Reydon Thomas A C
Leibniz Universität Hannover, Center for Philosophy and Ethics of Science (ZEWW), Im Moore 21, Hannover D-30167, Germany.
Cladistics. 2009 Dec;25(6):660-667. doi: 10.1111/j.1096-0031.2009.00266.x. Epub 2009 Jul 2.
A major issue in philosophical debates on the species problem concerns the opposition between two seemingly incompatible views of the metaphysics of species: the view that species are individuals and the view that species are natural kinds. In two recent papers in this journal, Olivier Rieppel suggested that this opposition is much less deep than it seems at first sight. Rieppel used a recently developed philosophical account of natural kindhood, namely Richard Boyd's "homeostatic property cluster" theory, to argue that every species taxon can be conceived of as an individual that constitutes the single member of its own specific natural kind. In this paper I criticize Rieppel's approach and argue that it does not deliver what it is supposed to, namely an account of species as kinds about which generalized statements can be made.
关于物种问题的哲学辩论中的一个主要问题，涉及到关于物种形而上学的两种看似不相容的观点之间的对立：一种观点认为物种是个体，另一种观点认为物种是自然类。在本期刊最近的两篇论文中，奥利维耶·里佩尔认为，这种对立远没有乍看上去那么深刻。里佩尔运用了一种最近发展起来的关于自然类别的哲学解释，即理查德·博伊德的“稳态属性簇”理论，来论证每个物种分类单元都可以被设想为一个个体，它构成了其自身特定自然类别的唯一成员。在本文中，我批评了里佩尔的方法，并认为它没有实现其预期目标，即对物种作为可以做出一般性陈述的类别进行解释。
