My research interests, both in my career as a biological scientist and as a humanistic scholar, has been in the general problem of understanding the living world in both its history and in its contemporary dimensions. This has meant a long-standing interest in evolutionary theory which I pursued initially in deep-sea organisms, particularly midwater fishes, and the evolutionary relationships of these forms. Work in biophysics and photosynthesis research also added to these inquiries experimental work on primary productivity in the sea with publications in this area. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
With my transfer into Philosophy, I continued these interests with study on early modern philosophy in relation to life science that led to published studies on Descartes, Buffon, John Ray, the natural history traditions, and studies of Lamarck, Richard Owen and Darwin. In more recent years, my early work in biophysics has underlain my interests in recent genetics, molecular biology, and biophysics, with particular interest in the issue of biophysical reductionism. I have sought to integrate these interests with my work in the humanities, theology and ethics through the study of Husserl\u2019s Phenomenology and its relevance for the understanding of the sciences. My current research project is to develop an analysis of the interaction of the biological and physical sciences in relation to the Phenomenology of the human person as a way of integrating scientific inquiry with more general humanistic concerns, utilizing insights of Michael Polanyi, Marjorie Grene, Edmund Husserl, and Robert Sokolowski. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My research interests, both in my career as a biological scientist and as a humanistic scholar, has been in the general problem of understanding the living world in both its history and in its contemporary dimensions. This has meant a long-standing interest in evolutionary theory which I pursued initially in deep-sea organisms, particularly midwater fishes, … Continue reading Research Interests<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4751,"featured_media":0,"parent":2,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-12","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/phillip-sloan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/phillip-sloan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/phillip-sloan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/phillip-sloan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4751"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/phillip-sloan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/phillip-sloan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/12\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/phillip-sloan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/12\/revisions\/13"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/phillip-sloan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/phillip-sloan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}