By Richard A. Richards
ISBN-10: 051177639X
ISBN-13: 9780511776397
ISBN-10: 0521196833
ISBN-13: 9780521196833
There's long-standing war of words between systematists approximately the best way to divide biodiversity into species. Over twenty diverse species ideas are used to workforce organisms, in keeping with standards as assorted as morphological or molecular similarity, interbreeding and genealogical relationships. This, mixed with the consequences of evolutionary biology, increases the fear that both there is not any unmarried type of species, or that species should not genuine. This e-book surveys the historical past of puzzling over species from Aristotle to trendy systematics for you to comprehend the foundation of the matter, and advocates an answer in accordance with the belief of the department of conceptual hard work, wherein species thoughts functionality in numerous methods - theoretically and operationally. It additionally considers comparable issues similar to individuality and the metaphysics of evolution, and the way medical phrases get their which means. this significant addition to the present debate might be crucial for philosophers and historians of technological know-how, and for biologists.
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Additional info for The species problem : a philosophical analysis
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There will be no clear demarcation between the species on the basis of particular intrinsic properties. The essential traits are essential because of the functional role they play in a mode of life, and this functional role is typically satisfied by differences of degree – beak length, leg length and so on. Accidental traits or properties don’t play such a functional role. Lennox calls this the “teleological method” of distinguishing essential and accidental traits. The bottom line is that it is the functional unity of creatures as formed in development – the possession of functionally essential (necessary) traits relative to a particular lifestyle that makes them what they are: The “form” of living things is their proper activity, and the generic material is differentiated into a species member for the sake of this.
It would be wrong to see this ambiguity in eidos and genos as mere carelessness on Aristotle’s part. His epistemology seems to require it. For Aristotle, knowledge of particular eide as enmattered forms is by sensation alone. Knowledge of the highest sort, however, depends on systematic logical deduction, and that requires the logical sense of eidos. As Sloan puts it: “To be knowable beyond the individual entity of sensation, it must be understood as universal” (Sloan 1985: 104). If we ignore the ambiguity, we miss a fundamental tension in Aristotle’s epistemo logy – the tension between being as particular, and knowledge as universal.
Aristotle 98b6–16) There are two critical points here: First, it appears to be an explanatory rather than a classificatory project that was motivating Aristotle (Lennox 2006: 8). The second critical point is that the eidos/genos (species/genus) framework was applied in Aristotle’s biological works primarily to the parts of animals, not the animals themselves, as Pierre Pellegrin argues: [I]f one reads the biological corpus simultaneously putting aside taxonomic presuppositions and paying attention to the properties of the conceptual schema genos-eidos, one cannot fail to notice that this conceptual schema is applied preponderantly and fully not to animal classes but to the parts of animals.
The species problem : a philosophical analysis by Richard A. Richards
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