Artificial life research is mainly a scientific activity, but it also raises and illuminates certain philosophical questions. This chapter explains what artificial life is and how it is connected with artificial intelligence (AI). It briefly describes some of its representative scientific achievements. Some soft artificial life models focus on self-organization and study how structure can emerge from unstructured ensembles of initial conditions. The chapter discusses some associated philosophical issues involving emergence, creative evolution, the nature of life, the connection between life and mind, and the social and ethical implications of creating life from scratch. The science and engineering of artificial life impinges on a number of broad philosophical issues, including how life emerges from non-life, whether the evolution of life has a directional arrow, what life is, whether software systems could ever be literally alive, and what the social and ethical implications of creating artificial life are.