History and Philosophy of Biology
About the Book Series
This series explores significant developments in the life sciences from historical and philosophical perspectives. Historical episodes include Aristotelian biology, Greek and Islamic biology and medicine, Renaissance biology, natural history, Darwinian evolution, Nineteenth-century physiology and cell theory, Twentieth-century genetics, ecology, and systematics, and the biological theories and practices of non-Western perspectives. Philosophical topics include individuality, reductionism and holism, fitness, levels of selection, mechanism and teleology, and the nature-nurture debates, as well as explanation, confirmation, inference, experiment, scientific practice, and models and theories vis-à-vis the biological sciences.
Authors are also invited to inquire into the "and" of this series. How has, does, and will the history of biology impact philosophical understandings of life? How can philosophy help us analyze the historical contingency of, and structural constraints on, scientific knowledge about biological processes and systems? In probing the interweaving of history and philosophy of biology, scholarly investigation could usefully turn to values, power, and potential future uses and abuses of biological knowledge.
The scientific scope of the series includes evolutionary theory, environmental sciences, genomics, molecular biology, systems biology, biotechnology, biomedicine, race and ethnicity, and sex and gender. These areas of the biological sciences are not silos, and tracking their impact on other sciences such as psychology, economics, and sociology, and the behavioral and human sciences more generally, is also within the purview of this series.
Series Editor:
Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther is Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He works in the philosophy of science and philosophy of biology and has strong interests in metaphysics, epistemology, and political philosophy, in addition to cartography and GIS, genetics and evolutionary theory, cosmology and particle physics, psychological and cognitive science, and science in general. Recent publications include "A Beginner's Guide to the New Population Genomics of Homo sapiens: Origins, Race, and Medicine" in The Harvard Review of Philosophy, and "Mapping the Deep Blue Oceans" in The Philosophy of GIS (Springer). His second book is When Maps Become the World (University of Chicago Press).
www.rgwinther.com
Beyond Lamarckism: Plasticity in Darwinian Evolution, 1890-1970
1st Edition
By Laurent Loison
October 27, 2025
Over the past 20 years, the role of phenotypic plasticity in Darwinian evolution has become a hotly debated topic among biologists and philosophers of science. For instance, in the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, a new form of evolutionary theory that aims to include processes not taken into ...
The Riddle of Organismal Agency: New Historical and Philosophical Reflections
1st Edition
Edited
By Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda, Jan Baedke, Guido I. Prieto, Gregory Radick
October 27, 2025
The Riddle of Organismal Agency brings together historians, philosophers, and scientists for an interdisciplinary re-assessment of one of the long-standing problems in the scientific understanding of life. Marshalling insights from diverse sciences including physiology, comparative psychology, ...
Sex, Gender, Ethics and the Darwinian Evolution of Mankind: 150 years of Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man’
1st Edition
Edited
By Michel Veuille
August 29, 2025
Sex, Gender, Ethics and the Darwinian Evolution of Mankind examines the impact of Darwin’s Descent of Man on contemporary biology and the humanities. Its publication in 1871 was a founding event in anthropology. Its content was primarily concerned with the development of sexual life, social life ...
Remapping Biology with Goethe, Schelling, and Herder: Romanticizing Evolution
1st Edition
By Gregory Rupik
July 30, 2025
Remapping Biology with Goethe, Schelling, and Herder recruits a Romantic philosophy of biology into contemporary debates to both integrate the theoretical implications of ecology, evolution, and development, and to contextualize the successes of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis’s gene’s-eye-view ...
Remapping Race in a Global Context
1st Edition
Edited
By Ludovica Lorusso, Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther
May 31, 2023
Investigating the reality and significance of racial categories, Remapping Race in a Global Context examines the role of race in human genomics, biomedicine, and struggles for social justice around the world. In this book, biologists, anthropologists, historians, and philosophers inspect critical ...
Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science
1st Edition
Edited
By David Ludwig, Inkeri Koskinen, Zinhle Mncube, Luana Poliseli, Luis Reyes-Galindo
January 09, 2023
In bringing together a global community of philosophers, Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science develops novel perspectives on epistemology and philosophy of science by demonstrating how frameworks from academic philosophy (e.g. standpoint theory, social epistemology, feminist philosophy...
Biological Identity: Perspectives from Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Biology
1st Edition
Edited
By Anne Sophie Meincke, John Dupré
April 29, 2022
Analytic metaphysics has recently discovered biology as a means of grounding metaphysical theories. This has resulted in long-standing metaphysical puzzles, such as the problems of personal identity and material constitution, being increasingly addressed by appeal to a biological understanding of ...
Philosophical Perspectives on the Engineering Approach in Biology: Living Machines?
1st Edition
Edited
By Sune Holm, Maria Serban
February 01, 2022
Philosophical Perspectives on the Engineering Approach in Biology provides a philosophical examination of what has been called the most powerful metaphor in biology: The machine metaphor. The chapters collected in this volume discuss the idea that living systems can be understood through the lens ...
Jakob von Uexküll and Philosophy: Life, Environments, Anthropology
1st Edition
Edited
By Francesca Michelini, Kristian Köchy
August 02, 2021
Dismissed by some as the last of the anti-Darwinians, his fame as a rigorous biologist even tainted by an alleged link to National Socialist ideology, it is undeniable that Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) was eagerly read by many philosophers across the spectrum of philosophical schools, from Scheler...
Evolutionary Moral Realism
1st Edition
By Michael Stingl, John Collier
June 30, 2021
Against standard approaches to evolution and ethics, this book develops the idea that moral values may find their origin in regularly recurring features in the cooperative environments of species of organisms that are social and intelligent.Across a wide range of species that are social and ...
Ecological Investigations: A Phenomenology of Habitats
1st Edition
By Adam Konopka
March 31, 2021
These investigations identify and clarify some basic assumptions and methodological principles involved in ecological explanations of plant associations. How are plants geographically distributed into characteristic groups? What are the basic conditions that organize groups of interspecific plant ...
Philosophy of Biology Before Biology
1st Edition
Edited
By Cécilia Bognon-Küss, Charles T. Wolfe
September 30, 2020
The use of the term "biology" to refer to a unified science of life emerged around 1800 (most prominently by scientists such as Lamarck and Treviranus, although scholarship has indicated its usage at least 30-40 years earlier). The interplay between philosophy and natural science has also ...