Philosophy of Biology

The philosophy of biology examines the concepts, methods, and explanations of the life sciences. Questions that look technical conceal long-standing philosophical problems: what does it mean to say that the heart is for pumping blood? On what, exactly, does natural selection act: the gene, the organism, the group? Are there species, or only similar individuals that we classify for convenience? Can biology be reduced to chemistry, and can evolution tell us anything about good and evil? ...

Hans Jonas Hans Jonas was born in Mönchengladbach, Germany, on 10 May 1903 and died in New Rochelle, New York, on 5 February 1993. He studied philosophy, theology, and art history at Freiburg, Berlin, and Marburg, where he was a student of Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann and earned his doctorate in 1928 with a dissertation on the concept of Gnosis. In Marburg he began a lifelong friendship with Hannah Arendt. A Jew, he left Germany in 1933 after the Nazi rise to power, spent time in England, and settled in Palestine in 1934; during the Second World War he served in the Jewish Brigade of the British army, and his mother was murdered at Auschwitz. After the war he taught in Israel and Canada and, from 1955, at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he remained until his retirement in 1976. ...