metzler. pp. 175-183. 2021.Die Existenz von Organismen wird allgemein in Form eines Lebenszyklus dargestellt: Sie führt vom Stadium der Zygote über die Fortpflanzungsfähigkeit und das Alter bis zum Tod. Das Leben eines Individuums wird daher wesentlich als irreversibel von der Geburt bzw. der Entstehung auf den Tod gerichtet verstanden. Die philosophische Tradition hat lange Zeit versucht, wenn nicht diese Irreversibilität zu erklären, so doch zumindest ihr einen Sinn zu geben.
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35International audience.
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43Natural Selection beyond Life? A Workshop ReportLife 11 (10): 1051. 2021.Natural selection is commonly seen not just as an explanation for adaptive evolution, but as the inevitable consequence of “heritable variation in fitness among individuals”. Although it remains embedded in biological concepts, such a formalisation makes it tempting to explore whether this precondition may be met not only in life as we know it, but also in other physical systems. This would imply that these systems are subject to natural selection and may perhaps be investigated in a biological …Read more
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41What Is It Like To Be an Environment? A Semantic and Epistemological InquiryBiological Theory 17 (1): 94-112. 2021.In this article, I consider the term “environment” in various claims and models by evolutionists and ecologists. I ask whether “environment” is amenable to a philosophical explication, in the same way some key terms of evolutionary theorizing such as “fitness,” “species,” or more recently “population” have been. I will claim that it cannot. In the first section, I propose a typology of theoretical terms, according to whether they are univocal or equivocal, and whether they have been the object o…Read more
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751The Ontology of Organismic Agency: A Kantian ApproachIn Andrea Altobrando & Pierfrancesco Biasetti (eds.), Natural Born Monads: On the Metaphysics of Organisms and Human Individuals, De Gruyter. pp. 33-64. 2020.Biologists explain organisms’ behavior not only as having been programmed by genes and shaped by natural selection, but also as the result of an organism’s agency: the capacity to react to environmental changes in goal-driven ways. The use of such ‘agential explanations’ reopens old questions about how justified it is to ascribe agency to entities like bacteria or plants that obviously lack rationality and even a nervous system. Is organismic agency genuinely ‘real’ or is it just a useful fictio…Read more
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13Review of Stuart Glennan, The New Mechanical Philosophy (review)Philosophy of Science 87 (4): 763-769. 2020.
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14Essay Review: Exploring the Conceptual Foundations of Post-Hamiltonian Evolutionary Biology—Rationality and Evolution of Social AgentsActa Biotheoretica 68 (4): 453-467. 2020.Evolutionary theorists often talk as if natural selection were choosing the most adapted traits, or if organisms were deciding to do the most adaptive strategy. Moreover, the payoff of those decisions often depend on what others are doing, and since Hamilton (1964), biologists possess conceptual tools such as kin selection and inclusive fitness to make sense of outcomes of evolution in these contexts, even when they seem unadaptive (such as sterility). The link between selection and adaptation t…Read more
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Macroevolution and Microevolution: Issues of Time Scale in Evolutionary 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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3Robustness: The Explanatory PictureIn Marta Bertolaso, Silvia Caianiello & Emanuele Serrelli (eds.), Biological Robustness. Emerging Perspectives from within the Life Sciences, Springer. pp. 95-121. 2018.Robustness is a pervasive property of living systems, instantiated at all levels of the biological hierarchies. As several other usual concepts in evolutionary biology, such as plasticity or dominance, it has been questioned from the viewpoint of its consequences upon evolution as well as from the side of its causes, on an ultimate or proximate viewpoint. It is therefore equally the explanandum for some enquiries in evolution in ecology, and the explanans for some interesting evolutionary phenom…Read more
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55Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences (edited book)Springer. 2015.The Darwinian theory of evolution is itself evolving and this book presents the details of the core of modern Darwinism and its latest developmental directions. The authors present current scientific work addressing theoretical problems and challenges in four sections, beginning with the concepts of evolution theory, its processes of variation, heredity, selection, adaptation and function, and its patterns of character, species, descent and life. The second part of this book scrutinizes Darwinis…Read more
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23Special Issue Editor’s Introduction: “Revisiting the Modern Synthesis”Journal of the History of Biology 52 (4): 509-518. 2019.
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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 |