Abstract
Throughout my university career, and since I began my Ph.D., Jean Gayon was there. Unlike many contributors to this volume, to the early or mid-career researchers who do French philosophy of biology today, I did not know Jean as a dissertation supervisor or a professor, but as a dissertation examiner, as expert witness to the beginning of my career and as indisputable scientific authority. For fifteen years I have been doing philosophy of evolutionary biology with Jean Gayon. In this chapter, I do not offer an analysis of “evolutionary biology according to Gayon” but I aim to pay tribute to a philosopher who was at once a “major contemporary”, a colleague, a friend, and an inspiration.
Translated by Henry Dicks from Huneman (2018).
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Notes
- 1.
Sphere: Sciences, philosophy, history; REHSEIS: Epistemological and historical research on exact sciences and scientific institutions.
- 2.
For a tribute to Marie-Claude Lorne, see Huneman and Barberousse (2011).
- 3.
See, Journal of the History of Biology, “Special Issue on Revisiting the Modern Synthesis”, 52(4), 2019.
- 4.
Darwin et l’après-Darwin (2019 [1992]) does lay claim to a certain idea of “rational reconstruction”, but this would nevertheless integrate the realities of conceptual history. On Gayon and Lakatos, see Duchesneau and by Loison, this volume.
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Huneman, P. (2023). Doing Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology with Jean Gayon. In: Méthot, PO. (eds) Philosophy, History and Biology: Essays in Honour of Jean Gayon. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28157-0_19
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