School
Biology
Overview
scientific study of living things, especially their structure, function, growth, evolution, and distribution
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Biology is discussed.
These cannot be regarded as in themselves parts of Biology; since the facts embraced under them are not substantive phenomena, but are simply incidental to substantive phenomena. All the truths of structural Biology are comprehended under the two foregoing subdivisions; and the comparison of these truths as presented in different classes of organisms, is simply a _method_ of interpreting them. Nevertheless, though…
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, Volume 1
a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; names the idea; the book is about it
Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical, nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms. There is another difference between the two divisions of science. The organisms of biology include as ingredients the smaller organisms of physics; but there is at present no evidence that…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
states what it is; names the idea; author linked in the graph
He regards life not as a foreign and unintelligible something, thrust into the scheme of nature, of which we can know nothing save its mystery, but as an essential part of the universal plan. The harmonies of life are regarded as but phases of the universal harmony, and Biology is studied by the same methods as other departments of science. The great truths of Physics and Chemistry are applied to its elucidation…
Herbert Spencer, Illustrations of Universal Progress
talks about the author, not by them; states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
Only so can observation really deal with fact capable of description and measurement. Thus psychology, it may be said, tends to become a department of physiology. From another standpoint, biology may be said to receive its completion in psychology. How much either phrase means, however, will depend on the estimate we form of biology. If biology is only the study of mechanical and chemical phenomena on the peculiar…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
names the idea; states what it is
Except under the influence of desire, no one would admit for a moment so crude a generalisation from such a tiny selection of facts. What does result, not specially from biology, but from all the sciences which deal with what exists, is that we cannot understand the world unless we can understand change and continuity. This is even more evident in physics than it is in biology. But the analysis of change and…
Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy
names the idea; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Biology
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Julian Huxley
- Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis
- Hermann Lotze
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Paul Valéry
- Roger Bacon
- Philip Kitcher
- Wilhelm Wundt
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Henry David Thoreau
- The Order of Things
- Alfred Tarski
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Robert Maynard Hutchins
- Jean Piaget
- Theophrastus
- Joseph Maréchal
- Jakob Johann von Uexküll
- Xavier Zubiri
- Allan Gotthelf
- Wolfgang Smith
- Stéphane Lupasco
- Hippo (philosopher)
Related ideas
- Animal
- Greek language
- Genetics
- Homeostasis
- Springer Science+Business Media
- Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
- Phylogenetic tree
- Embryology
- James Watson
- Life
- Medicine
- Virus
- Abiogenesis
- Molecular biology
- Molecule
- Organism
- Mesopotamia
- Metabolism
- Natural selection
- Species
- Physiology
- Scientific method
- Systematics
- Stephen Jay Gould
Place in the tradition
Part of Ancient Greek philosophy.