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Footnotes on the Philosophy of Biology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Ernst Mayr
Ernst Mayr*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

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.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , June 1969 , pp. 197 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © 1969 by The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

*

Presented December 27, 1965, at the annual meeting sponsored by Section L of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Berkeley, California.

References

[1] Mayr, E., “Cause and Effect in Biology,” Science, vol. 134, 1961, p. 1501.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
[2] Mayr, E., Animal Species and Evolution, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1963.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[3] Mayr, E., “The Evolution of the Living Systems,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 51 (5), 1964, p. 934.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
[4] Mayr, E., “Cause and Effect in Biology,” in Cause and Effect, The Free Press, New York, 1965, 33.Google Scholar
[5] Mayr, E., “Biological Man and the Year 2000,” in Daedalus Toward the Year 2000: work in progress, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1967, p. 832.Google Scholar
[6] Mayr, E., Principles of Systematic Zoology, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968 (in press).Google Scholar
[7] Simpson, G. G., “Biology and the Nature of Science,” Science, vol. 139, 1963, p. 81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed