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That was the Philosophy of Biology that was: Mainx, Woodger, Nagel, and Logical Empiricism, 1929–1961

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Abstract

This article is a systematic critical survey of work done in the philosophy of biology within the logical empiricist tradition, beginning in the 1930s and until the end of the 1950s. It challenges a popular view that the logical empiricists either ignored biology altogether or produced analyses of little value. The earliest work on the philosophy of biology within the logical empiricist corpus was that of Philipp Frank, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Felix Mainx. Mainx, in particular, provided a detailed analysis of biology in the 1930s and 1940s in his contribution to the logical empiricists’ Encyclopedia of Unified Science. However, the most important contributions to the philosophy of biology were those of Joseph Henry Woodger and Ernest Nagel. Woodger is primarily remembered for deploying the axiomatic method in biology but he also used semiformal methods for the analysis of many biological problems. While Woodger’s axiomatic work was often derided by some later philosophers of biology (e.g., David Hull and Michael Ruse), this article defends both the biological and the philosophical significance of some of that work, for instance, those aspects that led to the recognition of the conceptual complexity of mereology and temporal identity in biological systems. Woodger’s semiformal analyses were even more important, for instance, his explication of the concepts of the Bauplan and of innateness. Nagel’s importance lies in his analyses of reduction and emergence in the context of all empirical sciences and his use of these analyses in a careful exploration of biological problems. While Nagel’s model of reduction was generally rejected by philosophers of science in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly for biological contexts, it has recently been sympathetically reconstructed by many commentators; this article defends its continued relevance for the philosophy of biology.

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Notes

  1. Hull’s Hull (1974) explicit target was the logical empiricists’ account of reduction but it is clear from the discussions that his skepticism (as noted by Wolters 1999) was not limited to reduction alone. Hull (1973), which is a review of Ruse (1973), explicitly rejects the relevance of all logical empiricist analyses of biology.

  2. In response, Uebel (personal communication, August 4, 2014) has pointed out that when the volume was first being planned around 1998 there was no extant literature documenting attention to biology on the part of the logical empiricists.

  3. Byron (2007) documents the extent of this problem. Note, for instance, Ruse (1973, p. 9): “The author of a book on the philosophy of biology need offer no excuse for the subject he [sic] has chosen, since few areas of philosophy have been so neglected in the past 50 years”; or Hull (1974, p. 6): “The purpose of this book will be to take a closer look at that area of science [biology] which has been passed over in the rapid extrapolation from physics to the social sciences”; or Cohen and Wartofsky (1976, p. v): “The philosophy of biology should move to the center of the philosophy of science—a place it has not been accorded since the time of Mach”; or Rosenberg (1985, p. 13): “In the last few decades, many philosophers have turned their attention to biology to assess the adequacy of a philosophy of science that has been drawn from an almost exclusive examination and reconstruction of physics.” Nicholson and Gawne (2014) go even further by providing numerous self-serving quotations from Hull and, especially, Ruse, spanning decades, all designed to anoint themselves as the founders of the philosophy of biology. Many of these consist of ad hominem attacks on Woodger.

  4. In fact, much of modern molecular biology was created by physicists and chemists with no formal training in biology (Olby 1974; Judson 1979; Sarkar 1989). It would be ironic if the successful practice of biology did not require formal training in biology but the practice of the philosophy of biology does.

  5. This is a quite liberal translation by Woodger but sufficiently faithful to the content of the original not to be corrected here.

  6. Biographical details on Woodger are from Floyd and Harris (1964).

  7. For a critical discussion of this book, as well as Woodger (1929), see Nicholoson and Gawne (2014).

  8. Biographical information on Nagel is from Suppes (1994).

  9. See also his archives https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/Nagel/__;!!HoV-yHU!uRaX0aCZp1Dr07zIGJ1C2y9B9UKjc5cvmKxSqdjWA6s8QmAT6moOH3GCIXJVe_dPJuy6J1mu7dhFABB_A6MZWCnndjEb.

