Pub Date : 2024-08-28DOI: 10.1007/s40656-024-00628-4
Karl S Matlin, Sara Green
Cell biologists, including those seeking molecular mechanistic explanations of cellular phenomena, frequently rely on experimental strategies focused on identifying the cellular context relevant to their investigations. We suggest that such practices can be understood as a guided decomposition strategy, where molecular explanations of phenomena are defined in relation to natural contextual (cell) boundaries. This "top-down" strategy contrasts with "bottom-up" reductionist approaches where well-defined molecular structures and activities are orphaned by their displacement from actual biological functions. We focus on the central role of microscopic imaging in cell biology to uncover possible constraints on the system. We show how identified constraints are used heuristically to limit possible mechanistic explanations to those that are biologically meaningful. Historical examples of this process described here include discovery of the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation in mitochondria, molecular explanation of the first steps in protein secretion, and identification of molecular motors. We suggest that these instances are examples of a form of downward causation or, more specifically, constraining relations, where higher-level structures and variables delimit and enable lower-level system states. The guided decomposition strategy in our historical cases illustrates the irreducibility of experimentally identified constraints in explaining biological activities of cells. Rather than viewing decomposition and recomposition as separate epistemic activities, we contend that they need to be iteratively integrated to account for the ontological complexity of multi-level systems.
{"title":"Constraint-based reasoning in cell biology: on the explanatory role of context.","authors":"Karl S Matlin, Sara Green","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00628-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-024-00628-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Cell biologists, including those seeking molecular mechanistic explanations of cellular phenomena, frequently rely on experimental strategies focused on identifying the cellular context relevant to their investigations. We suggest that such practices can be understood as a guided decomposition strategy, where molecular explanations of phenomena are defined in relation to natural contextual (cell) boundaries. This \"top-down\" strategy contrasts with \"bottom-up\" reductionist approaches where well-defined molecular structures and activities are orphaned by their displacement from actual biological functions. We focus on the central role of microscopic imaging in cell biology to uncover possible constraints on the system. We show how identified constraints are used heuristically to limit possible mechanistic explanations to those that are biologically meaningful. Historical examples of this process described here include discovery of the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation in mitochondria, molecular explanation of the first steps in protein secretion, and identification of molecular motors. We suggest that these instances are examples of a form of downward causation or, more specifically, constraining relations, where higher-level structures and variables delimit and enable lower-level system states. The guided decomposition strategy in our historical cases illustrates the irreducibility of experimentally identified constraints in explaining biological activities of cells. Rather than viewing decomposition and recomposition as separate epistemic activities, we contend that they need to be iteratively integrated to account for the ontological complexity of multi-level systems.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142082723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-12DOI: 10.1007/s40656-024-00627-5
Sam Fellowes
The diagnosis of childhood schizophrenia was widely employed in the U.S. from the 1930s to the late 1970s. In this paper I will provide a history of the diagnosis. Some of the earliest publications on childhood schizophrenia outlined the notion that childhood schizophrenia had different types. I will outline the development of these types, outlining differing symptoms and causes associated with various types. I outline how different types of childhood schizophrenia were demarcated from one another primarily on age of onset and the type of psychosis which was believed to be present. I will outline how various child psychiatrists viewed the types of childhood schizophrenia posited by other child psychiatrists. I will outline the process of abandoning childhood schizophrenia. I use my history to challenge what I believe are misconceptions about childhood schizophrenia. Also, I will use my history to draw lessons for thinking about modern notions of autism. It shows potential problems around formulating psychiatric diagnoses around causes and how compromises might be needed to prevent those problems. Additionally, childhood schizophrenia shows that psychiatrists could formulate subtypes that are not based upon functioning levels and that we can conceive of subtypes as dynamic whereby someone can change which subtype they exhibit over time.
