Book excerpt: Systems biology is a vigorous and expanding discipline, in many ways a successor to genomics and perhaps unprecedented in its combination of biology with a great many other sciences, from physics to ecology, from mathematics to medicine, and from philosophy to chemistry. Studying the philosophical foundations of systems biology may resolve a longer standing issue, i.e., the extent to which Biology is entitled to its own scientific foundations rather than being dominated by existing philosophies.* Answers the question of what distinguishes the living from the non-living* An in-depth look to a vigorous and expanding discipline, from molecule to system* Explores the region between individual components and the system