In what follows our purpose is to make clear the reasons which lie back of Whitehead's appeal to eternal objects in his explanation of the emergence of actual entities and to show that so long as one operates within his scheme of ideas no other consistent explanation is available. A thoroughgoing reconstruction of the scheme is necessary if this presupposition is to be eliminated. If the project is successful, it will be demonstrated that the theory of actual entities provides no (...) basis for the explanation of the emergence of novel things, which is one of the major tenets of the organic philosophy. The argument will develop by way of an analysis of the theory of “physical relatedness.”. (shrink)

The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles – sometimes overt, sometimes masked – throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the ‘theorization’ of (...) Life, but conversely has also been the target of influential rejections: as just an instrument of transmission for the selfish gene, but also, historiographically, as part of an outdated ‘vitalism’. Indeed, the organism, perhaps because it is experientially closer to the ‘body’ than to the ‘molecule’, is often the object of quasi-affective theoretical investments presenting it as essential, sometimes even as the pivot of a science or a particular approach to nature, while other approaches reject or attack it with equal force, assimilating it to a mysterious ‘vitalist’ ontology of extra-causal forces, or other pseudo-scientific doctrines. This paper does not seek to adjudicate between these debates, either in terms of scientific validity or historical coherence; nor does it return to the well-studied issue of the organism-mechanism tension in biology. Recent scholarship has begun to focus on the emergence and transformation of the concept of organism, but has not emphasized so much the way in which organism is a shifting, ‘go-between’ concept – invoked as ‘natural’ by some thinkers to justify their metaphysics, but then presented as value-laden by others, over and against the natural world. The organism as go-between concept is also a hybrid, a boundary concept or an epistemic limit case, all of which partly overlap with the idea of ‘nomadic concepts’. Thereby the concept of organism continues to function in different contexts – as a heuristic, an explanatory challenge, a model of order, of regulation, etc. – despite having frequently been pronounced irrelevant and reduced to molecules or genes. Yet this perpetuation is far removed from any ‘metaphysics of organism’, or organismic biology. (shrink)

The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles, sometimes masked, often normative, throughout the history of biology. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and its ‘theorization’, but conversely has also been the target of influential rejections: as just an instrument of transmission for (...) the selfish gene, but also, historiographically, as part of an outdated ‘vitalism’. Indeed, the organism, perhaps because it is experientially closer to the ‘body’ than to the ‘molecule’, is often the object of quasi-affective theoretical investments presenting it as essential, as the pivot of a science or a particular approach to nature, while other approaches reject or attack it with equal force, assimilating it to a mysterious ‘vitalist’ ontology of extra-causal forces, or other pseudo-scientific doctrines. I do not seek to adjudicate between these debates, either regarding scientific validity or historical coherence; nor do I return to the well-studied issue of the organism-mechanism tension in biology. Recent scholarship has begun to discuss the emergence and transformation of the organism concept, but has not emphasized the way the latter is a shifting, ‘go-between’ concept – invoked as ‘natural’ by some thinkers to justify their metaphysics, but then presented as value-laden by others, over and against the natural world. The organism as go-between concept is also a hybrid, a boundary concept or a limit case, which continues to function in different contexts – as a heuristic, an explanatory challenge, a model of order, of regulation, etc. – despite having frequently been pronounced irrelevant and reduced to molecules or genes. Yet this perpetuation is far removed from any ‘metaphysics of organism’, or organismic biology. (shrink)

Although death statutes permitting physicians to declare brain death are relatively uniform throughout the United States, academic debate persists over the equivalency of human death and brain death. Alan Shewmon showed that the formerly accepted integration rationale was conceptually incomplete by showing that brain-dead patients demonstrated a degree of integration. We provide a more complete rationale for the equivalency of human death and brain death by defending a deeper understanding of the organism as a whole and by using a (...) novel strategy with shared objectives to justify death determination criteria. Our OaaW account describes different types of OaaW, defining human death as the loss of status as a human OaaW. We defend human death as similar to nonhuman death in terms of wakefulness, but also distinct in terms of the sui generis properties, particularly conscious awareness. We thereby defend the equivalency of brain death and human death using a resulting neurocentric rationale. (shrink)

