Marco J. Nathan - Böcker

Textbooks and other popular venues commonly present science as a progressive "brick-by-brick" accumulation of knowledge and facts. Despite its hallowed history and familiar ring, this depiction is nowadays rejected by most specialists. There currently are two competing models of the scientific enterprise: reductionism and antireductionism. Neither provides an accurate depiction of the productive interaction between knowledge and ignorance, supplanting the old metaphor of the "wall" of knowledge. This book explores an original conception of the nature and advancement of science. Marco J. Nathan's proposed shift brings attention to a prominent, albeit often neglected, construct--the black box--which underlies a well-oiled technique for incorporating a productive role of ignorance and failure into the acquisition of empirical knowledge. The black box is a metaphorical term used by scientists for the isolation of a complex phenomenon that they have deliberately set aside or may not yet fully understand. What is a black box? How does it work? How do we construct one? How do we determine what to include and what to leave out? What role do boxes play in contemporary scientific practice? Nathan's monograph develops an overarching framework for thinking about black boxes and discusses prominent historical cases that used it, including Darwin's view of inheritance in his theory of evolution and the "stimulus-response model" in psychology, among others. By detailing some fascinating episodes in the history of biology, psychology, and economics, Nathan revisits foundational questions about causation, explanation, emergence, and progress, showing how the insights of both reductionism and antireductionism can be reconciled into a fresh and exciting approach to science.

Over the last fifty years, scholars in biology, psychology, anthropology, and cognate fields have substantially enriched traditional philosophical theories about who we are and where we come from. The assumption of a shared human nature lies at the core of some of the most pressing socio-political issues of our time. From race to sex and gender, from medical therapy to disability, from biotechnological enhancement to transhumanism, all these timely debates presuppose a robust notion of human nature. Nevertheless, the riddle of human nature remains frustratingly elusive. Why? Marco J. Nathan here provides an accessible, detailed, and up-to-date overview of cutting-edge empirical research on human nature, including evolutionary psychology, critiques of essentialism, innateness, and genetic determinism, addressing the question of why these fields have failed to provide a full-blown theory of human nature. Nathan's answer is that our nature is not the kind of notion that is susceptible to explanation. Human nature rather plays a crucial role as an epistemological indicator, a pivotal concept that sets out the agenda for much social, political, and normative discourse. Nevertheless, science cannot adequately grasp it without dissolving it in the process.

Over the last fifty years, scholars in biology, psychology, anthropology, and cognate fields have substantially enriched traditional philosophical theories about who we are and where we come from. The assumption of a shared human nature lies at the core of some of the most pressing socio-political issues of our time. From race to sex and gender, from medical therapy to disability, from biotechnological enhancement to transhumanism, all these timely debates presuppose a robust notion of human nature. Nevertheless, the riddle of human nature remains frustratingly elusive. Why? Marco J. Nathan here provides an accessible, detailed, and up-to-date overview of cutting-edge empirical research on human nature, including evolutionary psychology, critiques of essentialism, innateness, and genetic determinism, addressing the question of why these fields have failed to provide a full-blown theory of human nature. Nathan's answer is that our nature is not the kind of notion that is susceptible to explanation. Human nature rather plays a crucial role as an epistemological indicator, a pivotal concept that sets out the agenda for much social, political, and normative discourse. Nevertheless, science cannot adequately grasp it without dissolving it in the process.

Philosophy of Molecular Medicine: Foundational Issues in Theory and Practice aims at a systematic investigation of a number of foundational issues in the field of molecular medicine. The volume is organized around four broad modules focusing, respectively, on the following key aspects: What are the nature, scope, and limits of molecular medicine? How does it provide explanations? How does it represent and model phenomena of interest? How does it infer new knowledge from data and experiments? The essays collected here, authored by prominent scientists and philosophers of science, focus on a handful of mainstream topics in the philosophical literature, such as causation, explanation, modeling, and scientific inference. These previously unpublished contributions shed new light on these traditional topics by integrating them with problems, methods, and results from three prominent areas of contemporary biomedical science: basic research, translational and clinical research, and clinical practice.