Life and Mind

In recent times, the philosophy of science has been reinvigorated by insights from the biological and cognitive sciences. These disciplines have provided not only new perspectives to approach traditional philosophical problems but have also opened the way to new conceptual and methodological questions that call for new and innovative solutions.

This book brings together some of the main debates that have structured in the last years the fields of philosophy of biology and cognitive sciences. It is organized around 11 chapters distributed in two parts: one devoted to the philosophy of biology, and the other to the cognitive sciences. These ideas were originally presented at the 11th edition of the International Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Science (PBCS-XI) workshop held in 2022 in Salamanca, Spain.

• Part I of the volume is devoted to topics related to the philosophy of biology and includes hot topics such as “biological functions”, “modelization”, “pain medicine”, or “organicism”.
• Part II is devoted to debates in the cognitive sciences and includes issues related to "ecological psychology", "enactivism", "FEP" or "animal cognition".

Considering the diversity of the topics covered in this volume, the book is purposely conceived to serve as an updated introduction to the fields of the philosophy of biology and cognitive sciences for those researchers interested in having a panoramic view of these two areas of inquiry. But not only that, the detailed and scholarly coverage of the topics included renders this book appealing to a much more specialized audience interested in particular aspects of each of the debates already mentioned.

Chapter “On the Boundaries Between Classical Demarcations and Transdiagnostic Approaches to Psychopathology: The Case of Meaning in Life and the Lack Thereof” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.