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116Philosophy of Science: A User's Guide (edited book)MIT Press. forthcoming.Thought experiments play a role in science and in some central parts of contemporary philosophy. They used to play a larger role in philosophy of science, but have been largely abandoned as part of the field’s “practice turn”. This chapter discusses possible roles for thought experimentation within a practice-oriented philosophy of science. Some of these roles are uncontroversial, such as exemplification and aiding discovery. A more controversial role is the reliance on thought experiments to ju…Read more
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Thought Experiments Repositioned (edited book)Thought experiments play a role in science and in some central parts of contemporary philosophy. They used to play a larger role in philosophy of science, but have been largely abandoned as part of the field’s “practice turn”. This chapter discusses possible roles for thought experimentation within a practice-oriented philosophy of science. Some of these roles are uncontroversial, such as exemplification and aiding discovery. A more controversial role is the reliance on thought experiments to ju…Read more
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124A Third Way to the Selected Effect/Causal Role Distinction in the Great Encode DebateTheoretical Biology Forum 2023 (1-2): 53-74. 2023.Since the ENCODE project published its final results in a series of articles in 2012, there is no consensus on what its implications are. ENCODE’s central and most controversial claim was that there is essentially no junk DNA: most sections of the human genome believed to be «junk» are functional. This claim was met with many reservations. If researchers disagree about whether there is junk DNA, they have first to agree on a concept of function and how function, given a particular definition, ca…Read more
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25Towards a Politicized Anatomy of Fundamental DisagreementInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (3): 450-466. 2023.Fundamental disagreement is at the core of many debates surrounding epistemic relativism. Proponents of epistemic relativism argue that certain disagreements are irresolvable because proponents base their views on fundamentally different epistemic principles and, thus, fundamentally different epistemic systems. Critics of epistemic relativism argue that this analysis is wrong since the particular epistemic principles in question are most of the time derived from or instances of the same, more ba…Read more
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31Scientific Pluralism in Practice: Responses to Anomaly in the SciencesPhilosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 14 (14). 2022.Scientific pluralism has become a household position within the philosophy of science literature. There are numerous accounts of plurality within various research fields. Most scientific pluralists, however, focus on the plurality of theories, explanations, or mechanisms, while other potential targets of plurality that the philosophy of scientific practice has particularly emphasized have so far not received extensive treatment. How should we approach such practice-based candidates of plurality?…Read more
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30What Counts as an Immune Response? On the Role of Abiotic Stress in ImmunologyBiological Theory 18 (3): 210-224. 2023.In the postgenomic era, interactions between organism and environment are central in disciplines such as epigenetics, medical physiology, and immunology. Particularly in the more "applied" medical fields, an emphasis lies on interactions of the organism with other organisms, that is, other living things. There is, however, a growing amount of research investigating the impact of abiotic triggers on the immune system. While the distinction between biota and abiota features heavily in other contex…Read more
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29Seeing “Lamarckian” More Positively: The Use/Disuse Paradigm Increases UnderstandingBioessays 41 (6): 1900054. 2019.
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23Small RNA research and the scientific repertoire: a tale about biochemistry and genetics, crops and worms, development and diseaseHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (1): 1-25. 2021.The discovery of RNA interference in 1998 has made a lasting impact on biological research. Identifying the regulatory role of small RNAs changed the modes of molecular biological inquiry as well as biologists' understanding of genetic regulation. This article examines the early years of small RNA biology's success story. I query which factors had to come together so that small RNA research came into life in the blink of an eye. I primarily look at scientific repertoires as facilitators of rapid…Read more
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12Teaching Biologists the Philosophy of Their Time: Kostas Kampourakis and Tobias Uller: Philosophy of Science for Biologists. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2020, 340pp, ISBN: 9781108740708 (review)Acta Biotheoretica 69 (3): 483-491. 2021.
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60Notes on a complicated relationship: scientific pluralism, epistemic relativism, and stancesSynthese 199 (1-2): 3485-3503. 2020.While scientific pluralism enjoys widespread popularity within the philosophy of science, a related position, epistemic relativism, does not have much traction. Defenders of scientific pluralism, however, dread the question of whether scientific pluralism entails epistemic relativism. It is often argued that if a scientific pluralist accepts epistemic relativism, she will be unable to pass judgment because she believes that “anything goes”. In this article, I will show this concern to be unneces…Read more
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50Friedrich Miescher’s Discovery in the Historiography of Genetics: From Contamination to Confusion, from Nuclein to DNAJournal of the History of Biology 53 (3): 451-484. 2020.In 1869, Johann Friedrich Miescher discovered a new substance in the nucleus of living cells. The substance, which he called nuclein, is now known as DNA, yet both Miescher’s name and his theoretical ideas about nuclein are all but forgotten. This paper traces the trajectory of Miescher’s reception in the historiography of genetics. To his critics, Miescher was a “contaminator,” whose preparations were impure. Modern historians portrayed him as a “confuser,” whose misunderstandings delayed the d…Read more
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68Back to Chromatin: ENCODE and the Dynamic EpigenomeBiological Theory 17 (4): 235-242. 2022.The “Encyclopedia of DNA Elements” (ENCODE) project was launched by the US National Human Genome Research Institute in the aftermath of the Human Genome Project (HGP). It aimed to systematically map the human transcriptome, and held the promise that identifying potential regulatory regions and transcription factor binding sites would help address some of the perplexing results of the HGP. Its initial results published in 2012 produced a flurry of high-impact publications as well as criticisms. H…Read more
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18Do heritable immune responses extend physiological individuality?History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (4): 1-20. 2022.Immunology and its philosophy are a primary source for thinking about biological individuality. Through its discriminatory function, the immune system is believed to delineate organism and environment within one generation, thus defining the physiological individual. Based on the paradigmatic instantiations of immune systems, immune interactions and, thus, the physiological individual are believed to last only for one generation. However, in recent years, transgenerationally persisting immune re…Read more
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25Adaptive immunity or evolutionary adaptation? Transgenerational immune systems at the crossroadsBiology and Philosophy 37 (5): 1-21. 2022.In recent years, immune systems have sparked considerable interest within the philosophy of science. One issue that has received increased attention is whether other phyla besides vertebrates display an adaptive immune system. Particularly the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9-based systems has triggered a discussion about how to classify adaptive immune systems. One question that has not been addressed yet is the transgenerational aspect of the CRISPR-Cas9-based response. If immunity is acquired and inh…Read more
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386Rethinking hereditary relations: the reconstitutor as the evolutionary unit of hereditySynthese 200 (5): 1-42. 2022.This paper introduces the reconstitutor as a comprehensive unit of heredity within the context of evolutionary research. A reconstitutor is the structure resulting from a set of relationships between different elements or processes that are actively involved in the recreation of a specific phenotypic variant in each generation regardless of the biomolecular basis of the elements or whether they stand in a continuous line of ancestry. Firstly, we justify the necessity of introducing the reconstit…Read more
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33A use/disuse paradigm for CRISPR-Cas systemsBiology and Philosophy 34 (1): 13. 2019.In his insightful review, Eugene V. Koonin discusses various aspects of CRISPR-Cas systems with a strong focus on their qualities as "adaptive immune systems". The CRISPR-Cas system is most famous for its application as a gene-editing tool. Koonin provides a deeper insight into its biological function in bacteria, which is to immunize the cell against parasite DNA. I shall comment on one issue discussed in the text, in two steps. First, I shall elaborate on CRISPR-Cas systems and their supposed …Read more
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University of ViennaLecturer
Vienna, Austria
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |