What Is Philosophy of Biology?

This project is called "What is Philosophy of Biology" (WIPOP). Is is part of my master's thesis in philosophy of science. In this master, one of my goal was to investigate the thematic diversity of philosophy of biology. Given that it is often the case that philosophy of biology of biology discribes itself as on a continuum with biology, I wanted to know if the thematics of the two endeavors matched, at least partially.

Some previous results, notably Gayon (2009), Pradeu (2017) and Malaterre et al. (2021) looked at the thematic diversity of philosophy of biology through one main journal : Biology and Philosophy. Gayon and Pradeu classified manually all the articles. The categories in which they fall have been built iteratively. Malaterre leveraged well-known topic modeling algorithm Latent Dirichilet Allocation (LDA). Howerver, given that Gayon and Pradeu manual annotation attribute a unique theme per article whereas Malaterre with LDA gives the probability to find a topic in a document (which have many of them), the two analysis are hard to compare.

Thus, we decided to use a state of the art topic modeling algorithm : BERTopic (Grootendorst, 2022). With it, we were able to attribute a single theme by article, thus making our analysis comparable with the one of Pradeu, himself extending the previous work of Gayon.