Historians and philosophers of twentieth-century life sciences have demonstrated that the choice of experimental organism can profoundly influence research fields, in ways that sometimes undermined the scientists’ original intentions. The present paper aims to enrich and broaden the scope of this literature by analysing the career of unicellular green algae of the genus Chlorella. They were introduced for the study of photosynthesis in 1919 by the German cell physiologist Otto H. Warburg, and they became the favourite research objects in (...) this field up to the 1960s. The paper argues that dealing with Chlorella’s high metabolic flexibility was crucial for the emergence of a new conception of photosynthesis, as a plastic, integrated system of pathways. At the same time, it led to new collaborations between physiologists and phycologists, both of whom started to re-orient their studies in ecologically informed directions. Following Chlorella’s trail, hence, not only elucidates how experimental organisms forced scientists to change their conceptual approaches and techniques, but also provides insight into the interaction of different lines of research of mid-twentieth century plant sciences. (shrink)

The present article is an attempt to give - in the frame of the theory of the organism - environment system - a new interpretation to the role of efferent influences on receptor activity and to the functions of senses in the formation of knowledge. It is argued, on the basis of experimental evidence and theoretical considerations, that the senses are not transmitters of environmental information, but they create a direct connection between the organism and the environment, which (...) makes the development of a dynamic living system, the organism - environment system, possible. In this connection process the efferent influences on receptor activity are of particular significance, because with their help the receptors may be adjusted in relation to the parts of the environment which are most important in the achievement of behavioral results. Perception is the process of joining of new parts of the environment to the organism - environment system ; thus, the formation of knowledge by perception is based on reorganization of the organism - environment system, and not on transmission of information from the environment. With the help of the efferent influences on receptors each organism creates its own peculiar world which is simultaneously subjective and objective. The present considerations have far reaching influences as well on experimental work in neurophysiology and psychology of perception as on philosophical considerations of knowledge formation. (shrink)

In this paper we address the interrelated questions of why and how certain features of an organism’s environment become meaningful to it. We make the case that knowing the biology is essential to understanding the foundation of meaning-making in organisms. We employ Miguel Nicolelis et al’s seminal research on the mammalian somatosensory system to enrich our own concept of brain-objects as the neurobiological intermediary between the environment and the consequent organismic behavior. In the final section, we explain how brain-objects (...) advance the ongoing discussion of what constitutes a biosemiotic system. In general, this paper acknowledges Marcello Barbieri’s call for biology to make room for meaning, and makes a contribution to that end. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead's (1861-1947) 'Philosophy of Organism' offers an important, indeed fundamental, metaphysical doctrine. It is the product of a long adventure of ideas and has many complementary aspects. The present book does not claim to achieve a complete description of all the aspects of the late Whitehead's worldview. Its aim is rather to stress some specific features of his teachings, such as his views concerning rationality, dynamic holism, things and objects, events, anticipation, creativity, nature, organism, and life. (...) This book should be useful not only for process philosophers, but also for all scholars who are interested in the development of process philosophical ideas"--Introduction, page 7. (shrink)

The biophilosophic justification for the idea that “brain death” is death needs to support two claims: that what dies in human death is a human organism, not merely a psychological entity distinct from it; that total brain failure signifies the end of the human organism as a whole. Defenders of brain death typically assume without argument that the first claim is true and argue for the second by defending the “integrative unity” rationale. Yet the integrative unity rationale has (...) fallen on hard times. In this article, I give reasons for why we should think of ourselves as organisms, and why the “fundamental work” rationale put forward by the 2008 President’s Council is better than the integrative unity rationale, despite persistent objections to it. (shrink)

