This book builds on recent scholarship highlighted in the edited collections,Philosophie, histoire, biologie: mélanges offerts à Jean Gayon(Merlin & Huneman, 2018)andKnowledge of Life Today(Gayon & Petit 2018/2019). While honoring the career and the thought of Jean Gayon (1949-2018), this book showcases the continued relevance of Gayon’s interdisciplinary work and illustrates his central place in the community of historians and philosophers of the life sciences.Chapters in this book address Jean Gayon’s intellectual trajectory from historical epistemology to the philosophy of biology,...

This book takes a new approach to the debate on causal pluralism in the philosophy of biology by asking how useful pluralism is instead of debating its truth.  The core thesis in this work is that many problems do not hinge on the question of whether or not we subscribe to causal pluralism.  As one step in this central argument, the author develops an account that reasonably distinguishes pluralism from monism; in another step he studies cases that allegedly motivate causal pluralism in biology.  Examining these cases shows how pluralism is often irrelevant and why pursuing pluralism is...