books by herself and her collaborators, G. Scott Williamson and Lucy Crocker, The case for action (1931), Biologists in search of material (1938), and The Peckham experiment (1943). Set up in the 1930s, the Peckham centre housed under one roof an enomous range of social activities for the community, from carpentry and swimming to ante-natal guidance, in the service of two deeper scientific goal...

PAUL JULIAN WEINDLING, Darwinism and social Darwinism in Imperial Germany: the contribution of the cell biologist Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), Forschungen zur Neueren Medizinund Biologiegeschichte 3, Stuttgart and New York, Gustav Fischer, 1991, pp. 355, illus., DM 148.00 (3-437-11305-4). This is the first major study for thirty years of the cell biologist Oscar Hertwig, whose matriculation and r...

It is argued that the notion of Umwelt is relevant for contemporary discussions within theoretical biology, biosemiotics, the study of Artificial Life, Autonomous Systems Research and philosophy of biology. Focus is put on the question of whether an artificial creature can have a phenomenal world in the sense of the Umwelt notion of Jakob von Uexküll, one of the founding figures of biosemiotics...

The word “system” is used in many areas (e.g. solar system, telephone system, nervous system, transportation system, ecological system, etc.) mainly to convey a meaning of ordering and/or interaction. The systems of interest for Systems Engineering are a specific subset: Engineered Systems. These are defined as “an integrated set of elements, subsystems, or assemblies that accomplish a defined ...

This introductory chapter contains a short discussion of the topic of biomimetics with special emphasis on background and goals together with an overview of the book. Biomimetics is described as information transfer from biology to the engineering sciences. Methods and preconditions for this interdisciplinary scientific subject are mentioned briefly focusing on the educational issues and the pa...

The Systems Theory Framework (STF) is presented as an integrating and organising concept for the predominant theories of career. In order to test the integrative capacity of the STF, a theory of personality, the Theory of Dialogical Self, is merged with the STF’s theoretical element of story. Implications for the practice of career counselling are discussed along with a working example of a car...

Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) represents a paradigm shift in the understanding of the ontogenesis and evolutionary progression of the denizens of the natural world. Given the empirical successes of the evo-devo framework, and its now widespread acceptance, a timely and important task for the philosophy of biology is to critically discern the ontological commitments of that frame...

The new intellectual climate inaugurated by the cognitive revolution can help elicit neglected contexts for literary historical study, to pose new questions for analysis and reopen old ones. The current challenge to social constructionist accounts of subjectivity, for example, can lead to a fundamentally new reading of Jane Austen’s last novel, Persuasion (). Austen’s was a period when a do...