The philosophy of biology today is one of the most exciting areas of philosophy. It looks critically across the life sciences, teasing out conceptual issues and difficulties bringing to bear the tools of philosophical analysis to achieve clarification and understanding. This essay surveys work in all of the major directions of research:…

Comments on the critiques of Tryon (2009a, this issue) and Cunningham (2009, this issue). These critiques provide an interesting contrast: one favoring greater reductionism and one favoring less. I consider each in turn. Tryon (2009a) again has addressed the issue of mechanisms in these pages (cf. Tryon, 2009b). The concepts of function and…

Comments on a article by Dewsbury (February-March 2009) in which he stated, "Darwin provided a viable mechanism for evolutionary change, natural selection" (p. 67). Although this view is consistent with the modern synthesis, the author argues that (a) the natural selection "mechanism" provided by Darwin was not initially accepted by scientists…

Comments on the special issue on Charles Darwin and psychology (Dewsbury, February-March 2009), in which the authors present evidence supporting the validity of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and how generations of psychologists have viewed the natural world through its light, taking Darwinian theories for granted as being a literal…

In this paper, I argue that characterisations of life through lists of properties have several shortcomings and should be replaced by theory-based accounts that explain the coexistence of a set of properties in living beings. The concept of life should acquire its meaning from its relationships with other concepts inside a theory. I illustrate…