Igor Ya. Pavlinov was, until his retirement in 2018, the leading researcher and the chief of the Mammal Division at the Zoological Museum, Lomonosov Moscow State University. He is still affiliated with the Zoological Museum, where he is a curator of mammals. His doctoral dissertation was Cladistic approach to phylogenetics and systematics: Theoretical foundations of evolutionary cladistics (1997). His principal research interests are in theoretical systematics and phylogenetics, systematics of mammals (mainly rodents), and morphometrics. He is the author of several dozen books on natural history, including Cladistic Analysis: Methodological Issues (1990), Evolution of Life (2001), Systematics of Mammals of the World (2003), Foundations of the Contemporary Phylogenetics (2005), Nomenclature in Systematics (2015) and its successor Taxonomic Nomenclature-What's in a Name: Theory and History (2022), Foundations of Biological Systematics (2018) and its successor Biological Systematics: History and Theory (2021), Mammals of Russia: A Guide (2019), The Species Problem. A Conceptual History (2023), and several books on particular orders and families of mammals.

About the Author

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 A Historical Consideration

1.1 A Brief Overview

1.2 The Roots: Folk Systematics

1.3 The Antique Hierarchical Systems

1.4 Toward the Deductive Genus-Species Scheme

1.5 The Development of Ranked Taxonomic Hierarchy

1.6 Against Taxonomic Hierarchy and/or Its Ranking

1.7 A Brief History of Meronomic Hierarchies

Chapter 2 Some Philosophical Considerations

2.1 The Hierarchical Structure of Cognitive Situation

2.2 The Hierarchies of Reduction Cascades

2.3 Some Comments on the Notions and Definitions

2.4 The Pyramids of Reasoning: Logics, Methodologies, and Methods

2.5 The Hierarchies of Taxonomic Theories

2.6 On the Objectivity and Subjectivity of Hierarchies and Ranks

2.7 The Importance of Being a System

2.8 A Few Words About Structuralism

Chapter 3 The Hierarchies as They Are

3.1 Basic Features of Hierarchies

3.2 More on Onto-Epistemic Dualism of Hierarchies

3.3 The Hierarchies Topology

3.4 Levelism

3.5 Fuzzy Hierarchies

3.6 Hierarchization of Classification Systems

3.7 To Rank or Not to Rank: The Contemporary Debates

Chapter 4 The Hierarchies Representations

4.1 The Text-Like Style

4.2 The Tree-Like Style

4.3 The Plane-Like Style

4.4 From Classifications to Representations and Back Again

Chapter 5 Two Important Conceptual Pyramids: Species and Homology

5.1 The Species Problem

5.2 The Homology Problem

Chapter 6 Taxonomic Hierarchy and Nomenclature

6.1 Taxonomic Theory and Nomenclature

6.2 The Hierarchies of Regulative Nomenclature

6.3 Rank-Dependent Nomenclature

6.4 Rank-Independent Nomenclature

References

Index