Philosophy of reductionism in biology

Moving beyond the influence of molecular genetics on the debate about reductionism in philosophy of biology

The rise of molecular genetics has had a fundamental influence on the development of philosophy of biology because of its central role in the debate concerning reductionism. I begin by describing notable attempts to reduce Mendelian genetics to molecular genetics, the lightning rod of reductionist attempts in philosophy of biology. I then suggest that the syntactic reductionist may wish to focu...

Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Biology : A Historical Review

The philosophy of biology has existed as a distinct sub-discipline within the philosophy of science for about thirty years. The rapid growth of the field has mirrored that of the biological sciences in the same period. Today the discipline is well represented in the leading journals in philosophy of science, as well as in several specialist journals. There have been two generations of textbooks...

Complexity, Reductionism, and Holism in Science and Philosophy of Science

There are concepts that belong to the basic terminology of science but which are not used in everyday scientific work – such as the concepts of natural law and causality. Such concepts touch on the epistemological foundations of science, and thus transcend individual disciplines and presuppose a particular interest, the interest in foundational questions of science, and presumably also special ...

Philosophy of biology versus philosophy of physics.

Not long ago I witnessed a remarkable interchange between two great thinkers: the cosmologist and physicist John Archibald Wheeler, and the philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper. Popper and Wheeler were meeting with a dozen other philosophers and scientists at Schloss Kronberg, the Victorian castle built by Kaiser Wilhelm's mother outside of Frankfurt during the closing years of the nineteenth...

The limits of reductionism in biology: what alternatives?