Notes on Contributors

Fritz Allhoff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Western Michigan University and a Research Fellow in the Centre for Applied Ethics and Public Philosophy at the Australian National University.

William Bechtel is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the interdisciplinary programs in Science Studies and Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. His research has sought to characterize mechanistic explanations, the processes by which they are developed and evaluated, and the ways they are represented. His current focus is on dynamical activity in self-organizing and sustaining mechanisms in biology, especially ones exhibiting oscillations. His recent books include Discovering Cell Mechanisms (2006) and Mental Mechanisms (2008).

Otavio Bueno is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Miami. His research concentrates in philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of logic, and he is currently developing a fictionalist conception that is empiricist about science and nominalist about mathematics. He has held visiting professorships or fellowships at Princeton University, the University of York (UK), the Uni­versity of Leeds, and the University of Sao Paulo. He has published papers in journals such as Philosophy of Science, Synthese, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Analysis, Erkenntnis, and History and Philosophy of Logic.

Chris J.J. Buskes is a Lecturer in the Philosophy of Science at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His work focuses on epistemology and general philosophy of science, with a special interest in the philosophy of biology. Among his publications is The Genealogy of Knowledge (1998), which offers a critical appraisal of evolutionary approaches to epistemology and philosophy of science. His latest book Evolutionair Denken (Evolutionary Thinking, 2006), aimed at a general public, was awarded the 2007 Socrates Goblet for the most stimulating Dutch book on philosophy and is now being translated into Spanish, German, and Polish.

Henk W. de Regt is a Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at the Faculty of Philosophy, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His present research focuses on the topics of scientific understanding and values in science. He has published in journals such as Philosophy of Science, Synthese, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. De Regt is co-founder and member of the Steering Committee of the European Philosophy of Science Association, co-founder of the Society for the Philosophy of Science in Practice, and editor-in-chief of the Dutch philosophy journal Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte.

Richard DeWitt is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Fairfield University. His areas of specialization include the history and philosophy of science, logic, and the philosophy of mind. His recent publications include work on many valued and fuzzy logics, especially the question of the axiomatizability of fuzzy logics; a publication (with R. James Long) involving medieval logic; and an introductory book on the history and philosophy of science.

Matthew H. Haber is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philo­sophy at the University of Utah. His research in philosophy of biology has focused on conceptual issues in systematics, including phylogenetic inference, the nature of biological taxa and hierarchies, foundational issues in nomenclature and classification, and the structure of phylogenetic think­ing.

Andrew Hamilton is an Assistant Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, where he is active in the Center for Biology and Society, the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, and the International Institute for Species Exploration. His research focuses on the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the biological sciences, particu­larly evolutionary theory and systematics. Hamilton’s work has appeared in philosophy, history, and science journals, including Philosophy of Science, Biological Theory, Isis, and PLoS Biology.

Daniel M. Hausman is the Herbert A. Simon Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His work lies mainly at the intersection between economics and philosophy and addresses issues concerning methodology, rationality, causality, and ethics; and he was the co-founder of the journal Philosophy and Economics. Among his many publications, The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics (1992), Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy (jointly with Michael McPherson, 2006), and The Philosophy of Economics: An Anthology (3rd edn., 2007) address general philosophical questions concerning economics.

Mitchell Herschbach is a PhD candidate in Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation integrates research from analytic philosophy of mind, phenomenology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and neuroscience about human social understanding, particularly our folk psychological capacities and the cognitive mechanisms underlying them.

Maarten G. Kleinhans is a Lecturer in Earth Surface Dynamics at the Faculty of Geosciences, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. His publications focus on the question of how the beautiful dynamical forms and patterns (and lack thereof) in rivers, deltas, and coastal seas are the result of smaller-scale transport and sediment size-sorting processes on Earth and on Mars.

Daniel Little is Chancellor and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. His areas of research and teaching fall within the philosophy of the social sciences and the philosophy of history. His books include Microfoundations, Method and Causation: Essays in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (1998) and The Paradox of Wealth and Poverty: Mapping the Ethical Dilemmas of Global Development (2003); his current book, History’s Pathways: Towards a New Philosophy of History, will appear in 2010.

Aidan Lyon is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, at the Australian National University. His current research lies in the areas of philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, and philosophy of probability. His dissertation investigates how the concept of objective probability is used in branches of science such as quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and evolutionary theory. Some of his recent work has been on the indispensability of mathematical explanations in science, and on mathematical realism.

Edouard Machery is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a resident fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science (University of Pittsburgh) and a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh). His research focuses on the philosophical issues raised by the cognitive sciences. He has published on a wide range of topics in the philosophy of psychology, including the nature of concepts, racial cognition, evolutionary psychology, innateness, and moral psychology.

Jay Odenbaugh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and a faculty member of the Environmental Studies Program at Lewis and Clark College. His research is in the philosophy of biology, especially ecology and environmental ethics. He is currently working on a book entitled On the Contrary: A Philosophical Examination of the Environmental Sciences and their Critics, and editing a collection of essays entitled After Environmentalism (with Bill Chaloupka and Jim Proctor).

Samir Okasha is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. Previously, he has worked at the University of York (UK), the London School of Economics, and the National University of Mexico. Much of his work focuses on conceptual and foundational problems in evolutionary biology, though he also works in general philosophy of science. His most recent book, Evolution and the Levels of Selection (2006), offers a comprehensive examination of the debate over units and levels of selection.

Joachim Schummer is Heisenberg Fellow at the University of Darmstadt. After double-graduation in chemistry and philosophy he has held teach­ing and research positions at the University of Karlsruhe, University of South Carolina, University of Darmstadt, Australian National University, and University of Sofia. His research interests focus on the history, philosophy, sociology, and ethics of science and technology, with emphasis on chem­istry and, more recently, nanotechnology. Schummer has published the first monograph (Realismus und Chemie/Realism and Chemistry; 1996) and more than 30 papers on the philosophy of chemistry. His recent collaborative book publications include Discovering the Nanoscale (2005), Nanotechnology Challenges (2006), and The Public Image of Chemistry (2007). He is the founding editor of Hyle: International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry.

Figures

6.1 Illustration for special theory of relativity 135

6.2 Electrons as particles 149

6.3 Electrons as waves 150

6.4 Two-slit experiment with detectors 150

8.1 A phylogenetic tree displaying the evolutionary relationships

between taxa in terms of descent from shared ancestors 192

8.2 Long-branch attraction. (From Matthew Haber, 2008, “Phylogenetic Inference,” in Aviezer Tucker (ed.),

A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, Wiley-Blackwell, p. 237) 194

9.1 Three types of explanation based on causes, effects, and laws 217

9.2 The correlation of time and length scale of earth-scientific

phenomena, split out between phenomena where biological factors are not important and where these are important. (Reprinted with permission from James W. McAllister, M.G. Kleinhans, C.J.J. Buskes, and H.W. de Regt, “Terra Incognita: Explanation and Reduction in Earth Science,” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 19 (2005): 289-317) 222