ABSTRACT
To address the ‘species problem’, we need the combined efforts of philosophers and biologists as well as a refreshed reading through the literature in which species, as a term applied to animal and plant forms, has been changing meaning and circumscription through time. Restricting attention to recent times, the relationship between species taxon and species name has been changing since Linnaeus, concealed behind the continuing adoption of Linnaean binomials irrespective of the plurality of biodiversity units we need to recognise in the different branches of biology. This has eventually caused the emergence of the species problem. Tentative solutions have been advanced, either by arbitrarily restricting the meaning of species to the units of biodiversity recognisable, e.g., in evolutionary biology, or by looking for a compromise with a generalised species concept. It is more sensible to accept that biological disciplines need a diversity of species-level units. The phenomenological species of the pre-Linnaean and Linnaean tradition can still function as an anchor concept and provide species names as far as the so-called species recognised in other biological disciplines are coextensive with them; but the nomadic association of the different disciplines with taxonomy as anchor discipline necessitates both conceptual and nomenclatural pluralism.
