Looking for recommendations on philosophy of biology
January 2, 2012 4:36 AM   Subscribe

Any philosophers of biology around? I'm looking for a good overviewish paper to translate.

I recently translated John Dewey's essay The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy into Estonian, but the editor of the journal it's for recommended that I also picked and translated a more contemporary paper on a roughly similar topic to accompany it (Dewey's is from 1909). Anyone have any ideas about good recent (past 20 years or so) papers on the impact that biology has had on philosophical isuues, or just on one particular issue? It'd be good if the paper has been also somewhat influential, even better if it is "mandatory reading".

I have a couple of papers but they are loooong overviews (up to 50 pages), and I'm looking for something preferably in the 10-20 page range.
posted by Pyrogenesis to Science & Nature (7 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
This one by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin was highly influential but it's about 30 years old now. Even has its own wikipedia entry.
posted by zaebiz at 6:22 AM on January 2, 2012


Daniel C Dennet writes papers like this, many recent ones on his home page.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:22 AM on January 2, 2012


My guess--as someone almost completely ignorant in this subject area--is that people at this specialist listserv or somewhere similar would be better equipped to give you the definitive references.

One tricky thing is that many papers will be applying philosophy to matters of biology. I'd imagine that people analyzing the influences of biology on philosophy might be thinner on the ground, although it's no secret that neurology, for instance, has been increasingly influential on philosophy in recent decades. That is, from my understanding you need to narrow your search to the third type of philosophy of biology as defined in this Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article (which also has a nice looking bibliography for you).
posted by col_pogo at 10:05 AM on January 2, 2012


Seconding the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a solid starting place for a search like this. It is written by philosophy professors and generally reflects the recent consensus within academic philosophy in the US/UK/Australia.

If you have access to an academic library I would look for one of the collections the SEP article mentions:
Recent textbooks include Elliott Sober's Philosophy of Biology (Sober 1999), Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths's Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (1999), Brian Gavey's Philosophy of Biology (2007), and Alexander Rosenberg and Daniel McShea's Philosophy of Biology: A contemporary introduction (2008). Valuable edited collections designed to supplement such a text are Elliott Sober's Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology (Sober 2006) which collects the classic papers on core debates, David Hull and Michael Ruse's The Philosophy of Biology which aims at a comprehensive survey using recent papers (1998), and the Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology (Hull and Ruse 2007) and Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Biology (Sarkar and Pultyinski 2008) which both consist of essays on key topics by leading authors.
If you need an article rather than a textbook section, I would try to find one of the edited collections they mention and page through it for something that seems accessible.

Philosophy of biology (like most philosophies of science) has changed a lot since the early twentieth century, so your editor is right to want a more recent piece.
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:58 AM on January 2, 2012


Maybe Donna Haraway - Blah Blah Oncomouse
posted by rhizome at 1:27 PM on January 2, 2012


Jeez. Blah Blah Oncomouse
posted by rhizome at 1:29 PM on January 2, 2012


Response by poster: Of course, the Stanford thing. I'm an idiot for not looking there myself. Thanks for the reminder. And yeah, I have good access to academic libraries and to journal/paper databases through the library proxy, so no problems there.

The spandrels paper is of course one of the most famous ones, but it's just about a particular aspect of adaptation, nothing particularly philosophical about it. But browsing some of Gould's essays is a good idea.

When it comes to the theory of evolution, "embarassing" is the politest word I can muster about Dennett, so I'll just skip him, sorry.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:03 PM on January 2, 2012


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