holism versus reductionism, process algebra, object orientated programming, philosophy of biology One of the great current debates in biology concerns whether the observed behaviour of a system can be accounted for in terms of the behaviours of its subcomponents. The problem is often presented as a question of ‘holism versus reductionism’; whether ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts...

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In its relationship with society, contemporary medicine is beset by a deep tension. It is an old tension and familiar to all those who work in and study medicine. It has long been observed, for example, that the instrumental stance of scientific medicine can entail a loss of consideration for the person of the patient.1 The idealtype of the biomedical physician is a kind of applied scientist, g...

Like most domains of science, the study of the mind has been tackled at many scales of analysis, from the behavior of large groups of people (economics and ecology), to the diffusion of ions across cellular membranes (molecular biology and biophysics). At each of these scales, researchers often believe that the critical phenomena of interest, and the most powerful explanatory constructs and mec...

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The international meeting held in February 1975 at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, set in motion the first scientific evaluation of genetically modified organisms. It left a legacy that remains influential decades later when the world is faced with the prospect of a cornucopia of new products derived from gene-splicing technology. Unlike the initial concerns over th...

Freedom of will is fundamental to morality, intuition of self, and normal functioning of society. However, science does not provide a clear logical foundation for this idea. This paper considers the fundamental argument against free will, so called reductionism, and why the choice for dualism against monism, follows logically. Then, the paper summarizes unexpected conclusions from recent discov...

The present study is an attempt to clarify some aspects of the controversy between holism and reductionism in sociological theory. What are the theoretical and non-theoretical motives behind classical holistic and reductionistic approaches to sociological theory? Are they chiefly ontological, epistemological, normative or of a more practical nature? An analytical framework making, it possible t...