The Leveled World: The Role of Levels of Organization in Biological Thought

• Applicant: Daniel Brooks, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 453040431

I seek in this project to provide grounding for the concept of 'levels of organization' by systematically reconstructing, documenting, and analyzing how scientists apply the term and how it was introduced and developed in the biological-scientific lexicon over time. This will proceed in three phases. (1) First, I will attend to conceptual issues concerning the concept’s character, i.e. how it is used, in science. I envision an ‘erotetic core’ motivating the concept’s usage in biology, meaning that scientists’ application of the levels concept is oriented toward dividing complex research questions into more manageable tasks. (2) Second, I will attend to the history of the concept, especially in 20th century biology. Here I will partition the concept’s origins, dispersal, and maturation into three periods of conceptual change and development that chronicle how the ‘levels’ transitioned from minor technical term into the ubiquitous concept of established significance it is today. (3) Finally, I will attend to the nature of levels of organization in biology. Here it appears that the idea of levels is a conglomerate notion that combines several ideas to characterize biological phenomena, among which include the organization of constituents into unique biological units, increased complexity of biological units over developmental and evolutionary time, and stratification of these units into chains of composition across different scales. These three analyses will provide a sustained and thorough documentation, clarification, and analysis to address the lacuna surrounding the levels concept in the scientific and philosophical literature.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants