Abstract

Throughout my university career, and since I began my Ph.D., Jean Gayon was there. Unlike many contributors to this volume, to the early or mid-career researchers who do French philosophy of biology today, I did not know Jean as a dissertation supervisor or a professor, but as a dissertation examiner, as expert witness to the beginning of my career and as indisputable scientific authority. For fifteen years I have been doing philosophy of evolutionary biology with Jean Gayon. In this chapter, I do not offer an analysis of “evolutionary biology according to Gayon” but I aim to pay tribute to a philosopher who was at once a “major contemporary”, a colleague, a friend, and an inspiration.