Phillip Sloan

Areas of Specialization
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences

Phillip Sloan is Professor Emeritus in the Program of Liberal Studies and Graduate Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame. In the Program he taught regularly in the Seminars, the Natural Science sequence, and the Intellectual History tutorials. Originally trained in biology and biological oceanography, with a specialization in evolutionary biology, he received his doctorate in philosophy, with a specialization in the history and philosophy of science. His research area is the history and philosophy of the life sciences in the modern period with publications on several aspects of the life sciences.

His research and writing has been on the history of evolutionary theory, Enlightenment natural history, and intellectual history. His most recent work has been focused on the history and philosophy of genetics and molecular biology. Professor Sloan is a Fellow and past President of Section L of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and he has been closely involved in the Notre Dame Initiative on Adult Stem Cell research. He is the coeditor of and contributor to Creating a Biophysics of Life: The Three-Man Paper and Early Molecular Biology (2012); Controlling Our Destinies: Philosophical, Historical and Ethical Perspectives on the Human Genome Project (2000); and Darwin and the Twenty-First Century: Nature, Humanity, and God (in press, University of Notre Dame Press, exp. 2015). His current book project, Mastering Life: The Molecular Revolution in Biology, focuses on the conception of life in recent biology and its bioethical implications.