TITLE: Nature's Purposes: analyses of function and design in biology
Published April 1998; The MIT Press.
Hardcover ISBN 0-262-011689 and paperback ISBN 0-262-510979
EDITORS (3):
Colin Allen
Marc Bekoff
George Lauder
RATIONALE FOR THE VOLUME
The proper analysis of teleological notions such as purpose, function,
design, and adaptation is controversial among biologists and
philosophers of biology and has generated a substantial literature,
particularly in the past 10-15 years. Interdisciplinary access to
this literature is, however, less than ideal. Philosophers and
biologists are not always aware of important work in the other
discipline, and even among biologists there is sometimes little
contact between those whose interests are in functional or comparative
morphology, anatomy, and physiology, on the one hand, or in ethology
and behavioral ecology on the other. Our aim with this volume is to
bring seminal papers in these areas together into one convenient
location. Although several of the papers intended for inclusion in
this volume appeared in major journals, these journals are not always
read or searched outside the respective disciplines or subdisciplines.
Several of the papers appeared as invited chapters in books that would
not have a broad readership outside a subdiscipline. And these papers
have not, yet, been widely anthologized. There is no anthology
dedicated to this topic alone, and perhaps the most respected general
anthology in the philosophy of biology (Sober 1984/1993) contains no
recent papers on this topic.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
See draft of introduction (© by the
editors, all rights reserved).