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The Science of Lost Worlds (MIT)

Adrian Currie (2026)

In The Science of Lost Worlds, Adrian Mitchell Currie and the fantastical Prof. Ichthy explore the epistemology of the historical sciences. They show how paleontologists creatively adopt perspectives that link the unfamiliar past with the familiar present through a variety of interlocking, iterative strategies that combine imagination and hard science to discover lost worlds.

Considering science, art, and the materiality of paleontological practice, Currie develops an artifactualist account of this scientific imagination. They explore the metaphysical upshots of paleontological practice, the deeply modal nature of paleontological knowledge, and how the science of the deep past is about deep possibility. Currie compares our knowledge of the past to our knowledge of the future, arguing that the peculiarity of the future profoundly limits our capacity to know it.

The Science of Lost Worlds is an exploration of palaeontological practice and reasoning that reflects and amplifies the ability of the deep past to generate wonder.

Methods in the Philosophy of Science (MIT)

Adrian Currie (2025)

A guidebook to methods and methodology, encouraging deeper engagement across the philosophy of science and beyond.

The last twenty years have seen multiple methodological revolutions in the philosophy of science: There has been increased diversity concerning the questions asked, who asks those questions, who the relevant audiences are, and what the techniques and tools involved are. In Methods in the Philosophy of Science: A User’s Guide, Sophie Veigl and Adrian Currie introduce this range of methods through both practical advice and philosophical reflection. Each chapter introduces the reader to a method or set of methods in the philosophy of science, discusses its advantages and limitations, and provides practical guidance on how to learn skills relevant to applying the method.

Everyone Flows: A Process Philosophy of Human Life (Oxford)

John Dupré (2025)

The book includes:

• A clear and accessible introduction to process philosophy
• An unusual but contemporary introduction to the philosophy of biology
• And provides approaches to central philosophical problems of human life, including personal identity, pregnancy and abortion, human nature and human kinds (especially sex and gender, race, and culture), and free will

Matter Out of Place. Anthropological Explorations of Bodies, Dirt and Morality (Berghahn)

Edited by Rebecca Lynch, Joseph Calabrese, and Roland Littlewood (2025)

While ‘pollution’ tends to be used to describe material contamination, anthropologists also often use the term to refer to social and individual challenges to a cultural idea of purity. These may be seen in terms of religious practice, foodstuffs and social differentiation, and pollution has been used as a trope to explore ideas of dirt and place, moral inversion and reinforcement, disgust, and taboo. Pollution as a concept shifts us into thinking with ideas of purity, order (and disorder), categorisation, and moral values. For those of us who work with bodies and on medicine, notions of pollution and its moral connotations seem particularly pertinent, weaving into and through our objects of study in different ways and with different consequences. This book is an invitation to consider the continued relevance of Mary Douglas’ conceptualization of pollution and dirt as ‘matter out of place’ in relation to contemporary circumstances. Its ethnographic and theoretical contributions cover diverse contexts, ranging from Europe to Africa, the Caribbean, India, and Outer Space and consider how bodies, health and moral framings connect to, build on, and perhaps allow us to reconsider ideas of pollution core to the discipline.

Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions & Public Health in the UK (Bloomsbury Academic)

Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal, Arthur Rose (2023)

This open access book examines the various ways that shame, shaming and stigma became an integral part of the United Kingdom's public health response to COVID-19 during 2020. Through a series of six case studies taken from the events of 2020, this thought-provoking book identifies a systemic failure to manage shame-producing circumstances in the UK. Ultimately, it addresses the experience of shame as a crucial, if often overlooked, consequence of pandemic politics, and advocates for a "shame sensitive" approach to public health responses.

Mind as Metaphor: A Defence of Mental Fictionalism (Oxford)

Adam Toon (2023)

We often think of the mind as an inner world. Once, this inner world might have been a spirit or soul - a "ghost in the machine", in Gilbert Ryle's memorable phrase. Nowadays, we are told it will be found in the brain. Adam Toon argues that this is a mistake. In fact, our concept of mind is fundamentally metaphorical: we project the 'outer world' of human culture onto the 'inner world' of the mind. This is an enormously powerful way of making sense of people and their behaviour. But we must not forget that this inner world is only a useful fiction.

Mind as Metaphor develops this idea to offer a radical new approach to the mind, known as mental fictionalism. Toon shows that mental fictionalism can make sense of our ordinary concept of mind (or folk psychology), while avoiding the difficulties faced by alternative approaches, such as behaviourism or instrumentalism. In doing so, Mind as Metaphor sheds new light on a range of issues, from the mind's capacity to represent the world (or intentionality) to the way in which new tools and practices expand the limits of inquiry.