One reason for the renewed interest in Austrian philosophy, and especially in the work of Brentano and his followers, turns on the fact that analytic philosophers have become once again interested in the traditional problems of metaphysics. It was Brentano, Husserl, and the philosophers and psychologists whom they influenced, who drew attention to the thorny problem of intentionality, the problem of giving an account of the relation between acts and objects or, more generally, between the psychological environments of cognitive subjects (...) and the different sorts of external (physical, geographical, social) environments which they inhabit. The present essay addresses this environmental version of the problem of intentionality. It draws not only on the work of Husserl and Scheler but also on the Gestalt psychological writings of Kurt Koffka and Kurt Lewin. It considers the influential subjective idealist theory of animal environments put forward by J. von Uexküll and contrasts this with a realist theory of organism-environment interaction based on the work of the ecological psychologists J. J. Gibson and Roger Barker. This realist theory is then exploited as a basis for an ontology of social objects of a range of different sorts. (This is the English original of the French translation.). (shrink)

What are the conceptually necessary and sufficient conditions for a person, or organism, to perceive a given object? More precisely, what is the nature of our ordinary thought about perception that gives rise to our willingness or unwillingness to say that S perceives O? Some form of causal theory of perception is now, I think, widely accepted. Such a theory maintains that it is part of our concept of perception that S perceives O only if O causes a (...) percept, or perceptual state, of S. I accept this causal requirement, though with some qualification. The crucial problem for the theory of perception is what must be added to the causal requirement. Not all causes of a percept are said to be perceived. Smith looks at a tree illuminated by the sun, when the sun is not itself in view. His visual percept is caused by the tree, but not only the tree. The percept's causal ancestry includes the sun and the array of light two inches from Smith's eyes. Why do we say that he sees the tree, but not the sun or the array of light? What principles underlie this invidious choice among causes? Similarly, we think of a bat as perceiving objects in his path, but not as perceiving himself. Yet, since he emits the sonar signals these objects reflect, he is himself a cause of his percepts. Why don't we say he perceives himself? (shrink)

This paper provides a new rationale for equating brain death with the death of the human organism, in light of well-known criticisms made by Alan D Shewmon, Franklin Miller and Robert Truog and a number of other writers. We claim that these criticisms can be answered, but only if we accept that we have slightly redefined the concept of death when equating brain death with death simpliciter. Accordingly, much of the paper defends the legitimacy of redefining death against objections, (...) before turning to the specific task of defending a new rationale for equating brain death with death as slightly redefined. (shrink)

Starting from a philosophical perspective, which states that the living structures are actually a combination between matter and information, this article presents the results on an analysis of the bipolar information-matter structure of the human organism, distinguishing three fundamental circuits for its survival, which demonstrates and supports this statement, as a base for further development of the informational model of consciousness to a general informational model of the human organism. For this, it was examined the Informational System of (...) the Human Body and its components from the perspective of the physics/information/neurosciences concepts, showing specific functions of each of them, highlighting the correspondence of these centers with brain support areas and with their projections in consciousness, which are: Center of Acquisition and Storing of Information (CASI) reflected in consciousness as memory, Center of Decision and Command (CDC) (decision), Info-Emotional Center (IES) (emotions), Maintenance Informational System (MIS) (personal status), Genetic Transmission System (GTS) (associativity/genetic transmission) and Info Genetic Generator (IGG) related by the body development and inherited behaviors. The Info Connection (IC), detected in consciousness as trust and confidence can explain the Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) and associated phenomena. This connection is antientropic and informational, because from the multitude of uncertain possibilities is selected a certain one, helping/supporting the survival and life. The human body appears therefore as a bipolar structure, connected to two poles: information and matter. It is argued that the survival, which is the main objective of the organism, is complied in three main ways, by means of: (i) the reactive operation for adaptation by attitude; (ii) the info-genetic integration of information by epigenetic processes and genetic transmission of information for species survival, both circuits (i) and (ii) being associated to the information pole; (iii) maintenance of the material body (defined as informed matter) and its functions, associated to the matter pole of the organism. It results therefore that the informational system of the human body is supported by seven informational circuits formed by the neuro-connections between the specific zones of the brain corresponding to the informational subsystems, the cognitive centers, the sensors, transducers and execution (motor/mobile) elements. The fundamental informational circuits assuring the survival are the reactive circuit, expressible by attitude, the epigenetic/genetic circuit, absorbing and codifying information to be transmitted to the next generations, and the metabolic circuit, connected to matter (matter pole). The presented analysis allows to extend the informational modeling of consciousness to an Informational Model of Consciousness and Organism, fully describing the composition/functions of the organism in terms of information/matter and neurosciences concept. (shrink)

