Leading biologists and philosophers of biology discuss the basic theories and concepts of biology and their connections with ethics, economics, and psychology, providing a remarkably unified report on the "state of the art" in the philosophy of biology.

"Bartley and Radnitzky have done the philosophy of knowledge a tremendous service. Scholars now have a superb and up-to-date presentation of the fundamental ideas of evolutionary epistemology." --Philosophical Books

A collection of original essays by major thinkers, addressing how the biological sciences inform and inspire philosophical research.

Throughout his long career Canguilhem has been concerned with the way in which ideas originate and become transformed in scientific discourse, and with the role played by ideological factors in determining the direction if not the results of scientific work. This book collects his published essays of the 1970s.

Over the past forty years, economists associated with the University of Chicago have won more than one-third of the Nobel prizes awarded in their discipline and have been major influences on American public policy. Building Chicago Economics presents the first collective attempt by social science historians to chart the rise and development of the Chicago School during the decades that followed the Second World War. Drawing on new research in published and archival sources, contributors examine the people, institutions and ideas that established the foundations for the success of Chicago economics and thereby positioned it as a powerful and controversial force in American political and intellectual life.

This book builds on recent scholarship highlighted in the edited collections, Philosophie, histoire, biologie: mélanges offerts à Jean Gayon (Merlin & Huneman, 2018) and Knowledge of Life Today (Gayon & Petit 2018/2019). While honoring the career and the thought of Jean Gayon (1949-2018), this book showcases the continued relevance of Gayon’s interdisciplinary work and illustrates his central place in the community of historians and philosophers of the life sciences. Chapters in this book address Jean Gayon’s intellectual trajectory from historical epistemology to the philosophy of biology, the nature and scope of his philosophical approach to the history of science, and his unique contributions to the history and epistemology of biological concepts and theories. Drawing on published and unpublished sources, the book explores some of Gayon’s most significant contributions to the philosophy, history, and social studies of biology.

These are the conference proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Discovery Science (DS 2001). Although discovery is naturally ubiquitous in s- ence, and scientific discovery itself has been subject to scientific investigation for centuries, the term Discovery Science is comparably new. It came up in conn- tion with the Japanese Discovery Science project (cf. Arikawa's invited lecture on The Discovery Science Project in Japan in the present volume) some time during the last few years. Setsuo Arikawa is the father in spirit of the Discovery Science conference series. He led the above mentioned project, and he is currently serving as the chairman of the international steering committee for the Discovery Science c- ference series. The other members of this board are currently (in alphabetical order) Klaus P. Jantke, Masahiko Sato, Ayumi Shinohara, Carl H. Smith, and Thomas Zeugmann. Colleagues and friends from all over the world took the opportunity of me- ing for this conference to celebrate Arikawa's 60th birthday and to pay tribute to his manifold contributions to science, in general, and to Learning Theory and Discovery Science, in particular. Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT, for short) is another conference series initiated by Setsuo Arikawa in Japan in 1990. In 1994, it amalgamated with the conference series on Analogical and Inductive Inference (AII), when ALT was held outside of Japan for the first time.

Neuroscientists investigate the mechanisms of spatial memory. Molecular biologists study the mechanisms of protein synthesis and the myriad mechanisms of gene regulation. Ecologists study nutrient cycling mechanisms and their devastating imbalances in estuaries such as the Chesapeake Bay. In fact, much of biology and its history involves biologists constructing, evaluating, and revising their understanding of mechanisms. With In Search of Mechanisms, Carl F. Craver and Lindley Darden offer both a descriptive and an instructional account of how biologists discover mechanisms. Drawing on examples from across the life sciences and through the centuries, Craver and Darden compile an impressive toolbox of strategies that biologists have used and will use again to reveal the mechanisms that produce, underlie, or maintain the phenomena characteristic of living things. They discuss the questions that figure in the search for mechanisms, characterizing the experimental, observational, and conceptual considerations used to answer them, all the while providing examples from the history of biology to highlight the kinds of evidence and reasoning strategies employed to assess mechanisms. At a deeper level, Craver and Darden pose a systematic view of what biology is, of how biology makes progress, of how biological discoveries are and might be made, and of why knowledge of biological mechanisms is important for the future of the human species.