What part can the history of biology play in the development of the philosophy of biology? Does that history offer any particularly valuable evidence for the solution or restructuring of problems familiar to the philosopher of biology? Typically, methodological questions concerning biology are raised in the context of a general theory of science or the logic of science in order to test a thesis about the unity or diversity of scientific methods or theories. Such questions should not be settled in abstraction from the literature of biology itself. The key issues of the philosophy of biology may very well be given a different formulation when they are articulated in the interests of an abstract, ahistorical distinction of physics and biology, on the one hand, and of an attempt to capture the methodological preoccupation of major figures in the history of biology, on the other. Morton Beckner's The Biological Way of Thought provides an extremely detailed account of diverse contexts of biological inquiry; its use of bio logical examples is expert and wide ranging. Nevertheless, the problem atic of this book tends to distinguish biologists into just two camps: the organismic, for whom evolution theory, the investigation of goal directed systems, historical narratives, etc., provide biology with a distinctive conceptual system; and those biologists or philosophers who argue that insofar as the areas mentioned are open to scientific investigation, the methods of physics and chemistry suffice. Beckner has subjected the claims of organismic biologists to a careful critique, reformulating them to indi cate the extent to which they are compatible with the Hempel-Oppenheim model of scientific explanation, and the extent to which their significance for science eludes expression in terms of that model. It is impossible to