Despite the radical importance of embryology in the development of organicism,
developmental biology remains philosophically underexplored as a theoretical and …

At first sight, the empirical study of ontogenesis and the theoretical study of organismal
agency seem to have little in common. In this chapter, I discuss why this initial impression is …

Abstract “Development” suggests that there is something that is developing, or changing
over time. We can ask about temporal boundaries of that developmental process, asking …

Theoretical accounts of development exhibit several internal tensions and face multiple
challenges. They span from the problem of the identification of the temporal boundaries of …

This essay must be tempered throughout with humility. In the past 50 years, developmental
biology has recapitulated in rapid order the Industrial Revolution's succession of creator …

In this article, I address the question of what Developmental Systems Theory (DST) aims at
explaining. I distinguish two lines of thought in DST, one that deals specifically with …

Understanding the organization of an organism by individuating meaningful parts and
accounting for organismal properties by studying the interaction of bodily parts is a central …

The way in which parts are related to wholes is crucial to any theory of self-organization,
since it is necessary to know what is being organized and what collective properties they …

The conceptual history of the term “organization” begins in Medieval times with the reception
and transformation of Aristotle's philosophy of life. It designates the corporeal structure and …

Two approaches to an integration of evolution and development are often distinguished, one
“neo-Darwinian” and the other “structuralist”. Should these approaches in turn be …