{"title":"A history of childhood schizophrenia and lessons for autism.","authors":"Sam Fellowes","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00627-5","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00627-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The diagnosis of childhood schizophrenia was widely employed in the U.S. from the 1930s to the late 1970s. In this paper I will provide a history of the diagnosis. Some of the earliest publications on childhood schizophrenia outlined the notion that childhood schizophrenia had different types. I will outline the development of these types, outlining differing symptoms and causes associated with various types. I outline how different types of childhood schizophrenia were demarcated from one another primarily on age of onset and the type of psychosis which was believed to be present. I will outline how various child psychiatrists viewed the types of childhood schizophrenia posited by other child psychiatrists. I will outline the process of abandoning childhood schizophrenia. I use my history to challenge what I believe are misconceptions about childhood schizophrenia. Also, I will use my history to draw lessons for thinking about modern notions of autism. It shows potential problems around formulating psychiatric diagnoses around causes and how compromises might be needed to prevent those problems. Additionally, childhood schizophrenia shows that psychiatrists could formulate subtypes that are not based upon functioning levels and that we can conceive of subtypes as dynamic whereby someone can change which subtype they exhibit over time.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11319613/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141918213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-01DOI: 10.1007/s40656-024-00622-w
Andreas Vrahimis
Comparative to the commonplace focus onto developments in mathematics and physics, the life sciences appear to have received relatively sparse attention within the early history of analytic philosophy. This paper addresses two related aspects of this phenomenon. On the one hand, it asks: to the extent that the significance of the life sciences was indeed downplayed by early analytic philosophers, why was this the case? An answer to this question may be found in Bertrand Russell's 1914 discussions of the relation between biology and philosophy. Contrary to received views of the history of analytic philosophy, Russell presented his own 'logical atomism' in opposition not only to British Idealism, but also to 'evolutionism'. On the other hand, I will question whether this purported neglect of the life sciences does indeed accurately characterise the history of analytic philosophy. In answering this, I turn first to Susan Stebbing's criticisms of Russell's overlooking of biology, her influence on J.H. Woodger, and her critical discussion of T.H. Huxley's and C.H. Waddington's application of evolutionary views to philosophical questions. I then discuss the case of Moritz Schlick, whose evolutionist philosophy has been overlooked within recent debates concerning Logical Empiricism's relation to the philosophy of biology.
{"title":"The life sciences and the history of analytic philosophy.","authors":"Andreas Vrahimis","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00622-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-024-00622-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Comparative to the commonplace focus onto developments in mathematics and physics, the life sciences appear to have received relatively sparse attention within the early history of analytic philosophy. This paper addresses two related aspects of this phenomenon. On the one hand, it asks: to the extent that the significance of the life sciences was indeed downplayed by early analytic philosophers, why was this the case? An answer to this question may be found in Bertrand Russell's 1914 discussions of the relation between biology and philosophy. Contrary to received views of the history of analytic philosophy, Russell presented his own 'logical atomism' in opposition not only to British Idealism, but also to 'evolutionism'. On the other hand, I will question whether this purported neglect of the life sciences does indeed accurately characterise the history of analytic philosophy. In answering this, I turn first to Susan Stebbing's criticisms of Russell's overlooking of biology, her influence on J.H. Woodger, and her critical discussion of T.H. Huxley's and C.H. Waddington's application of evolutionary views to philosophical questions. I then discuss the case of Moritz Schlick, whose evolutionist philosophy has been overlooked within recent debates concerning Logical Empiricism's relation to the philosophy of biology.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141861820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-01DOI: 10.1007/s40656-024-00624-8
Louis-Patrick Haraoui, Anthony Rizk, Hannah Landecker
Drawing on institutional historical records, interviews and student theses, this article charts the intersection of hospital acquired illness, the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), environments of armed conflict, and larger questions of social governance in the specific case of the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC) in Lebanon. Taking a methodological cue from approaches in contemporary scientific work that understand non-clinical settings as a fundamental aspect of the history and development of AMR, we treat the hospital as not just nested in a set of social and environmental contexts, but frequently housing within itself elements of social and environmental history. AMR in Lebanon differs in important ways from the settings in which global protocols for infection control or rubrics for risk factor identification for resistant nosocomial outbreaks were originally generated. While such differences are all too often depicted as failures of low and middle-income countries (LMIC) to maintain universal standards, the historical question before us is quite the reverse: how have the putatively universal rubrics of AMR and hospital infection control failed to take account of social and environmental conditions that clearly matter deeply in the evolution and spread of resistance? Focusing on conditions of war as an organized chaos in which social, environmental and clinical factors shift dramatically, on the social and political topography of patient transfer, and on a missing "meso" level of AMR surveillance between the local and global settings, we show how a multisectoral One Health approach to AMR could be enriched by an answering multisectoral methodology in history, particularly one that unsettles a canonical focus on the story of AMR in the Euro-American context.
