William Carroll writes at Public Discourse (“The Limits of Life: 
Biology and the Philosophy of Nature“):
‘For some time, astrobiologists have been studying what are called extremophiles, organisms that live in extreme conditions. Do we get closer to understanding the origin of life the more we advance in our knowledge of life at its frontiers?
It is precisely such a question that is properly in the domain of the philosophy of nature. It would be of considerable benefit for biologists and other natural scientists to become acquainted with the insights this discipline offers. The philosophy of nature is a more general science of nature than any of the diverse empirical sciences. It depends upon the various natural sciences to understand nature, but the philosophy of nature concerns topics that are not specific to any one of the sciences, but common to them all: the nature of change and time, how physical entities are unities (as distinct from mere heaps of elements), and what the differences are between the living and the non-living.’