ABSTRACT
With an expertise in the philosophies of science and language, I turned my focus to the philosophy of biology and life sciences in the mid-1980s. I found it interesting that the results of the philosophy of science debates did not reach any biological discipline, although philosophy of science is the essential discipline for the foundations and justifications of scientific theory building and methodology. At the center of these more than half-a-century lasting debates was the question how to define a scientific sentence in contrast to metaphysical ones. “Scientific” meant empirically based, experimentally testable, and theoretically formalizable, because mathematics was assumed to be the only exact science that could depict material (physical and chemical) reality (Whitehead and Russel 1910–1913; Goedel 1931; Carnap 1939).