It is now widely accepted that the concepts of “health” and “disease” in psychiatric and psychological contexts are value laden. In this article I argue that even in the realm of physical illness and disease (appendicitis, phenylketonuria, etc.), the concepts of “health”, “illness” and "disease” are value laden. I explore the four most common bases used to objectively ground the key concept “normal functioning”, namely, genetic structure, evolutionary fitness, non-premature death and absence of pain. I argue that they all fail (...) to adequately provide an objective grounding for the. concept “normal functioning” (health) and, hence, for “abnormal functioning” (illness, disease). The reason an objective grounding cannot be given is that physical “health”, “illness” and “disease” rest on widely shared values in addition to the condition of the organism. (shrink)

According to neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism, moral goodness is an instance of natural goodness, a kind of normativity supposedly already present in nature in the biological realm of non-human living things. Proponents of this view appeal to Michael Thompson’s conception of a life-form--the form of a living organism--to give an account of natural goodness. However, although neo-Aristotelians call themselves naturalists, they hardly ever consult the science of biology to defend their commitments regarding biological organisms. This has led many critics to (...) argue that the neo-Aristotelian account of natural normativity is out of touch with the findings of modern evolutionary biology. One line of response to this objection, presented by John Hacker-Wright and Micah Lott, claims that the neo-Aristotelian concept of a living organism has to be presupposed in evolutionary biology as long as organisms are the subjects of evolutionary explanation. In this paper, I examine this response by tracing the concept of organism in modern evolutionary biology. I first argue that the Modern Synthesis theory of evolution, which understands evolution as change in gene frequencies within a population, does not presuppose the relevant concept of organism. I then explore an alternative view of evolution that has emerged in the past twenty years from advances in evolutionary developmental biology. I argue that this so called ‘evo-devo’ approach makes room for an explanatory concept of organism that can be reconciled with the neo-Aristotelian view. Moreover, I argue that although the explanatory role of the concept of organism in evolutionary biology is still contentious, the well-established role of this concept in developmental biology can be used to defend the biological commitments of neo-Aristotelian naturalism. (shrink)

The focus of my inquiry in this article is the figure of the Human that is enacted in the design of the humanoid robot. The humanoid or anthropomorphic robot is a model (in)organism, engineered in the roboticist’s laboratory in ways that both align with and diverge from the model organisms of biology. Like other model organisms, the laboratory robot’s life is inextricably infused with its inherited materialities and with the ongoing — or truncated — labours of its affiliated humans. (...) But while animal models are rendered progressively more standardised and replicable as tools for the biological sciences, the humanoid robot is individuated and naturalised. Three stagings of human— robot encounters (with the robots Mertz, Kismet and Robota respectively) demonstrate different possibilities for conceptualising these subject objects, for the claims about humanness that they corporealise, and for the kinds of witnessing that they presuppose. (shrink)

The minutiae of F.W.J. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie have been perennially dismissed due to its allegedly infeasible and indefensible assertions about Nature, such as his designation of Nature as “universal organism.” In the realm of post-Kantian German Idealism, such a dismissive attitude toward Schelling’s so-called objective idealism, more often than not, develops itself along the lines of Hegel’s critique of Schelling’s conception of the Absolute. In turn, I aim to accomplish two tasks in the following investigation. First, I intend to clarify (...) Schelling’s characterization of Nature as universal organism through a practical or teleological, instead of a theoretical or metaphysical, approach. Second, I seek to undermine the Hegelian-influenced criticisms of Schelling’s “Absolute” by demonstrating the ways in which the practico-teleological characterization of Schelling’s formulation of Nature extends into his later philosophical works. Through these clarifications, I hope to emphasize the uniqueness and richness of Schelling’s configuration of Nature. (shrink)

