Description
Book SynopsisAgainst the traditional view of the living world as fundamentally composed of enduring things, this book argues for the radical alternative is that it essentially consists of processes. Biology is the study of the processes that constitute living beings, and the things biologists study ultimately derive their existence from more basic processes.
Trade ReviewEverything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology is an excellent example of the skillful sampling of an on-going approach in philosophy of science. The sampling quite obviously emerged from intensive live discussions among the authors and stands in sharp contrast to the haphazardly put together collections that seem to dominate the field these days. It is an insightful and surprisingly lively read. I especially warmly recommend it to those philosophers exposed chiefly to the standard topics and approaches in philosophy of biology and in philosophy of science more generally. * Slobodan Perović, Metascience *
I highly recommend this insightful and lively collection. * Slobodan Perović, University of Belgrade, Metascience *
This is an important book in the development of biological explanation and understanding ... Essential. * L. C. Archie, CHOICE *
This anthology heralds a revolution in the philosophy of biology, arguing that the long-standing dominance of the mechanistic framework should finally come to an end. Ambitious and innovative, yet cogent and empirically grounded, Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré's Everything Flows is a must read for anyone interested in understanding new directions in the investigation of the biological world. * Katherine Valde, Philosophy of Science *
Everything Flows is an impressive collection and a worthwhile read for metaphysicians, philosophers of science, and biologists...Whether or not support for processualism will grow or dwindle remains to be seen; irrespective, the book stands as an absorbing study of a specific moment in analytic philosophy of biology, and a manifesto for a distinctive movement in that field * Adam Ferner, BJPS Review of Books *
Nicholson and Dupré's Everything Flows is an excellent, multiperspectival effort to raise awareness about the metaphysical assumptions and problems that underlie the dominant orientation in mainstream biology, namely, that of mechanistic neo-Darwinism with its substance outlook, and to display why the process-relational alternative is to be embraced instead. * Adam C. Scarfe, Process Studies *
This book appears at a time when genocentric mechanism has been widely disseminated to the public even as cutting-edge biologists and philosophers have been pulling the rug out from under it ... One of the uses of this book for philosophers will be to counter the metaphysical enshrinement of a false, but widespread impression about genes ... It is true that Everything Flows assumes philosophical and biological literacy, but it is also true that it does a very good job teaching both. * David Depew, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences *
Table of ContentsJohannes Jaeger: Foreword Part I: Introduction 1: John Dupré & Daniel J. Nicholson: A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology Part II: Metaphysics 2: Peter Simons: Processes and Precipitates 3: Rani Lill Anjum & Stephen Mumford: Dispositionalism: A Dynamic Theory of Causation 4: James DiFrisco: Biological Processes: Criteria of Identity and Persistence 5: Thomas Pradeu: Genidentity and Biological Processes 6: Johanna Seibt: Ontological Tools for the Process Turn in Biology: Some Basic Notions of General Process Theory Part III: Organisms 7: Daniel J. Nicholson: Reconceptualizing the Organism: From Complex Machine to Flowing Stream 8: Denis Walsh: Objectcy and Agency: Towards a Methodological Vitalism 9: Frédéric Bouchard: Symbiosis, Transient Biological Individuality, and Evolutionary Processes 10: Argyris Arnellos: From Organizations of Processes to Organisms and Other Biological Individuals Part IV: Development and Evolution 11: Paul Griffiths & Karola Stotz: Developmental Systems Theory as a Process Theory 12: Flavia Fabris: Waddington's Processual Epigenetics and the Debate over Cryptic Variability 13: Laura Nuño de la Rosa: Capturing Processes: The Interplay of Modelling Strategies and Conceptual Understanding in Developmental Biology 14: Eric Bapteste & Gemma Anderson: Intersecting Processes are Necessary Explanantia for Evolutionary Biology, but Challenge Retrodiction Part IV: Implications and Applications 15: Stephan Guttinger: A Process Ontology for Macromolecular Biology 16: Marta Bertolaso & John Dupré: A Processual Perspective on Cancer 17: Ann-Sophie Barwich: Measuring the World: Olfaction as a Process Model of Perception 18: Anne Sophie Meincke: Persons as Biological Processes: A Bio-Processual Way Out of the Personal Identity Dilemma
