on what one wants those terms to mean, so disputes about them are semantic: but not merely so. Unpacking words and concepts is essential to understanding the natural phenomena to which they are meant to refer. As to Godfrey-Smith's little book, it provides an authoritative but easy starting place for readers of Current Biology who want to root out tacit philosophical commitments in their discip...

As a newcomer, the philosophical basis of systems biology seems intuitive and appealing, the underlying philosophy being that the whole of a living system cannot be completely understood by the study of its individual parts. Yet answers to the questions "What is systems biology?" and "What constitutes a systems biology approach in 2016?" are somewhat more elusive. This seems to be due largely t...

Abstract Biological agency has received much attention in recent philosophy of biology. But what is the motivation for introducing talk into biology and meant by “agent”? Two distinct motivations can be discerned. The first that thinking organisms as agents helps to articulate distinctive about vis-à-vis other biological entities. second treating agent-like a useful heuristic understanding thei...

Int roduction This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last halfcentury between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a defi nition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the mo...

Abstract This discussion note addresses Caleb Hazelwood’s ‘Practice-Centered Pluralism and a Disjunctive Theory of Art’. Hazelwood advances disjunctive definition art on the basis an analogy with species concept pluralism in philosophy biology. We recognize between art, we applaud attention to practice, are bullish pluralism—but it is mistake take these as for definition.

For most people in their right mind, parasites are disgusting little creatures. The mention of them evokes images of tiny crawlers entering the body of innocent victims by devious means, encrusting themselves within various organs (often with very unpleasant effects), living off their host’s tissues, and then exiting the body, sometimes through scatological avenues, leaving behind hosts that ar...

Introduction Nothing in biology makes sense, Dobzhansky famously claimed, except in the light of evolution. Without qualification the statement is surely an exaggeration, but evolutionary issues loom sufficiently large in biology to cast a shadow that extends well beyond the discipline. They have long absorbed the energies of philosophers of biology, for instance. If we see evolution as the qui...