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Do organisms have an ontological status?
The category of âorganismâ has an ambiguous status: is it scientific or is it philosophical? Or, if one looks at it from within the relatively recent field or sub-field of philosophy of biology, is it a central, or at least legitimate category therein, or should it be dispensed with? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific âbolsteringâ for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the âmechanisticâ or âreductionistâ trend, which has been perceived as dominant since the 17th century, whether in the case of Stahlian animism, Leibnizian monadology, the neo-vitalism of Hans Driesch, or, lastly, of the âphenomenology of organic lifeâ in the 20th century, with authors such as Kurt Goldstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Georges Canguilhem. In this paper I try to reconstruct some of the main interpretive âstagesâ or âlayersâ of the concept of organism in order to critically evaluate it. How might âorganismâ be a useful concept if one rules out the excesses of âorganismicâ biology and metaphysics? Varieties of instrumentalism and what I call the âprojectiveâ concept of organism are appealing, but perhaps ultimately unsatisfying
MATERIALISM NEW AND OLD
New materialism is not a clear-cut set of theses, or a firmly unified school of thought. It crosses discourses and theoretical commitments, but, as its name indicates, seems consistently to oppose ânewâ materialism to an older form, or perhaps several older forms of this doctrine. The latter are typically associated with âmechanisticâ standpoints, with âreductionismâ, with the denial of life, agency, embodiment, meaning, value ⊠What happens when a historian of materialism confronts such claims? In what follows, I reflect on the historical problems which affect such theoretical positionings. It is not that there is no need to distinguish passive from active forms of materialism, or single out a focus on organic life. But that a distinction between ânew and oldâ might not be the way to capture such crucial theoretical and historical features
The Return of Vitalism:
The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared "On nâinterroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires": laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of Lifeâ. Nowadays, as David Hull puts it, "both scientists and philosophers take ontological reduction for granted⊠Organisms are ânothing butâ atoms, and that is that." In the mid-twentieth century, from the immediate post-war period to the late 1960s, French philosophers of science such as Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon returned to Jacobâs statement with an odd kind of pathos: they were determined to reverse course. Not by imposing a different kind of research program in laboratories, but by an unusual combination of historical and philosophical inquiry into the foundations of the life sciences (particularly medicine, physiology and the cluster of activities that were termed 'biology' in the early 1800s). Even in as straightforwardly scholarly a work as La formation du concept de rĂ©flexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siĂšcles (1955), Canguilhem speaks oddly of "defending vitalist biology," and declares that Life cannot be grasped by logic (or at least, "la vie dĂ©concerte la logique"). Was all this historical and philosophical work merely a reassertion of 'mysterianâ, magical vitalism? In order to answer this question we need to achieve some perspective on Canguilhemâs 'vitalismâ, notably with respect to its philosophical influences such as Kurt Goldstein
The organism â reality or fiction?
A reflection on organisms as real entities, as constructions, or as fiction
4. Review-Interview with Stephen Gaukroger
Stephen Gaukrogerâs the Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1739-1841 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 416 p., ISBN 9780198757634, ÂŁ30.00) has a much more pronounced Germanic flavor than the previous ones, the Emergence of a Scientific Culture (2006) and the Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility (2010). If the earlier books were âGaukroger meets the Scientific Revolutionâ or âGaukroger meets the Enlightenmentâ, this one is âGaukroger meets the Two Culturesâ (or the problem of Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften) and moreover, Gaukroger meets Herder. Of this book and its background we have discussed with the author.
DIDEROT AND MATERIALIST THEORIES OF THE SELF
The concept of self has preeminently been asserted
(in its many versions) as a core component of anti-reductionist, antinaturalistic philosophical positions, from Descartes to Husserl and
beyond, with the exception of some hybrid or intermediate positions
which declare rather glibly that, since we are biological entities which fully belong to the natural world, and we are conscious of ourselves as 'selves', therefore the self belongs to the natural world (this is characteristic e.g. of embodied phenomenology and enactivism).