  10. Nagel to Morris, November 16, 1944. Quoted from Reisch (2005, p. 206).

  11. See Hofer (2013) for details.

  12. It is striking that Mainx used “rules” rather than “laws” in future concordance with many post–1970 debates in the philosophy of biology—see, for example, Sarkar (1998).

  13. The only notable exception to this claim appears to be Feigl (1963) with which Carnap (1963) explicitly disagreed.

  14. It is perhaps debatable as to how important it was to evolution. If we take the incorporation of classical genetics (in particular, the work emanating from the Morgan school as well as biochemical genetics) into evolutionary biology as being important, as Haldane (1932) and Wright (1934) clearly did, the issue of reductionism becomes important even in that context. If evolution is taken to be largely comprised of population genetics and systematics (before the molecular turn of the 1960s) the question of reductionism is largely irrelevant. But evolution is not the sole area of biology, and evolutionary biology since the 1950s has also had to engage with the material basis for heredity and diversification.

  15. For more detailed histories of the debate between mechanism and its alternatives, see Gilbert and Sarkar (2000) and Allen (2005).

  16. Thanks are due to Ken Schaffner for drawing my attention to Beckner’s case. There will be no detailed discussion of Beckner’s work because it does not fit well within the logical empiricist canon in spite of Nagel’s involvement.

  17. Sarkar (2015) provides a critical review of this burgeoning literature and a partial defense of Nagel’s model of reduction.

  18. As Nagel (1935, p. 48) observed: “Although chemistry may in some sense be reducible to contemporary physics, it is not the case that it is reducible to the physics of the early nineteenth century.”

  19. On Carnap’s earlier exposition of this model, which is often not recognized (unlike the case of Hempel and Oppenheim), see Sarkar (2013).

  20. Carnap (1939) and Hempel and Oppenheim (1948) had noted this case but had not connected it to the problem of reduction.

  21. The same point was later emphasized by Hempel (1969) within the logical empiricist canon.

  22. Though Schaffner (1967a) is not cited, this point was emphasized by him. Given that Schaffner’s work formed part of a dissertation written under Nagel’s supervision at Columbia University, the former should receive at least some credit for this refinement of Nagel’s analysis.

  23. By “life” Woodger meant “a single organism throughout its whole temporal extent” (1945, p. 96).

  24. The same criticism can also be leveled against Beckner’s (1959) dissertation, written under Nagel’s supervision, which also ignores molecular biology altogether.

  25. As many commentators have pointed out, this model is more one of theory replacement than reduction—see, e.g., Schaffner (1967b) and Sarkar (1989, 1998) for further detail.

  26. Schaffner’s original interest was in reduction in physics. Nagel explicitly required him to include genetics as a case study in his dissertation at Columbia University in the 1960s which was written under Nagel’s supervision (Ken Schaffner, personal communication, 1989).

  27. See, especially, the recent critical reviews mentioned earlier, by Schaffner (2013) and Sarkar (2015).

  28. Ruse (1975) pretends to engage with Woodger’s formal work but does not do so with any subtlety.

  29. Two recent papers by Rieppel (2003, 2006) are particularly important for the reconstruction of philosophical influences on Hennig’s notoriously obscure writings. Besides Woodger and Bertalanffy, Rieppel notes the apparent influence of Carnap.

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Acknowledgments

The title of this article obviously owes its origin to Stent (1968). This article was written during a summer 2014 visit to the Max-Planck-Insitut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte that was funded by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). Thanks are due to the DAAD for support. This article was presented at HOPOS 2014: Tenth International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science Congress in Ghent (Summer 2014) and to the International Philosophy of Biology Circle (Summer 2022); comments by members of both audiences were very helpful and have been incorporated into the text. For discussions and help, thanks are due to Veronika Hofer and Michael Stöltzner; for comments on an earlier draft, thanks are due to Dan Nicholson, Ken Schaffner, and Thomas Uebel.

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    Sahotra Sarkar

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Sarkar, S. That was the Philosophy of Biology that was: Mainx, Woodger, Nagel, and Logical Empiricism, 1929–1961. Biol Theory 18, 153–174 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-023-00429-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-023-00429-1

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