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  1. A Functional Naturalism.Anthony Nguyen - 2021 - Synthese 198 (1):295-313.
    I provide two arguments against value-free naturalism. Both are based on considerations concerning biological teleology. Value-free naturalism is the thesis that both (1) everything is, at least in principle, under the purview of the sciences and (2) all scientific facts are purely non-evaluative. First, I advance a counterexample to any analysis on which natural selection is necessary to biological teleology. This should concern the value-free naturalist, since most value-free analyses of biological teleology appeal to natural selection. My counterexample is unique (...)
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  • Against etiological function accounts of interests.Katie McShane - 2019 - Synthese 198 (4):3499-3517.
    The etiological account of function defines a part’s/trait’s function as whatever that part/trait does and was selected for doing. Some philosophers have tried to employ this as an account of biological interests, claiming that to benefit an organism is to promote its etiological functioning and to harm it is to inhibit such functioning. I argue that etiological functioning is not a good account of biological interests. I first describe the history of theories of biological interests, explaining the special role that (...)
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  • Functions and Health at the Interface of Biology and Technology.Elselijn Kingma - 2020 - Noûs 54 (1):182-203.
    Synthetic biology promises to eliminate the distinction between biology and engineering by delivering a philosophically interesting new kind of entity: a biological organism that is wholly designed and constructed by humans. The possibility of such organisms raises interesting questions in three domains: the analysis of (1) biological functions, (2) engineering functions, and (3) health and disease. This paper identifies and systematically answers these questions. This does not only establish how we should think about functions and health and disease in synthetic (...)
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  • Organism and artifact: Proper functions in Paley organisms.Sune Holm - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4b):706-713.
    In this paper I assess the explanatory powers of theories of function in the context of products that may result from synthetic biology. The aim is not to develop a new theory of functions, but to assess existing theories of function in relation to a new kind of biological and artifactual entity that might be produced in the not-too-distant future by means of synthetic biology. The paper thus investigates how to conceive of the functional nature of living systems that are (...)
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