Postdoctoral Research Fellow - 3 years (EXPIRED)

Many complex structures and processes in living organism are at least partly the result of spontaneous self-assembly processes. In the AssemblingLife project, a central aim is, within the framework of philosophy of science, to develop new ideas of life and life science explanation by bringing in the increasing knowledge and awareness of self-assembly processes from various scientific fields (for example nanoscience, molecular biology and soft material science). Important objectives are to provide a comprehensive analysis of the concept and idea of self- assembly across fields and scales and to decipher differences, similarities and connections between self-assembly and ideas of self- organization of living systems. The project aims to challenge (but also to build on) existing accounts of explanation in philosophy of biology and life sciences, such as current accounts of genetic causation as well as mechanist and interventionist ideas of explanation. It is also a central goal to explicate how several explanatory frameworks, such as for example biophysics and molecular biology, may compete and/or integrate from the viewpoint of self-assembly processes. The project aims at building bridges between mechanist and organicist views of life, to provide new answers to questions of scientific explanation, the relation between scales and levels of explanation, and ultimately to the question of how to understand life itself.

This postdoc position is specifically associated with the research strand in AssemblingLife, which addresses the vices and virtues of mechanist and interventionist ideas of explanation when evaluated in the light of current knowledge of self-assembly processes and their significance in living systems.

The project is funded by the ERC (Consolidator Grant).