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Philosophy of Psychiatry (Routledge) 

Sam Wilkinson (2023)

This is the first introductory textbook of its kind devoted to philosophy of psychiatry, offering a thorough and accessible investigation of the conceptual and philosophical problems at the heart of psychiatric practice and research. While it applies some of the long-standing concerns of philosophy to the mental health professions, it also investigates philosophical problems and issues that have arisen more recently from careful examination of psychiatric phenomena. Divided into two parts, Philosophy of Psychiatric Practice and Research and Philosophy and Psychopathology, the book’s 12 chapters cover topics like the ontological status of mental illness, philosophical issues in diagnosis, the role of culture in psychiatry and the relationship between mental illness and personal identity, as well as explore foundational problems in studying well-known psychopathologies like schizophrenia, depression and addiction. All chapters include initial overviews and concluding summaries and a list of suggested readings. 

Drawing Processes of Life (Intellect)   

Gemma Anderson-Tempini and John Dupré (2023)

Drawing Processes of Life is the product of biologists, philosophers, and artists working together to formulate new ways of representing our new approach to life. It is a mutualistic symbiosis, where identities are transformed, information and nutritive substances shared, and where new organisms emerge.  

Originating from an AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project, it derives from Gemma Andersons’ work on the methodological and epistemological value of drawing as a technique in biological research and from her collaborative work on visualising living – biological – processes through artistic processes. It also draws on John Dupré’s recent work on biology as process, and the need to develop representations of biological systems that more adequately capture their processual nature. Hence the book has intertwined aims: to show how better to represent biological process through drawing and to demonstrate the scientific value of drawing as a method. 

The book presents this work and locates it in a broader historical and contemporary perspective on the relations between art and science. The project outcomes are interwoven with the work of leading scholars in the field. Many of these contributions also stress the problems presented by the processual nature of biological phenomena, a central focus of Anderson and Dupré’s own work. 

Contributors include Chiara Ambrosio, Heather Barnett, Alessio Corti, Katharina Lee Chichester, Johannes Jaeger, Wahida Khandker, Jonathan Phillips, Berta Verd, James Wakefield and Janina Wellmann. Foreword from Scott F. Gilbert, and Afterword from Sarah Gilbert and Scott F. Gilbert. 

The perspectives presented here constitute a powerfully integrated and vital set of themes of interest to artists, scientists, philosophers, students and post-doctoral researchers. 

Animals matter: Resistance and transformation in animal commodification (Leiden)

Julien Dugnoille (2023)

In this book, we reclaim the term “resistance” by exploring how animals can “resist” their commodification through blocking and allowing human intervention in their lives. In the cases explored in this volume, animals lead humans to rethink their relationship to animals by either blocking and/or allowing human commodification. In some cases, this results in greater control exercised on the animals, while in others, animals’ resistance also poses a series of complex moral questions to human commodifiers, sometimes to the point of transforming humans into active members of resistance movements on behalf of animals.

Dogs and cats in South Korea (Purdue University Press)

Julien Dugnoille (2022)

Dogs and Cats in South Korea: Itinerant Commodities shows that though dogs and cats are consumed in the millions each year, they are recipients of both cruelty and care in a very unique way compared to other animal species in South Korean society. The anti-imperialist and postcolonial stances associated with the consumption of dogs and cats in South Korea are oversimplistic. Stereotypes by societies that do not eat these animals overshadow the various ways in which South Korean citizens interact with them, including companionship. In fact, many dogs and cats go from companion to livestock, and from livestock to companion, demonstrating that the relationships with these creatures are not only complex, but also fluid. The trajectories of the lives of dogs and cats are never linear. In that sense, individual dogs and cats in South Korea are itinerant animals navigating an exchange system based on culture, economics, and politics. With nuance and cultural understanding, Dugnoille tells the complicated stories of these animals in South Korea, as well as the humans who commoditize and singularize them.

Data Journeys in the Sciences (Springer) 

Sabina Leonelli and Niccolo Tempini (2020)

This groundbreaking, open access volume analyses and compares data practices across several fields through the analysis of specific cases of data journeys. It brings together leading scholars in the philosophy, history and social studies of science to achieve two goals: tracking the travel of data across different spaces, times and domains of research practice; and documenting how such journeys affect the use of data as evidence and the knowledge being produced.  

The volume captures the opportunities, challenges and concerns involved in making data move from the sites in which they are originally produced to sites where they can be integrated with other data, analysed and re-used for a variety of purposes. The in-depth study of data journeys provides the necessary ground to examine disciplinary, geographical and historical differences and similarities in data management, processing and interpretation, thus identifying the key conditions of possibility for the widespread data sharing associated with Big and Open Data.  

The chapters are ordered in sections that broadly correspond to different stages of the journeys of data, from their generation to the legitimisation of their use for specific purposes. Additionally, the preface to the volume provides a variety of alternative “roadmaps” aimed to serve the different interests and entry points of readers; and the introduction provides a substantive overview of what data journeys can teach about the methods and epistemology of research. 

The Devil is Disorder (Berghahn) 

Rebecca Lynch (2020)

What role might the Devil have in health and illness? The Devil is Disorder explores constructions of the body, health, illness and wider misfortune in a Trinidadian village where evangelical Christianity is growing in popularity. Based on long-term ethnography and locating the village in historical and global context, the book takes a nuanced cosmological approach to situate evangelical Christian understandings as shaping and being shaped by their context and, in the process, shaping individuals themselves. As people move from local to global subjects, health here stretches beyond being a matter of individual bodies and is connected to worldwide flows and networks, spirit entities, and expansive moral orders. 

Vermin, Victims and Disease (Palgrave Macmillan) 

Angela Cassidy (2019)

This open access book provides the first critical history of the controversy over whether to cull wild badgers to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in British cattle. This question has plagued several professional generations of politicians, policymakers, experts and campaigners since the early 1970s. Questions of what is known, who knows, who cares, who to trust and what to do about this complex problem have been the source of scientific, policy, and increasingly vociferous public debate ever since. This book integrates contemporary history, science and technology studies, human-animal relations, and policy research to conduct a cross-cutting analysis. It explores the worldviews of those involved with animal health, disease ecology and badger protection between the 1970s and 1990s, before reintegrating them to investigate the recent public polarisation of the controversy. Finally it asks how we might move beyond the current impasse. 

The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body

Luna Dolezal (2015)

The Body and Shame introduces leading twentieth-century phenomenological and sociological accounts of embodied subjectivity through the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias. Dolezal examines the embodied, social and political features of body shame. contending that body shame is both a necessary and constitutive part of embodied subjectivity while simultaneously a potential site of oppression and marginalization. Exploring the cultural politics of shame, the final chapters of this work explore the phenomenology of self-presentation and a feminist analysis of shame and gender, with a critical focus on the practice of cosmetic surgery, a site where the body is literally shaped by shame. 

Rock, Bone and Ruin (MIT) 

Adrian Currie (2019)

The “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. How has this been possible, given that the evidence they have to work with offers mere traces of the past? In Rock, Bone, and Ruin, Adrian Currie explains that these scientists are “methodological omnivores,” with a variety of strategies and techniques at their disposal, and that this gives us every reason to be optimistic about their capacity to uncover truths about prehistory. Creative and opportunistic paleontologists, for example, discovered and described a new species of prehistoric duck-billed platypus from a single fossilized tooth. Examining the complex reasoning processes of historical science, Currie also considers philosophical and scientific reflection on the relationship between past and present, the nature of evidence, contingency, and scientific progress. 

Currie draws on varied examples from across the historical sciences, from Mayan ritual sacrifice to giant Mesozoic fleas to Mars's mysterious watery past, to develop an account of the nature of, and resources available to, historical science. He presents two major case studies: the emerging explanation of sauropod size, and the “snowball earth” hypothesis that accounts for signs of glaciation in Neoproterozoic tropics. He develops the Ripple Model of Evidence to analyze “unlucky circumstances” in scientific investigation; examines and refutes arguments for pessimism about the capacity of the historical sciences, defending the role of analogy and arguing that simulations have an experiment-like function. Currie argues for a creative, open-ended approach, “empirically grounded” speculation. 

