My dissertation defends a non-mechanistic interpretation of Kant’s philosophy of nature. Inspired by the picture of nature in the Critique of Pure Reason and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, most readers align Kant with Early Modern mechanists, who claim that we can know that the internally purposive form of causality characteristic of ...
Published in KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy
Millikan’s (1984. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism. MIT Press) selected effects theory of functions states that functions are effects for which the ancestors of a trait were selected for. As the function is an effect a thing’s ancestors produced, only things that are reproductions in some sense can hav...
The biological individual and the precursors of ethical-religious action: The most recent reflections in the field of biology and the philosophy of biology have highlighted how complex and little obvious is the idea of a personal, individual identity in the world of life. On one hand, having lost a geno-centric reading, life, right from its first m...
Published in Studies in history and philosophy of science
This paper distinguishes two ways in which Kant's ideas concerning the relation between teleology and biological organization have been taken up in contemporary philosophy of biology and theoretical biology. The first sees his account as the first instance of the modern understanding of teleology as a heuristic tool aimed at producing mechanistic e...
Published in European Journal for Philosophy of Science
The propensity nature of evolutionary fitness has long been appreciated and is nowadays amply discussed (Abrams, 2009, 2012; Ariew & Ernst, 2009; Ariew & Lewontin, 2004; Beatty & Finsen, 1989; Brandon, 1978; Drouet & Merlin, 2015; Mills & Beatty, 1979; Millstein, 2003, 2016; Pence & Ramsey, 2013; Sober, 1984, 2001, 2013, 2019; Walsh, 2010; Walsh et...
In this thesis, I inspect some key assumptions which tend to underpin mainstream accounts of natural selection, noting where those assumptions break down and taking this as a basis for fresh analysis. First, I examine the assumption that natural selection inherently involves struggle or competition. I show selection can take place without zero-sum ...
The idea that analysis of organisms can proceed by distinguishing organisms from machines is common to many areas of philosophy. This thesis argues that our search for a philosophy of organisms should not proceed by defining or relying on a Machine–Organism Distinction (MOD). We are often able to take biological theories that are thought to charact...
100 years ago, in 1921, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Édouard Le Roy met. From his friendship we know a lot from the correspondence that lasted for 25 years, from 1921 to 1946. Readers of Teilhard de Chardin's work had frequently heard of Édouard Le Roy as a friend, confidante and teacherstudent. It has not yet been sufficiently researched what Le...
Este estudio revisa la situación de la teleología en su relación con las ciencias biológicas, ya no sola, sino acompañada de las ideas de comunicación y normatividad, procedentes la primera de las ciencias semióticas y la segunda de las ciencias humanas. La primera parte presenta una clasificación de las ciencias naturales, semióticas y humanas, qu...
