Dipartimento di Filosofia

My research project aims at catching the epistemological notion of causality and the way it is instantiated in the relational structure of explanatory sentences. The field of inquiry is however bounded to causal explanation in biology and deals with developmental phenomena at the crossroads between old and new explanatory models. The first step is a critical one: it proceeds by tracing some theoretcal and empirical blind alleys of contemporary gene-based developmental explanations. The main thesis opens up the possibility for a complex description of development where biochemical, biophysical and ecological issues play a causal role which is complementary to genes' dynamics. The expected result would be a multi-dimensional causal structure to support epistemologically such a complex description. Proficiency fields : Epistemology, Philosophy of Biology.