Abstract
This book addresses a concept—that of the organism, or biological individual—which is used across biology to pick out living things, but which is contested. I argue that we can arbitrate arguments about the concept by delving into philosophical questions about what concepts are for, in order to formulate some plausible success criteria against which the performance of rival concepts can be evaluated. I defend a particular, evolutionary way of understanding the concept as outperforming its rivals in terms of the kind and range of work it supports. More generally, I argue that kind concepts are like scientific models, in that they distort and idealise the natural world for the sake of making it easier for us to think, talk, and entertain useful expectations about that world. This means that we need to be cautious when trafficking between biological concepts and more abstract metaphysical assumptions about objecthood. But it also helps to explain how our common-sense practice of parsing the living world into countable chunks delivers rich predictive and explanatory success, even though that world is in a bewildering state of transition and compositional complexity. The book delivers creative insights for evolutionary biology and transitions theory, but also breaks new ground in the way it connects scientific ontology to metaphysics.
If your university has access to OUP ebooks you can read it online here (and everyone can see the table of contents):
https://academic.oup.com/book/60068?login=false
Otherwise you can buy it here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-units-of-life/ellen-clarke/9780192857194
Or you can download the first chapter here here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BQCue5stbNTMjKeXloa3Hnlno_snAlMm/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=113284151931103883967&rtpof=true&sd=true
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