Biology and its disciplinary Partitions – intellectual and academic Constraints

Abstract

Biology and its disciplinary Partitions – intellectual and academic Constraints A productive confrontation between biology and philosophy should be based on a serious effort to recover a comprehensive vision of the living world as the subject of a unitary science. Key steps in the emergence of biology as the science of all living beings in the first half of the XIX century are outlined. Academic constraints and personal agendas shaping emergence and fate of individual biological disciplines are examined, with examples from developmental and evolutionary biology. Disciplinary divisions within the life sciences can be seriously limiting for the philosopher of science, much less so for the scientist, although many concepts of foundational importance for different biological disciplines are nomadic concepts that take on the most diverse meanings according to the contexts in which they are used. It is suggested to try a reversal between disciplines and key concepts, turning the latter into anchors for a potentially nomadic set of disciplines.

Keywords

• history of biology
• structure of science
• concepts