History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2-3):195-232 (2010)
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Abstract |
The category of ‘organism’ 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 “bolstering” for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the “mechanistic” or “reductionist” 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 “phenomenology of organic life” 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 ‘stages’ or ‘layers’ of the concept of organism in order to critically evaluate it. How might ‘organism’ be a useful concept if one rules out the excesses of ‘organismic’ biology and metaphysics? Varieties of instrumentalism and what I call the ‘projective’ concept of organism are appealing, but perhaps ultimately unsatisfying.
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Keywords | philosophy of biology mechanism and organism |
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References found in this work BETA
Thinking About Mechanisms.Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden & Carl F. Craver - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (1):1-25.
How Brains Make Chaos in Order to Make Sense of the World.Christine A. Skarda & Walter J. Freeman - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (2):161-173.
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Citations of this work BETA
The Return of the Organism as a Fundamental Explanatory Concept in Biology.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (5):347-359.
“Was Canguilhem a Biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the Project of ‘Biophilosophy’".Charles Wolfe - 2015 - In Darian Meacham (ed.), Medicine and Society, New Continental Perspectives (Dordrecht: Springer, Philosophy and Medicine Series, 2015). Springer. pp. 197-212.
The Organism as Ontological Go-Between. Hybridity, Boundaries and Degrees of Reality in its Conceptual History.Charles T. Wolfe - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 1:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shps.
From Substantival to Functional Vitalism and Beyond: Animas, Organisms and Attitudes.Charles T. Wolfe - 2011 - Eidos: Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad Del Norte 14:212-235.
Epigenesis by experience: Romantic empiricism and non-Kantian biology.Amanda Jo Goldstein - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):13.
View all 14 citations / Add more citations
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