Let me know if you're willing to comment on the draft for me!
Here's the outline:
Part 1 Finding our target
Chp 1: What is the problem?
Summary: We are pulled in different directions about
individuality. Concepts can be valuable in lots of different ways. To
arbitrate, we need to choose criteria.
Chp 2: Setting the stage
Key puzzles: Should we
assume that metaphysical assumptions about ontology are authoritative over
biological ontology? (How) can we lean on general criteria for evaluating the
naturalness of kind categories in general, to evaluate the category of the
biological individual?
Summary: We can arbitrate the competing definitions, by
comparing the breadth of their value – the range of purposes that they are able
to serve well – and by prioritising concepts that idealise property clusters in
ways that support empirical success.
Part 2: Model concepts
Chp 3: Evolutionary individuality
Key puzzles: What features does a concept need in order
to act as the bearer of fitness in evolutionary theory? What is the relation
between that concept and the objects participating in the evolutionary process?
Summary: We can define evolutionary individuals in terms of
their capacity for participating in evolution by natural selection, thanks to
the action of various individuating mechanisms.
I also explained how particular idealisations at work in generating this
concept enable it to play crucial supporting roles in evolutionary theory.
Chp 4: Individuals in the making (Afra)
Key puzzles: How do new, higher-level individuals
come into existence? How can we address the apparent paradox between defining
evolutionary individuality as a theoretical kind category, on the one hand, and
declaring it a property that varies continuously, on the other?
Summary: Goldilocks organisms are the culmination of Evolutionary
Transitions in Individuality, via the gradual accumulation of a property we can
call ‘evolutionary potential’, thanks to the evolution of increasingly
effective policing mechanisms.
Chp 5: Other kinds of biological individual (Maureen)
Key puzzles: Why have we developed so many different ways of
thinking about living things? Are they all useful? What are they useful for?
How do they relate to one another?
Summary: Distinct sorts of biological individuality perform
quite different functions, some of which are more context-limited than others.
Part 3: Learning lessons
Chp 6: Identity and other metaphysical problems (Samir)
Key puzzles: Do (any of) the previously surveyed kinds of
biological individual imply identity conditions, as expected by metaphysicians?
Can biological individuality ground personal identity? Can it help with puzzles
about origins, counterfactuals and persistence?
Summary: The evolutionary account can provide certain sorts
of identity criteria – especially concerning the birth conditions of new
individuals. But that, just as with individuality in general, the answers
provided can be deemed successful or not only in the context of a given aim.
This is a more pragmatic, conventional view of identity than is usually
expected by metaphysicians, and it undercuts the project of appealing to biological
theory to settle metaphysical puzzles about identity. It also takes some of the
worry out of maintaining multiple different accounts of individuality that
imply different identity conditions.
Chp 7: Omissions, problems and non-problems
Key puzzle: Can the foregoing chapters help us to make sense of
the status of all candidate organisms, or are we left with some serious
problems?
Chp 8: Broader implications (Celia)
Summary: Work on biological individuality, and especially
evolutionary individuality, could be applied to much broader problems
concerning people and the societies that they live in, in so far as it captures
different ways of solving cooperation problems.
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