Nevertheless, from Cudworth and Moreâs attacks on materialism all
the way through twentieth-century argument against naturalism, the
gulf between selfhood and the world of Nature appears
unbridgeable. In contrast, my goal in this paper is to show that early
modern materialism could yield a theory of the self according to
which (1) the self belongs to the world of external relations
(Spinoza), such that no one fact, including supposedly private facts, is only accessible to a single person; (2) the self can be reconstructed as a sense of âorganic unityâ which could be a condition for biological individuality (a central text here is Diderotâs 1769 RĂȘve de DâAlembert); yet this should not lead us to espouse a Romantic concept of organism as foundational or even ineffable subjectivity (a dimension present in Leibniz and made explicit in German idealism); (3) what we call 'self' might simply be a dynamic process of interpretive
activity undertaken by the brain. This materialist theory of the self
should not neglect the nature of experience, but it should also not
have to take at face value the recurring invocations of a better, deeper âfirst-person perspectiveâ or âfirst-person science.â
The âPhysiology of the Understandingâ and the âMechanics of the Soulâ: Reflections on Some Phantom Philosophical Projects
In reflecting on the relation between early empiricist conceptions of the mind and more experimentally motivated materialist philosophies of mind in the mid-18th century, I suggest that we take seriously the existence of what I shall call âphantom philosophical projectsâ. A canonical empiricist like Locke goes out of his way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the âlogic of ideasâ is not a scientific project: âI shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mindâ (Essay, I.i.2). An equally prominent thinker, Immanuel Kant, seems to make an elementary mistake, given such a clear statement, when he claims that Lockeâs project was a âphysiology of the understanding,â in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). A first question, then, would be: what is this physiology of the understanding, if it was not Lockeâs project? Did anyone undertake such a project? If not, what would it have resembled? My second and related case comes out of a remark the Hieronymus Gaub makes in a letter to Charles Bonnet of 1761: criticizing materialist accounts of mind and mind-body relations such as La Mettrieâs, Gaub suggests that what is needed is a thorough study of the âmechanics of the soulâ, and that Bonnet could write such a study. What is the mechanics of the soul, especially given that it is presented as a non-materialist project? To what extent does it resemble the purported âphysiology of the understandingâ? And more generally, what do both of these phantom projects have to do with a process we might describe as a ânaturalization of the soulâ
Holism, organicism and the risk of biochauvinism
In this essay I seek to critically evaluate some forms of holism and organicism in biological thought, as a more deflationary echo to Gilbert and Sarkar's reflection on the need for an 'umbrella' concept to convey the new vitality of holistic concepts in biology (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000). Given that some recent discussions in theoretical biology call for an organism concept (from Moreno and Mossioâs work on organization to Kirschner et al.âs research paper in Cell, 2000, building on chemistry to articulate what they called âmolecular vitalism,â studying the âvitalisticâ properties of molecular, cellular, and organismal function, and Pepper and Herronâs suggestion in their 2008 paper that organisms define a category that evolutionary biology cannot do without), the question, what concept of organicism are they calling for? To what extent are such claims philosophically committed to a non-naturalistic concept of organism as organizing centre, as a foundational rather than heuristic concept â or possibly a âbiochauvinism,â to use Di Paoloâs term (Di Paolo 2009)? My aim in this paper is to conceptually clarify the forms of holism and organicism that are involved in these cases (and I acknowledge that the study of early 20th-century holisms [Peterson 2010] indicates that not all of them were in fact âorganicistâ or âbiologisticâ). I suggest that contemporary holists are still potentially beholden to a certain kind of vitalism or âbiochauvinismâ; but that when they reduce their claims to mere heuristics, conversely, they risk losing sight of a certain kind of organizational âthicknessâ, a âvital materialityâ (Wheeler 2010) which is characteristic of biological systems (Bechtel 2007). And I ask if it is possible to articulate a concept of biological holism or organicism which is neither an empirical âbiochauvinismâ nor a metaphysical âvitalismâ
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