Functions: From Organisms to Artefacts (eBook)

This book, originally published in French, examines the philosophical debates on functions over the last forty years and proposes new ways of analysis. Pervasive throughout the life sciences, the concept of function has the air of an epistemological scandal: ascribing a function to a biological structure or process amounts to suggesting that it is explained by its effects. This book confronts the debates on function with the use of the notion in a wide range of disciplines, such as biology, psychology, and medicine. It also raises the question of whether this notion, which is as old in the history of technology as it is in the life sciences, has the same meaning in these two domains.

Jean Gayon

Jean Gayon's works have developed in two directions: philosophy and the history of life sciences. His historical work focuses mainly on the 19th and 20th centuries: population biology and biometrics, the theory of evolution, genetics. His philosophical work has itself developed in the following directions: (1) The conceptual clarification of a number of issues commonly addressed by what has been called since the 1970s the philosophy of biology; for example: the concept of species, the structure of the theory of evolution, units of selection, chance. (2) The analysis of some of the typical figures of 'biological philosophies' of the 19th and 20th centuries (Bernard, Nietzsche, Pearson, Canguilhem, Dagognet, Sober, Grene, etc.). (3) An involvement in some ethical-political issues related to life and health sciences: genetic improvement of humanity, eugenics, human races.

In addition to this work on the history and philosophy of biology, Jean Gayon also has contributions on issues relating to the general philosophy of science and its history.

Armand de Ricqlès

Armand de Ricqlès is a French paleobiologist best known for his work in bone histology and its implications for the growth and thermometabolism of dinosaurs. He worked in the University of Paris (and later Université paris VII) from 1961 till 1995, when he was nominated to a chair of Historical and Evolutionary Biology at the Collège de France. He officially retired in 2010, but he continues publishing.

Armand de Ricqlès initially worked on the functional significance of extant bone histodiversity, and applied this newly gained knowledge in paleobiological inferences. He has collaborated with several histologists and paleontologists, including Melvin Glimcher, Timothy G. Bromage, John R. Horner, and Kevin Padian. In his career, he promoted the introduction of cladistics at the University and influenced several students and colleagues, some of them ultimately becoming members of a CNRS sponsored research team organized at the Jussieu campus  and at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.

Through these collaborations, he has studied the growth, physiology, habitat (aquatic to terrestrial) and other paleobiological aspects of various limbed vertebrates. He has also made some contributions to the history of bone histology, and has written some papers on the problems facing French scientists because of the heavy French bureaucracy.

Antoine C. Dussault is a researcher at the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie (Montréal, Québec) and teaches philosophy at Collège Lionel-Groulx (Sainte-Thérèse, Québec). His work focuses on the philosophy of ecology, environmental ethics and the philosophy of medicine. His main current research topics are the concept of function (in ecology and elsewhere), the concept of health and its possible application to ecosystems, and the holism/reductionism debate in ecology.