Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Biology

Pence, Charles H. [UCL] Hazelwood, Caleb [Duke University]

The philosophy of biology has long been pervaded by internal disputes over its metaphysical commitments. Many contributions from the field’s founding figures—from Fisher’s indeterministic causation to Hull’s account of species as individuals—do not shy away from metaphysics. Others have expressed a profound skepticism about metaphysics, leading to the importance of a “practice turn” for philosophy of biology, with some arguing that our role is thus to extract from practice the nature of biological concepts. In other words, the former camp informs biological practice with metaphysical principles, whereas, for the latter, ontology yields to pragmatism. This tension has been evaluated in particular contexts, e.g., in debates over species concepts and natural selection—areas in which the presence or absence of connections with metaphysics has been noteworthy. But few have attempted to evaluate, in general, the conditions under which these relationships between metaphysical principles, scientific practice, and philosophy of biology are, or ought to be, understood. In this talk, we will offer a preliminary sketch of the relationship between practice and metaphysics in the philosophy of biology. More ambitiously, we will attempt to develop a normative, pluralist account, articulating the circumstances under which each approach should defer to the other.