What is the point of philosophy of biology? This is the question that continued to come up as I thought, scribbled, and erased while writing this piece. This question has also been ever present for me since I first started seriously practicing the discipline. To be honest, I’m not really sure what the best way to address this question is. In fact, what I am sure about is that no one has a straightforward answer to this question. If I am lucky, maybe one or two people will squint and hesitantly nod their heads, then think that my answer resembles a grainy facsimile of their own. Maybe. Hopefully.
What is the point of philosophy of biology? I am curious if your answer and my ideas have a family resemblance. (Maybe they have the same smile, or they have similar circadian rhythms.) I am also curious if your answer and mine meet only in terms of the question they try to answer. (As passing strangers who nod to each other on a busy street.) It strikes me that these similarities and differences are the point, the point of foolishly posing such a question and thinking, with hubris, that we can try to answer it. Understanding our individual touchpoints for this mixed academic discipline gives us clarity. Attempting to describe those touchpoints gives us a shared project.
I ask your forgiveness in advance, however, because I am not really interested in giving a well-assembled answer to this question.
Philosophy of biology is a wonderful, curious place. Two academic pursuits met and made room for questions that are abstract by biology’s standards, applied for philosophy’s standards, and run in both directions (applying philosophy to biology and using biology to interrogate philosophy).
At times, philosophy of biology is a space where you can find answers. I came to philosophy at the end of my training as a field ecologist. My general interest was in how living and non-living things fit together, and I particularly focused on understanding this for the boreal forest, arctic, and their related transition zones. In the familiar philosophy of biology origin story, I found myself bothered by questions about life and questions about what it means to say we know or can know about life. This second set of questions was an unanswerable plague until I met a discipline where such questions were welcome. The answer, it turns out, is that revealing the concepts we use and assumptions we make when doing biology shapes what we know about life. This is comforting.
As an academic discipline, one of Western philosophy’s projects is to take the many ways we use abstract concepts and make them more precise. This focus on so-called precisifying means the discipline is prepared to handle unruly questions. Its drive to analyze means it is primed to ask these questions of other unsuspecting pursuits. And its breadth means that this philosophy is open to working in many disciplinary languages. Philosophy meets biology and asks “How?” and “Why?” of biology, while biology meets philosophy and asks how philosophy would answer those questions.
In thinking about what kinds of things I might want to share in this piece, I talked to one of my closest collaborators. He’s an academic field biologist who works on the social behavior of wild mammals. I asked what he would like philosophers to know: “Biologists don’t read philosophy.”
Of course, it is not strictly true that all biologists, and all those who are not professional philosophers, do not read philosophy. Philosophy is a varied discipline that offers lessons to all people in their projects. Folks read philosophy for fun, and philosophers work hard to share their research with nonexperts. It is not even sort of true that biologists do not read philosophy. Many curious biologists have abstract questions about their research, and many philosophers of biology work directly with biologists.
But these points are not what my collaborator meant by saying that “biologists don’t read philosophy.” The idea here is that philosophy of biology offers a creative, curious place between disciplines, and it is the philosopher of biology who keeps it.
It is not the biologist’s job to know the philosophy of biology. Their work is not to find the discipline, rummage through the bookshelves, then sit down and try to parse philosophical texts for their own use. The field ecologist’s job is to find, follow, and monitor their subjects. The evolutionary theoretician’s job is to develop, fine-tune, and apply their models. These tasks may happen near the rooms where philosophy of biology happens, but they may also happen far away, where one is standing in the middle of cool, clear headwaters wearing insulated chest waders and being bitten by horseflies.
None of this means that those who study life are ignorant of or resistant to philosophy of biology. Many biologists want to consider the big picture of their research. But we are humans. We each have limited time, energy, and resources, and biologists’ energies are already directed at, well, biology.
This is a rather mundane thing of me to say. Of course this is the case.
The mythic thing we call “expertise” is all about developing specialized focus on particular things. But expertise is slippery and amorphous. Some disciplines have clear boundaries and others do not. Turning our attention to mixed academic pursuits like the philosophy of biology, we get to see the strengths and challenges of requesting different things from our scientific questions and practitioners.
Biologists and philosophers alike will happen across the philosophy of biology. (Maybe. Hopefully.) This big academic project is a meeting place in need of guides. And so, the philosopher’s job is to welcome others, help them get oriented, and consider the questions that have no other home. This is comforting.
Hannah Anderson
Hannah Andersonis a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. She works primarily in the philosophy of biology and feminist epistemology, with additional scientific interests in the evolution of aging and arctic and boreal forest ecology. Hannah is interested in how scientists practice science and how philosophy can support scientific activities. Her main research focus is on how we understand the evolution of complex traits across the tree of life. In addition to biology, Hannah is interested in the role of illustration and other practice-based activities in science.
