ABSTRACT

Microbiology and virology have added various issues to the explananda of the species problem, such as lateral genetic transfer, endosymbiosis, community formation, and so forth. These, then, are the key issues that the problem of species must address. The species problem is often discussed in the context of developments in philosophy generally. For instance, Mill and Venn introduced the notion of natural kinds into the philosophy of science, and since then philosophers have returned to this as the basis for species in natural history/biology. A taxon is any class of objects in a classification in modern biology, and species are taxa. A "revival" of essentialism has occurred since the 1990s, associated with process structuralism, which is basically a neo-Thomistic account of structure determining function, causal essentialism, and a couple of philosophical attempts to revise essentialism as developmental resources shared by members of taxonomic groups.