"Wrongful Life" Reloaded : Logico-Empiricism’s Philosophy of Biology 1934/36 (Prague/Paris/Copenhagen) : With historical and political intermezzos

Abstract

I offer a revision (“reload”) of an earlier paper on logicalempiricism’s philosophy of biology by locating its central theses in the context of the international conferences of Prague (1934), Paris (1935), and Copenhagen (1936), so important for the development of logical empiricism and its spread in the Western world. My theses are that logical empiricism did not contribute in the same way to the development of the philosophy of biology, as it did, e.g., to the development of philosophy of mathematics or physics. The reasons for this failure were: (1o ) logical empiricists were largely ignorant of the biological sciences; (2o ) they concentrated on an unproductive (“ideological”) framework (anti-vitalism, reduction) that they took to be the philosophy of biology; (3o ) this prevented them from dealing with actual problems of biological science. Between the various sections of the paper, I insert “intermezzos” that present several conference participants within a wider historical context (i.e., the Great War, persecution, language).