Customer Reviews

Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology)

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I am a philosoher but not at all a philosopher of science, and I found this to be a very helpful book to read. It is primarily a book, not about biology as such, but about scientific explanation and models. It defends a pluralism of theories and models, illustrating its argument by examples from biology, particularly the biology of social insects. The pluralism is "integrative" since the models are brought together when one is explaining specific instances of the phenomena under study.

So much philosophy of science uses physics for its examples that I found it refreshing and illuminating to draw on biology (which is, for many of us, much easier to understand). As a philosopher interested in intellectual pluralism, I found this study one of the very most useful. This is a book written primarily for philosophers and theorists of biology, but it could be read with profit by anyone with a serious interest in these issues.