Course : Philosophy of Biology and the Life Sciences

The aim of the course is to systematically study the central problems of the philosophy of biology. We will study conceptual issues that arise within the life sciences (the levels of selection, the concept of function, of biological species, of the gene, of genetic information etc), more general issues in the philosophy of science applied to the life sciences (e.g. explanation, reduction, causality), as well as philosophical questions that arise from the application of the evolutionary way of thinking to traditional philosophical problems (e.g. human nature, mind, ethics).