The project is interdisciplinary, and biology, nanoscience, chemistry and physics will inform the philosophical work.
Life is often understood as “hard work”; living processes require the constant input of energy and detailed genetic regulation. These ideas of life very much influence the general understanding of living systems, and how philosophers of science address biological explanation.
Self-assembly, on the other hand, can be understood as producing “order for free” and takes place when complex and ordered structures, patterns, and processes form spontaneously from disordered components.
Project aims
- Contribute a comprehensive analysis of the concept of self-assembly across scales
- Contribute a novel understanding of the role of genetic causation by investigating the interaction of genetic regulation and self-assembly-processes
- Contribute new ideas of scientific explanation that may bridge mechanist and organicist views of living systems
- Contribute a new account of the relations between levels and/or scales in living systems, elucidating the implications of self-assembly across scales for central discussions of reduction, and explanatory levels in the philosophy of biology
Sub-projects
- Subproject 1: Determining problems in existing approaches and identifying relevant empirical import to the project.
- Subproject 2: The concept of self-assembly across scales and relevant fields.
- Subproject 3: A new conceptualization of genetic causation and explanation.
- Subproject 4: Causal explanation and non-ideal intervention targets in living systems.
- Subproject 5: Competition and integration between explanatory frameworks.
- Subproject 6: Implications of self-assembly for philosophical discussion of reduction and emergence and the understanding of relations between scales/levels.