本文以黎巴嫩贝鲁特美国大学医疗中心(AUBMC)为具体案例,利用机构历史记录、访谈和学生论文,描绘了医院获得性疾病、抗菌药耐药性(AMR)的出现、武装冲突环境以及更广泛的社会治理问题之间的交叉点。当代科学研究将非临床环境理解为 AMR 历史和发展的一个基本方面,我们借鉴了这种研究方法,将医院视为不仅嵌套在一系列社会和环境背景中,而且经常包含社会和环境历史元素的地方。黎巴嫩的 AMR 与最初制定全球感染控制协议或耐药院内爆发风险因素识别标准的环境有很大不同。虽然这种差异常常被描述为中低收入国家(LMIC)未能保持普遍标准,但我们面前的历史问题却恰恰相反:AMR 和医院感染控制的所谓普遍标准为何未能考虑到社会和环境条件,而这些条件显然对耐药性的演变和传播有着深远影响?战争是一种有组织的混乱状态,社会、环境和临床因素在其中发生了巨大变化,病人转院的社会和政治地形,以及地方和全球环境之间缺失的 "中观 "AMR 监控,这些因素都是我们关注的重点,我们要说明的是,历史上的多部门方法论,尤其是打破了以欧美背景下的 AMR 故事为核心的传统方法论,如何能够丰富针对 AMR 的多部门 "同一健康 "方法。
{"title":"States of Resistance: nosocomial and environmental approaches to antimicrobial resistance in Lebanon.","authors":"Louis-Patrick Haraoui, Anthony Rizk, Hannah Landecker","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00624-8","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00624-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Drawing on institutional historical records, interviews and student theses, this article charts the intersection of hospital acquired illness, the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), environments of armed conflict, and larger questions of social governance in the specific case of the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC) in Lebanon. Taking a methodological cue from approaches in contemporary scientific work that understand non-clinical settings as a fundamental aspect of the history and development of AMR, we treat the hospital as not just nested in a set of social and environmental contexts, but frequently housing within itself elements of social and environmental history. AMR in Lebanon differs in important ways from the settings in which global protocols for infection control or rubrics for risk factor identification for resistant nosocomial outbreaks were originally generated. While such differences are all too often depicted as failures of low and middle-income countries (LMIC) to maintain universal standards, the historical question before us is quite the reverse: how have the putatively universal rubrics of AMR and hospital infection control failed to take account of social and environmental conditions that clearly matter deeply in the evolution and spread of resistance? Focusing on conditions of war as an organized chaos in which social, environmental and clinical factors shift dramatically, on the social and political topography of patient transfer, and on a missing \"meso\" level of AMR surveillance between the local and global settings, we show how a multisectoral One Health approach to AMR could be enriched by an answering multisectoral methodology in history, particularly one that unsettles a canonical focus on the story of AMR in the Euro-American context.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11294430/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141876783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-26DOI: 10.1007/s40656-024-00621-x
Jacopo Ambrosj
{"title":"Malin Ah-King, The female turn. How evolutionary science shifted perceptions about females, Singapore: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022.","authors":"Jacopo Ambrosj","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00621-x","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00621-x","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141768259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-25DOI: 10.1007/s40656-024-00626-6
Héloïse Athéa
{"title":"Sara Green, Animal models of human disease, 2024, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","authors":"Héloïse Athéa","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00626-6","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00626-6","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141768260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-25DOI: 10.1007/s40656-024-00625-7
Matthew Perkins-McVey
{"title":"William Bechtel & Linus Ta-Lun Huang, Philosophy of neuroscience, 2022. Cambridge University Press.","authors":"Matthew Perkins-McVey","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00625-7","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00625-7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141768261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-25DOI: 10.1007/s40656-024-00623-9
Christoph J Hueck
{"title":"Bernd Rosslenbroich, Properties of life. Toward a theory of organismic biology. Vienna series in theoretical biology, 2023, The MIT Press, 326 Pages, ISBN 9780262546201 (Paperback).","authors":"Christoph J Hueck","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00623-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-024-00623-9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141768258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-06-26DOI: 10.1007/s40656-024-00620-y
Francesca Merlin, Élodie Giroux
Since the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP), biomedical sciences have moved away from a gene-centred view and towards a multi-factorial one in which environment, broadly speaking, plays a central role in the determination of human health and disease. Environmental exposures have been shown to be highly prevalent in disease causation. They are considered as complementary to genetic factors in the etiology of diseases, hence the introduction of the concept of the "exposome" as encompassing the totality of human environmental exposures, from conception onwards (Wild in Cancer Epidemiol Biomark Prev 14:1847-1850, 2005), and the launch of the Human Exposome Project (HEP) which aims to complement the HGP. At first sight, and seen as complementary to the genome, the exposome could thus appear as contributing to the rise of novel postgenomic deterministic narratives which place the environment at their core. Is this really the case? If so, what sort of determinism is at work in exposomics research? Is it a case of environmental determinism, and if so, in what sense? Or is it a new sort of deterministic view? In this paper, we first show that causal narratives in exposomics are still very similar to gene-centred deterministic narratives. They correspond to a form of Laplacian determinism and, above all, to what Claude Bernard called the "determinism of a phenomenon". Second, we introduce the notion of "reversed heuristic determinism" to characterize the specific deterministic narratives present in exposomics. Indeed, the accepted sorts of external environmental exposures conceived as being at the origins of diseases are determined, methodologically speaking, by their identifiable internal and biological markers. We conclude by highlighting the most relevant implications of the presence of this heuristic determinism in exposomics research.