What is it like to perceive a feared object? According to a popular neo-Gibsonian theory in psychology, fear biases our perceptions of objects so as to encourage particular kinds of actions: when we are afraid, spiders may be perceived as physically closer than they are in order to promote fleeing. Firestone mounted severe criticisms against this view, arguing that these cases are better explained by non-perceptual biases that operate on accurate perceptions of the external environment. In this paper I (...) will argue that fear might indeed distort our perceptions of the world, but not in the way neo-Gibsonians suppose. In the view I favor, perceptual distortions occur as by-products of fearful attention, a special mode of attention that is part of an orchestrated defensive response that prepares the organism to deal effectively with a threat. To argue for this view I will rely on empirical evidence that fearful attention narrows down the focus of attention and favors processing of local rather than global features of stimuli, which may jointly explain why perceptual distortions might occur in fearful object seeing. This view has consequences not only for empirical investigations in fearful perceptual distortions, but also for an explanation of the intentionality of fear and the phenomenal integration of bodily and intentional elements in fear episodes. (shrink)

This article proposes a cybernetic photographic theory that takes seriously the philosophical claim that cameras, images and human beings exist as evolving systems of machines-organisms. It provides an epistemological challenge to the modernist problematic of representation – namely, the emergence of human consciousness outside and above nature, and a rationalist distinction between an active, visual-reasoning subject and a passive object. I utilize the philosophy of Francois Lauruelle in order to foreground and deepen the understanding of the ethical thought in (...) cybernetics. My purpose is to build upon ethical philosophy that, as Gilbert Simondon contended, would ‘save the technical object’. There is some urgency to this task as, in saving machines from their own histories and statuses as non-human, representational things in the world, we may begin an ethico-political programme that evaluates the complementary creative processes of human and machine – in a word, our shared Art – in order to save ourselves. It is perhaps the case that any recuperation of cybernetic and photographic theory today be poised not to reckon with our ‘digital’ moment but rather with our Anthropocene era defined by human’s extinction level powers of destruction. (shrink)

This article proposes a cybernetic photographic theory that takes seriously the philosophical claim that cameras, images and human beings exist as evolving systems of machines-organisms. It provides an epistemological challenge to the modernist problematic of representation – namely, the emergence of human consciousness outside and above nature, and a rationalist distinction between an active, visual-reasoning subject and a passive object. I utilize the (non)philosophy of Francois Lauruelle in order to foreground and deepen the understanding of the ethical thought in (...) cybernetics. My purpose is to build upon ethical philosophy that, as Gilbert Simondon contended, would ‘save the technical object’. There is some urgency to this task as, in saving machines from their own histories and statuses as non-human, representational things in the world, we may begin an ethico-political programme that evaluates the complementary creative processes of human and machine – in a word, our shared Art – in order to save ourselves. It is perhaps the case that any recuperation of cybernetic and photographic theory today be poised not to reckon with our ‘digital’ moment but rather with our Anthropocene era defined by human’s extinction level powers of destruction. (shrink)

