Comments on Marcel Weber’s “Life in a Physical World: The Place of the Life Sciences”

Abstract

Marcel Weber’s contribution is an extremely accurate and synthetic view of the state of some discussions which are typical of what is meant today by “philosophy of biology”. Before commenting more closely his contribution, I would like to take some distance and to come closer to actual science (at least to some parts of the biological sciences). Looking at biology as a set of different sciences is more and more frequent. From mathematical biology to medical sciences and to biotechnologies, the field of biology became more and more diversified, although some common features remain at the most general level. Biology as a whole remains basically an empirical science, or a set of largely empirical researches. Philosophers dealing with biology should not underestimate biological empiricism and biological experimentalism. The extent to which this is the case, which is recognized by Marcel Weber, creates a real difficulty for philosophical thinking, because looking at biology as a largely empirical and basically experimental science, leads to the conclusion that biology is much less stabilized, at least in important parts, than it could be supposed. If you do not look at things from a purely conceptual point of view, if you avoid projecting on biology as a science in progress or rather as a set of closely related research disciplines, the idea of the structure of biological knowledge as the major problem of the philosophy “of” biology, then you get a much more realistic and richer picture of the biological sciences. Pluralism is now completely integrated in biological thinking, and experimentalism remains a most general feature. As far as I can see, Marcel Weber could agree entirely on these remarks, since he wrote a book on biological experimentalism.