{"title":"Narratives in exposomics: A reversed heuristic determinism?","authors":"Francesca Merlin, Élodie Giroux","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00620-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-024-00620-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Since the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP), biomedical sciences have moved away from a gene-centred view and towards a multi-factorial one in which environment, broadly speaking, plays a central role in the determination of human health and disease. Environmental exposures have been shown to be highly prevalent in disease causation. They are considered as complementary to genetic factors in the etiology of diseases, hence the introduction of the concept of the \"exposome\" as encompassing the totality of human environmental exposures, from conception onwards (Wild in Cancer Epidemiol Biomark Prev 14:1847-1850, 2005), and the launch of the Human Exposome Project (HEP) which aims to complement the HGP. At first sight, and seen as complementary to the genome, the exposome could thus appear as contributing to the rise of novel postgenomic deterministic narratives which place the environment at their core. Is this really the case? If so, what sort of determinism is at work in exposomics research? Is it a case of environmental determinism, and if so, in what sense? Or is it a new sort of deterministic view? In this paper, we first show that causal narratives in exposomics are still very similar to gene-centred deterministic narratives. They correspond to a form of Laplacian determinism and, above all, to what Claude Bernard called the \"determinism of a phenomenon\". Second, we introduce the notion of \"reversed heuristic determinism\" to characterize the specific deterministic narratives present in exposomics. Indeed, the accepted sorts of external environmental exposures conceived as being at the origins of diseases are determined, methodologically speaking, by their identifiable internal and biological markers. We conclude by highlighting the most relevant implications of the presence of this heuristic determinism in exposomics research.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141452320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-30DOI: 10.1007/s40656-024-00618-6
Markus Maier
In their anthology Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré argue that modern theories of biology imply that the fundamental structure of reality is processual at its core. In the present work, I first examine the implicit and explicit metaphysical presuppositions the editors make in order to allow for such an inference from scientific theory to ontology. After showing the difficulties of a naïve transfer of theoretical entities to fundamental ontology, I argue that the editors can nevertheless extend their claims beyond the mere articulation of different domain ontologies. This leads to the idea of a scientifically informed induction base for an ontology of processes.
在他们的选集《万物流动:丹尼尔-尼科尔森(Daniel J. Nicholson)和约翰-杜普雷(John Dupré)认为,现代生物学理论意味着现实的基本结构在其核心上是过程性的。在本著作中,我首先研究了编者们为了允许从科学理论到本体论的推论而做出的隐含和明确的形而上学预设。在展示了将理论实体天真地转移到基本本体论的困难之后,我认为编者们可以将其主张扩展到不同领域本体论的表述之外。这就引出了为过程本体论建立一个有科学依据的归纳基础的想法。
{"title":"On the relationship between scientific theory and ontology in everything flows.","authors":"Markus Maier","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00618-6","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00618-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In their anthology Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré argue that modern theories of biology imply that the fundamental structure of reality is processual at its core. In the present work, I first examine the implicit and explicit metaphysical presuppositions the editors make in order to allow for such an inference from scientific theory to ontology. After showing the difficulties of a naïve transfer of theoretical entities to fundamental ontology, I argue that the editors can nevertheless extend their claims beyond the mere articulation of different domain ontologies. This leads to the idea of a scientifically informed induction base for an ontology of processes.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141176928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}