Abskrakt k přednášce 27. 11. 2015


                                          Species problem


"It is often said that there is no other problem in biology that is as refractory to solution as is
the species problem. And the solutions that have been proposed, from Aristotle, the scholastics,
and Linnaeus to the present time, are highly diverse and often incompatible with one another"
(Mayr, 1988: 315). The so–called “species problem” is the interdisciplinary discussion in the
fields of philosophy and biology, in which the main objective is to find a concept species that
would be coherent, consistent, content-appropriate and, preferably, useful to active biologists.
Despite the strong development of biology, the problem remains unsolved and gets ever more
complicated. The reason is that the concept of species is full of conceptual and metaphysical
problems that cannot be resolved by empirical research. Hence the need for a rigorous philosophical
approach to the problem. What are the species, can they be defined and how to define them, what is
their ontological status, are just some of the questions that researchers in the fields of
philosophy and biology are trying to solve.