Philippe Huneman
- First trained in mathematics and then in philosophy, Philippe Huneman is Director of research (eq. Full Professor) at the Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS / Paris I Sorbonne). After having studied the constitution of the concept of organism in modern biology in relation with Kant’s theory of purposiveness (Métaphysique et biologie, Paris: Kimé 2008 and many papers in philosophy journals and books), he turned to philosophy of evolutionary biology and ecology. He edited several books (From groups to individuals, on individuality with F. Bouchard (MIT Press 2013); on functions (“Synthese Library”, 2013); a coedited reference volume under the title Handbook of evolutionary thinking in the sciences (Springer, 2015); and a book on development, inheritance and evolution edited with D. Walsh, to appear at Oxford UP in 2016), and published papers on the relationships between natural selection and causation, on the roles of organism in evolution, as well as the status of development in recent evolutionary theory, and on the computational conception of emergence in general, as well as issues in modeling and simulation. He is generally concerned by types of explanation in biology and ecology, focusing on structural and topological explanations in these fields, and is the PI of an interdisciplinary funded project (french ANR) on explanations in evolutionary biology (“The space of explanations in evolutionary theory”), and of another project on environmental philosophy (GDR Sapienv) as well as the cochair of the CNRS funded LIA ParisToronto-Montréal ECIEB (on evolutionary biology).
He is affiliated Professor to the University of Toronto since 2009 and have been a visiting professor in 2005 to the University of Chicago. He is also coeditor of the book series History, Philosophy and Theory in Life Sciences, Springer (with: C. Wolfe, T. Reydon). - contact - personal webpage