With financial support (USF; Universitair Stimulerings Fonds) from the 'Vrije Universiteit', the department of Molecular Cell Physiology of the faculty of Earth and Life Sciences embarked on a program called "Living reductionism; learning from biological models" in July 1999. The program was part of a larger program that aimed at gaining insight into the relations between Faith, Science, Society and Culture. The initiator of this program was Prof. Wim Drees. After he left the VU, the departments of Artificial Intelligence (Jan Treur) and Theoretical Psychology (Huib Looren-de Jong), together with our department, decided to continue the discussions and to put the focal point on Reductionism and related issues. This cooperation culminated in three separate papers and a summarizing collective paper that were jointly published as a Symposium in Philosophical Psychology in 2002.[1]
Within the framework of our program "Living reductionism", the department of Molecular Cell Physiology invited two philosophers, Robert Richardson (University of Cincinnati, USA) and Achim Stephan (Universität Osnabrück, Germany) to start a collaboration on the notion of Emergence. In a genuinely collaborative effort, we set out to seek a useful approach of the concept of emergence in the natural sciences in general and in biochemical networks in particular. Their first visit to the VU was rounded off with a Minisymposium (October 1, 2002) that dealt with ‘Interlevel relations in Computer Science, Psychology, and Biology’. It took place at the Vrije Universiteit. After a period of intensive discussions, we arrived at a notion of emergence that is different from that commonly used in metaphysics. The paper 'Emergence and its place in nature: a case study of biochemical networks' we wrote together will appear in Synthese in 2005.[2]
From the start of our program on 'living reductionism' in 1999, we have been studying issues that bear on the discipline Systems Biology and, at the same time, have (strong) philosophical implications, like nonlinearity, (bio)complexity, (anti)reductionism, self-organization, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, (kinetic) modeling, or emergence. In the past few years, several congresses, symposia and workshop on Systems Biology have been organized throughout the world dealing with specific experimental and theoretical topics and also several books on Systems Biology have been published or will be published soon. It is our strong belief that the foundations of Systems Biology are fundamentally different from those of Molecular Biology. Therefore, we think that time is ripe for a symposium and book on the Philosophy of Systems Biology. Up to now, the Philosophy of Biology did not pay much attention to the discipline of Systems Biology and to acknowledge this fact, we have decide to name our symposium and the accompanying book: "Towards a Philosophy of Systems Biology".