Philosophy of Biology book - Open Access - Free PDF from Oxford University Press

[Ahab]

This recent book on the philosophy of biology looks interesting:
Everything Flows
Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology

If you go the the site, simply click on the Open Access link and a pop-up will enable you to download the free pdf.

Book description:

Everything Flows explores the metaphysical thesis that the living world is not made up of substantial particles or things, as has often been supposed, but is rather constituted by processes. The biological domain is organised as an interdependent hierarchy of processes, which are stabilized and actively maintained at different timescales. Even entities that intuitively appear to be paradigms of things, such as organisms, are actually better understood as processes. Unlike previous attempts to articulate processual views of biology, which have tended to use Alfred North Whitehead's panpsychist metaphysics as a foundation, this book takes a naturalistic approach to metaphysics. It submits that the main motivations for replacing an ontology of substances with one of processes are to be found in the empirical findings of science. Biology provides compelling reasons for thinking that the living realm is fundamentally dynamic, and that the existence of things is always conditional on the existence of processes. The phenomenon of life cries out for theories that prioritise processes over things, and it suggests that the central explanandum of biology is not change but rather stability, or more precisely, stability attained through constant change. This edited volume brings together philosophers of science and metaphysicians interested in exploring the prospects of a processual philosophy of biology. The contributors draw on an extremely wide range of biological case studies, and employ a process perspective to cast new light on a number of traditional philosophical problems, such as identity, persistence, and individuality.

 

[Treedbear]

Thanks. I downloaded all 403 single-spaced pages. Here's an excerpt, that deals with the roots of our modern epistemology. Substantialism has had a major influence on how the western world structures our understanding of the world in both science and religion. My own point of view is the deep questions of philosophy and science can be resolved by adopting alternative paradigms. And a key is to realize that things only exist as the result of how they interact with other things. In other words they are the relationships that they have, which seems to be essentially the same as processualism. The basic problem at the root of many preconceptions is that there are absolutes (such as Plato described as Forms) by which everything can be understood.

2. Historical Background

The opposition between things and processes as the ultimate constituents of reality isof course an ancient one, commonly traced all the way back to the Presocratics.Heraclitus is the patron saint of process philosophy, at least in the western tradition.¹The Greek dictum panta rhei (‘everything flows’) encapsulates the Heracliteandoctrine of universal flux. Heraclitus not only emphasized the pervasiveness ofchange, but also signalled the importance of change in explaining stability overtime (Graham 2015). The antithesis of this view is the atomism of Leucippus andDemocritus. The indivisible and unchanging material atoms of the ancient traditionprovided paradigms for the various notions of substance articulated in subsequentcenturies.Parmenides was another early advocate of substantialism. Although his static viewof the world proved too extreme for most subsequent philosophers to accept, hisconviction that permanence is more fundamental and more real than change becameone of the cornerstones of western metaphysics. It was enthusiastically adopted byPlato in his changeless realm of eternal Forms—and also by Aristotle who, whiletransforming these essential Forms into worldly entities, nonetheless remained committed to their unchanging character. Aristotelian substances, which are the basicentities of his metaphysics, are distinguished as substances of particular kinds by theiressence, and this essence sets unbreachable limits on the kinds of changes that anindividual substance can undergo. It is difficult to overstate how influential thisessentialist view has been. Many substantialists to this day follow Aristotle in assertingthat, to be a thing, one must be a thing of a certain kind, and that the kind to which athing belongs determines what changes it can undergo while still being what it is.