Causal relations among components and activities are intentionally misrepresented in mechanistic explanations found routinely across the life sciences. Since several mechanists explicitly advocate accurately representing factors that make a difference to the outcome, these idealizations conflict with the stated rationale for mechanistic explanation. We argue that these idealizations signal an o...

Although chemistry is by far the largest scientific discipline according to any quantitative measure, it had, until recently, been virtually ignored by professional philosophers of science. They left both a vacuum and a one-sided picture of science tailored to physics. Since the early 1990s, the situation has changed drastically, such that philosophy of chemistry is now one of the most flourish...

The phenomenon of digital computation is explained (often differently) in computer science, computer engineering andmore broadly in cognitive science. Although the semantics and implications of malfunctions have received attention in the philosophy of biology and philosophy of technology, errors in computational systems remain of interest only to computer science. Miscomputation has not gotten ...

To better understand this cultural phenomenon, Zenit interviewed Fr. Leopoldo Prieto, LC, a professor of philosophy in the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome. Fr Leopoldo’s newest book, recently published in Spain, is entitled “Man and Animal: New Boundaries of Anthropology” (El hombre y el animal: Nuevas fronteras de la antropología, BAC, Madrid 2008). Analyzing the results of var...

In this essay we propose that the fundamental philosophical concept of conceptual complexity is captured mathematically by the notion of algorithmic information content, and we discuss the complexity of physical and mathematical theories, the complexity of biological mutations, and the most complex system in biology, the human brain. These are steps in the direction of a mathematical philosophy...

K. Kampourakis (ed.), The Philosophy of Biology: A Companion for Educators, History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences 1, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6537-5_5, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise natural selection could quite unaided have drawn all the music of the...

Cognitive science has been shaped by analytic philosophy and the computer metaphor, which has led to the dominance of such themes and notions as rationality, language, representation, functionalism, and computation. I would like to make a case for a cognitive science which lets itself be shaped by a phenomenological philosophy and biology. Central notions then become: experience, embodiment, et...