ABSTRACT
It is only since the 1950s that philosophers of science began to pay serious attention to biology. Initially philosophers used biological examples to test the claims about science that logical positivists and logical empiricists had drawn from their studies of physics. Over the same time the revolution in biological theorizing – both evolutionary and molecular – gave rise to a number of abstract questions that have jointly interested biologists and philosophers with no independent interest in assessing positivism or the post-positivist picture of science that succeeded it (Monod 1971; Wilson 1975; Dawkins 1976). Nonetheless, this work was done with enough knowledge of the details of the biological revolution and developments in philosophy of science to draw conclusions about the adequacy or failure of post-positivist accounts of laws, theories, explanations, reduction, and scientific method. This essay examines the main issues that interest contemporary philosophers of biology, issues that clearly show the relevance of biology not only for philosophy of science but for philosophy in general.
