Site Manager

• Beckett Sterner, Assistant Professor, School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.

Student Editors

• Vinit Karkathar (Summer 2020 - present)

Aims

The site's goal is to provide engaging introductions for a general reader, bibliographic studies of peer-reviewed academic literature, and critical perspectives on the historical development of major debates in philosophy of biology and medicine. The site does not aim to provide authoritative or encyclopedic essays presenting current research on these topics; for this purpose, please see the many excellent entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Website content is organized into four main types, described below.

Questions

Question pages are meant to pose and explore topics of public interest without presupposing prior knowledge of philosophy. Each page is organized according to a common template. The first section introduces the question and provides a preliminary, common sense answer. The second section provides motivation for people care about how we answer the question based on discussions in reliable sources, including news media and peer-reviewed articles. The third section explores problems and complexities the initial, common sense answer isn't able to address. These new difficulties are presented as questions in their own right and linked to debates in the academic literature.

Concepts

Concept pages provide resources for understanding the variety and relationships of definitions for disputed concepts in biology and medicine. In other words, the pages report the main results of conceptual analyses undertaken by philosophers and scientists: novel definitions and accounts of how existing definitions are related. Each page is Analysis pages do not aim to provide exhaustive bibliographies for a topic in the literature, as these can be found at other sites such as philpapers.

Arguments

Argument pages describe the positions people have taken in philosophical debates and map the arguments they've used.

Context

Context pages situate important debates, topics, or trends relevant to philosophy of biology and medicine. These pages can take diverse formats, e.g. as critical reviews of a topic, historical studies of the reception of an idea or work, or analyses of how our understanding of an idea has been influenced by changes in policy, society, or technology. Perspective pages are not intended to substitute for preprints or published articles presenting arguments about primary subjects (e.g. a new account of individuality, critique of evidence-based medicine, etc) in the field.