Footnotes on the Philosophy of Biology
- 1 June 1969
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Philosophy of Science
- Vol. 36 (2) , 197-202
- https://doi.org/10.1086/288246
Abstract
No other branch of the philosophy of science is as backward as the philosophy of biology. When physicists or philosophers “explain biology,” they not only tend to use wrong terminologies but they usually throw away that which is typically biological. This error is second only to the even worse one of adopting vitalistic interpretations. Vitalism is now dead, as far as biologists are concerned (it seems to survive in the minds of a few philosophers), and a biologist can now talk about the differences between the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of biology without being suspected of being a concealed vitalist.Keywords
This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit:
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- Animal Species and EvolutionPublished by Harvard University Press ,1963
- Biology and the Nature of ScienceScience, 1963
- Cause and Effect in BiologyScience, 1961