American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volume 85, Issue 3, Summer 2011

Christopher Tollefsen
Pages 447-464

Some Questions for Philosophical Embryology

A philosophical embryology should have three concerns: first, it should describe the realities discovered by embryology and developmental biology at a higher level of generality than is achieved by those disciplines, and it should integrate this more general representation with philosophy’s other more general concepts. Second, it should answer philosophical questions raised by the study of embryological development if, as I believe, there are some. And third, it must be prepared to engage in a philosophical dialectic with those whose general representations work with a different set of concepts, or who answer philosophical questions differently, or who dispute the boundaries between the scientific and the philosophical. In this essay, I identify a number of questions that belong to the domain I am identifying as “philosophical embryology,” and discuss the answers I think are indicated by sound philosophy and biology.