Massimo Pigliucci is a former Biologist who has worked in the field of genotype-environment interactions for the majority of his career. He currently works at the City College of New York as a philosophy professor. Pigliucci’s present profession is mainly concerned with the Philosophy of Science. This particular field in philosophy is arguably tightly linked with the natural sciences.

Pigliucci spent close to twenty-five years as a Biologist. “I published a good number of papers, my lab was funded pretty continuously by national science foundations. I spent a lot of time in the lab. I loved doing statistical analysis on large data sets; that was one of my specialties. There was nothing to complain about.” While Pigliucci’s career was well suited to his passions he gradually discovered that his research was no longer tackling the issues and topics that were of interest to him. That is to say, he was becoming interested in the theoretical aspects of biology as opposed to the empirical ones; Pigliucci was spending more and more time thinking about conceptual issues in evolution and biology rather than doing actual experiments. In light of this, Pigliucci obtained his second Ph.D. in the field of philosophy and decided to combine his two passions.

While some argue that the theoretical qualities studied in biology are in fact not interconnected with the field of philosophy, scientists and other intellectuals like Massimo Pigliucci, think otherwise. Let us briefly consider an example of such intellectuals. Ralph B. Winn held that “there are still scholars who deny the urgency of making a clear differentiation between philosophy and science—for the sake of effective collaboration—either because they believe that the function of philosophy consists in mediating between and integrating, the sciences, or because they insist that philosophy is an older and already obsolescent form of investigation” (Winn, 2). Massimo Pigliucci challenges the latter view by stating “once one starts discussing conceptual issues, the distinction between genetic science and the philosophy of science becomes relatively vague.”

There are numerous matters that demonstrate the similarities between these two fields of education. For instance, Pigliucci states that while working as a Biology professor at the University of Tennessee, he met a newly hired assistant professor of philosophy named Jonathan Coupler. “Coupler had recently defended his dissertation in philosophy at Stanford University and his thesis was on what philosophers call the nature nurture issues, which is what biologists call genotype-environment interactions,” says Pigliucci. As it turns out, this particular philosophical focus was the scientific field in which Pigliucci specialized. In order to broaden the similarities of these two subjects, consider the following: Genotype-environment interactions, as stated by the Experiment Institute of Vegetable Crops, influence the performance of varieties over a range of environments. By the same token, nature nurture issues tackle matters similar to this, such as “whether an attribute or idea is a product of human ‘nature’ or whether ‘nurture’ has a long, interdisciplinary history” (Ariew, 1). The principal point being, these two instructors where members of distinct academic fields, yet studied matters on analogous grounds.

While Pigliucci’s change in career path may be seen as a drastically unusual adjustment, as we see from Pigliucci’s previously stated example, this is not the case. Science involves critical thinking, observation, among other things, all of which are required in philosophy. Today in the field of science, one proposes a hypothesis and puts together evidence to support the given theory and then produces a coherent conclusion. One could say that this is, in essence, indistinguishable from philosophic inquiry. I say this because in philosophical inquiry one generates new ideas, and while these ideas may or may not be factual, they are driven by investigation or observation of our reality. Similarly, in the past, the branch of philosophy was, in many ways, closely related to the natural sciences. For instance V. F. Lenzen states, “While the formation of new concepts requires creative activity, the new usually is introduced as an extension or modification of the old. Creation must be founded on reflective analysis of the old…science and philosophy participate in a common task” (Lenzen, 449.)

Massimo Pigliucci is an ideal example of how the sciences and philosophy exist in a comparable platform. He steered away from the dispute between the incompatibility of science and philosophy and instead chose to combine the two. Pigliucci shares some advise to fellow intellectuals looking to decide their career path in the sciences and elsewhere: “Do whatever the hell you like because if you really love something there’s is a good chance you’ll succeed and if you don’t succeed you can always do something you don’t like later. I would say that there’s one thing that has changed dramatically in the past 10 to 15 years: more and more colleges have become trade schools. The point of education used to be not just to prepare you for the working environment but also to prepare you for life in general.”

 

 

Works Cited

Ariew, André, and Shorey, Katy(Jul 2016) Nature/Nurture – A Philosophical Analysis. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0003458.pub2]

 

Lenzen, V. F. “Science and Philosophy.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 8, no. 3, 1948, pp. 448–455. www.jstor.org/stable/2103213.

Ranalli, P., and I. Giordano. “Genotype-Environment Interactions in «Pisum Sativum» L.” Rivista Di Ortoflorofrutticoltura Italiana, vol. 66, no. 5, 1982, pp. 347–352. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42878518.

Winn, Ralph B. “Philosophy and Science.” Philosophy of Science, vol. 9, no. 1, 1942, pp. 1–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/184678.