Everything Flows (OUP) 

Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré (2018)

Everything Flows explores the metaphysical thesis that the living world is not made up of substantial particles or things, as has often been supposed, but is rather constituted by processes. The biological domain is organised as an interdependent hierarchy of processes, which are stabilized and actively maintained at different timescales. Even entities that intuitively appear to be paradigms of things, such as organisms, are actually better understood as processes. Unlike previous attempts to articulate processual views of biology, which have tended to use Alfred North Whitehead's panpsychist metaphysics as a foundation, this book takes a naturalistic approach to metaphysics. It submits that the main motivations for replacing an ontology of substances with one of processes are to be found in the empirical findings of science. Biology provides compelling reasons for thinking that the living realm is fundamentally dynamic, and that the existence of things is always conditional on the existence of processes. The phenomenon of life cries out for theories that prioritise processes over things, and it suggests that the central explanandum of biology is not change but rather stability, or more precisely, stability attained through constant change. This edited volume brings together philosophers of science and metaphysicians interested in exploring the prospects of a processual philosophy of biology. The contributors draw on an extremely wide range of biological case studies, and employ a process perspective to cast new light on a number of traditional philosophical problems, such as identity, persistence, and individuality. 

Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study (Chicago) 

Sabina Leonelli (2016)

In recent decades, there has been a major shift in the way researchers process and understand scientific data. Digital access to data has revolutionized ways of doing science in the biological and biomedical fields, leading to a data-intensive approach to research that uses innovative methods to produce, store, distribute, and interpret huge amounts of data. In Data-Centric Biology, Sabina Leonelli probes the implications of these advancements and confronts the questions they pose. Are we witnessing the rise of an entirely new scientific epistemology? If so, how does that alter the way we study and understand life—including ourselves? 
 
 Leonelli is the first scholar to use a study of contemporary data-intensive science to provide a philosophical analysis of the epistemology of data. In analyzing the rise, internal dynamics, and potential impact of data-centric biology, she draws on scholarship across diverse fields of science and the humanities—as well as her own original empirical material—to pinpoint the conditions under which digitally available data can further our understanding of life. Bridging the divide between historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science, Data-Centric Biology offers a nuanced account of an issue that is of fundamental importance to our understanding of contemporary scientific practices. 

In recent decades, there has been a major shift in the way researchers process and understand scientific data. Digital access to data has revolutionized ways of doing science in the biological and biomedical fields, leading to a data-intensive approach to research that uses innovative methods to produce, store, distribute, and interpret huge amounts of data. In Data-Centric Biology, Sabina Leonelli probes the implications of these advancements and confronts the questions they pose. Are we witnessing the rise of an entirely new scientific epistemology? If so, how does that alter the way we study and understand life—including ourselves? 
 
 Leonelli is the first scholar to use a study of contemporary data-intensive science to provide a philosophical analysis of the epistemology of data. In analyzing the rise, internal dynamics, and potential impact of data-centric biology, she draws on scholarship across diverse fields of science and the humanities—as well as her own original empirical material—to pinpoint the conditions under which digitally available data can further our understanding of life. Bridging the divide between historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science, Data-Centric Biology offers a nuanced account of an issue that is of fundamental importance to our understanding of contemporary scientific practices. 

The Feeling Body (MIT) 

Giovanna Colombetti (2014)

In The Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti takes ideas from the enactive approach developed over the last twenty years in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and applies them for the first time to affective science—the study of emotions, moods, and feelings. She argues that enactivism entails a view of cognition as not just embodied but also intrinsically affective, and she elaborates on the implications of this claim for the study of emotion in psychology and neuroscience.  

In the course of her discussion, Colombetti focuses on long-debated issues in affective science, including the notion of basic emotions, the nature of appraisal and its relationship to bodily arousal, the place of bodily feelings in emotion experience, the neurophysiological study of emotion experience, and the bodily nature of our encounters with others. Drawing on enactivist tools such as dynamical systems theory, the notion of the lived body, neurophenomenology, and phenomenological accounts of empathy, Colombetti advances a novel approach to these traditional issues that does justice to their complexity. Doing so, she also expands the enactive approach into a further domain of inquiry, one that has more generally been neglected by the embodied-embedded approach in the philosophy of cognitive science. 

Doing Ethical Research (Palgrave Macmillan) 

Hannah Farrimond (2013)

Navigating ethical issues throughout your research project can be a confusing and daunting task. But why are ethics so important anyway? Can you anticipate or prepare for ethical dilemmas before they happen? And what can you do if they arise in your research? 
 
Doing Ethical Research offers essential advice on how to negotiate ethical considerations at each stage of your project, from the approval application to the final report write-up. In particular, the book: 
 
- Examines the fundamental importance of ethical research and assessment 
- Explores hot topics of consent, confidentiality and research relationships 
- Includes ethical dilemmas and case studies to show how ethics affect real-life research 
- Gives readers confidence to interpret and critically reflect upon ethical debates 
 
Each chapter is packed with clear examples and explanations that are designed to help readers to make their own ethical decisions. It is an essential resource for all researchers, whatever their level or research background.