The wide scope of philosophy of biology

Abstract

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology is a collection of 25 substantial essays which are ‘‘written especially to give the reader an introduction to one of the most vibrant areas of scholarship today, and at the same time to move the subject forward dramatically’’. This Handbook largely succeeds at both of these tasks. The Handbook is unlike a number of other companions or encyclopedia collections as its authors write opinionated pieces on topics which do not always attempt to be comprehensive. It begins with a helpful introduction by Ruse followed by a history of the philosophy of biology written by the late David Hull. It ends with a piece on the rhetoric of Stephen Jay Gould which I found quite interesting, even though perhaps not ‘‘philosophical’’. In between, the essays showcase the large variety of topics and approaches that fall under the heading ‘‘philosophy of biology’’. The philosophy of biology is now a discipline in its own right and is a growth industry. The rising prevalence of the life sciences combined with the trend toward specialization in philosophy indicates that its phenomenal growth is likely to continue. The field is now large enough that it is undergoing its own divisions and trends of increased specialization as well. Like any field, much of the work resists classification, but there are rough categories of the kind of work that qualifies as philosophy of biology. There is a great deal of work that continues to be done dealing with problems where conceptual issues mix with empirical ones within the science itself. Sometimes, but not always, authors utilize these biological problems to address more general issues in the philosophy of science. In this Handbook, some central problems in the field are ignored—other than a brief historical section on group selection in Ruse’s chapter on ‘‘Darwinian Evolutionary Theory’’, the levels of selection problem is not mentioned. Likewise, there is no direct discussion of the