The machine-organism analogy has played a pivotal role in the history of Western philosophy and science. Notwithstanding its apparent simplicity, it hides complex epistemological issues about the status of both organism and machine and the nature of their interaction. What is the real object of this analogy: organisms as a whole, their parts or, rather, bodily functions? How can the machine serve as a model for interpreting biological phenomena, cognitive processes, or more broadly the social and cultural (...) transformations of the relations between individuals, and between individuals and the environments in which they live? Wired Bodies. New Perspectives on the Machine-Organism Analogy provides the reader with some of the latest perspectives on this vast debate, addressing three major topics:1) the development of a ‘mechanistic’ framework in medicine and biology; 2) the methodological issues underlying the use of ‘simulation’ in cognitive science; 3) the interaction between humans and machines according to 20th-century epistemology. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question ‘what is an organism?’. Extant theories of organismality only provide a partial answer because they do not include an account of composition on which an ontology of living entities can be based. Here we develop a new account of what organisms are, based on a naturalistic answer to the special composition question, the bound state view. We argue that physical structure, including the existence of a boundary, is essential for life, and that, therefore, organisms (...) are a particular kind of composite physical object – living objects. The bound state account of composition explains how composite physical objects exist in the world, and the property ‘life’ distinguishes the subset of those objects which are organisms. Our view obviates the need for disjunctive accounts of composition for living and non-living entities, placing ‘organism’ within the context of a broader scientific ontology, while at the same time providing a clear criterion of organismality that can be used in adjudicating problematic cases of biological individuality. (shrink)

This original and thought-provoking volume examines organic life as subjective activity. It shows that organic life operates differently from objective thought and truth. The volume considers topics such as: the origin of life, the absorption of food, the operation of heredity, and the possible control of further evolutionary development.

In the nineteenth century protozoology and early cell biology intersected through the nexus of Darwin's theory of evolution. As single-celled organisms, amoebae offered an attractive focus of study for researchers seeking evolutionary relationships between the cells of humans and other animals, and their primitive appearance made them a favourite model for the ancient ancestor of all living things. Their resemblance to human and other metazoan cells made them popular objects of study among morphologists, physiologists, and even those investigating animal behaviour. (...) The amoeba became the exemplar of the new protoplasmic cell concept of mid-century and because its apparent simplicity made it widely generalizable it became a popular subject in a breadth of experimental investigations and theoretical speculations. It was able to do this because "the amoeba" denotes not a particular organism, but a general type of behaviour common to the cells of a range of protozoa, simple plants and higher animals. Its status as an exemplary cell also rested upon auxiliary philosophical assumptions about what constitutes a primitive characteristic and the thesis that evolution is a progressive development of order from chaos. (shrink)

One reason for the renewed interest in Austrian philosophy, and especially in the work of Brentano and his followers, turns on the fact that analytic philosophers have become once again interested in the traditional problems of metaphysics. It was Brentano, Husserl, and the philosophers and psychologists whom they influenced, who drew attention to the thorny problem of intentionality, the problem of giving an account of the relation between acts and objects or, more generally, between the psychological environments of cognitive subjects (...) and the different sorts of external (physical, geographical, social) environments which they inhabit. The present essay addresses this environmental version of the problem of intentionality. It draws not only on the work of Husserl and Scheler but also on the Gestalt psychological writings of Kurt Koffka and Kurt Lewin. It considers the influential subjective idealist theory of animal environments put forward by J. von Uexküll and contrasts this with a realist theory of organism-environment interaction based on the work of the ecological psychologists J. J. Gibson and Roger Barker. This realist theory is then exploited as a basis for an ontology of social objects of a range of different sorts. (English translation is appended to the French text.). (shrink)

Consumer well-being is a micromarketing concept that emphasizes on contributions of marketing activities in social welfare. The major objective of the current study is to analyze the impact of self-incongruence on brand dissatisfaction, brand hate, and consumer well-being. This study has utilized the Self-incongruity Theory and the Stimulus-Organism-Response model to test the impact of self-incongruity on anti-consumption and consumer voice behaviors, and subsequent effects on consumer well-being. Data were collected from young consumers of technology products from major cities of (...) Pakistan. A total of 592 consumers answered a paper-and-pencil questionnaire using purposive sampling technique. The data were analyzed by partial least square structural equation modeling. The findings of this study reveal that functional and symbolic incongruity predict brand hate and dissatisfaction, which is positively related with brand retaliation. Brand retaliation is negatively related with consumer well-being. This study offers implications for product designers, marketers, advertisers and other stakeholders to improve congruence between what young consumers of technology products expect and what brands are offering to mitigate negative attitudes and behaviors and increase consumer well-being. (shrink)

What is pseudo-science and when do charges of pseudo-scientific thinking generally arise? These questions are answered by looking at six examples where the charge of pseudo-science has arisen: anti-vaccination and the claims that it causes illnesses, Creationism – the claim that the Bible is literally true –, chiropractic and claims about curing cancer and the like, pre-Darwinian evolution, that is developmental hypotheses before the Origin of Species, Immanuel Velikovsky and his book, Worlds in Collision, and the Gaia hypothesis that the (...) Earth is an organism. It is agreed that there is an objective foundation to charges of pseudo-science and the author’s testimony in a court case in Arkansas in 1981, arguing that Creationism is not genuine science, is used to support this claim. Karl Popper’s criterion of demarcation invoking falsifiability is a key notion here. However, it is argued that charges of pseudo-science occur most frequently when conventional practitioners are under threat. Then claims of pseudo-science are used to attack the non-conventional opposition. The examples are used to support this conclusion. (shrink)

ArgumentIn this essay, I sketch a problem-based framework within which I locate the concept of “organism” in the system theories of Georg Ernst Stahl, Théophile Bordeu, and Paul-Joseph Barthez. Around 1700, Stahl coins the word “organism” for a certain concept of order. For him, the concept explains the form of order of living bodies that is categorically different from the order of other bodies or composites. At the end of the century, the “organism” as a specific form (...) of order becomes a major topos in many discourses. I will not so much focus on experiments and objects as on basic problems that contribute to the general framework of the concept of organism as a key concept of the vitalist movement between 1700 and 1800. For this purpose, I will investigate the combination of three explanatory tools. These tools refer to regulating agents, functional interactions, and stimulus-reactions-schemes within individual organic systems of forces. They are related to various themes – especially to energy, sensibility, and sympathy. I will retrace some aspects of these relations. (shrink)

The article elucidates and defends whitehead's claim that john locke anticipated the main positions of the philosophy of organism. It is argued that the major philosophical categories of locke's epistemology and whitehead's process philosophy perform similar functions. The functional parallels between the mind and the actual entity, Simple ideas and objectified actual entities, Mental operations and concrescence, Ideas and objects, And power and the ontological principle are delineated and examined. The conclusion extends a necessary caveat in assessing the philosophy (...) of organism via locke's epistemology. (shrink)

Karen Ng's Hegel's Concept of Life tackles one of the hardest problems – the placement and status of the category of life within treatises on epistemology and logic—within what are already two of the most difficult texts in the history of philosophy—Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. It does so with good attention to contemporary debates surrounding Hegel's logic and metaphysics, and manages to integrate concerns that have been more typically expressed in continental scholarship—such as the influence of (...) Schelling and Hölderlin—with concerns that have come out of the more recent analytic conversation – such as the status of universals and the attributability of inferentialism to Hegel's thought. Ng argues for a distinctive kind of post‐Kantian reading of Hegel, one which emphasizes Hegel's interests in Kant's thoughts about judgment and teleology in the third Critique rather than the categories and dialectic of the first Critique. In the first section, I want to trace a tension in Ng's thought between inflationary and deflationary understandings of ‘life’ and its associated terms. Here I will try to make out the relevant concept of life that makes the living object the promising form of a richer object of judgment for a self‐conscious subject. In the following section, I try to tease out the relation of life to two very closely related notions, namely the notion of an organism and the notion of a purpose. (shrink)

Taking our lead from Solomon’s emphasis on the importance of the intentional object of emotion, we review the history of repeated attempts to make this object disappear. We adduce evidence suggesting that in the case of James and Schachter, the intentional object got lost unintentionally. By contrast, modern constructivists seem quite determined to deny the centrality of the intentional object in accounting for the occurrence of emotions. Griffiths, however, downplays the role objects have in emotion noting (...) that these do not qualify as intentional. We argue that these disappearing acts, deliberate or not, generate fruitless debate and add little to the advancement of our understanding of emotion as an adaptive mechanism to cope with events that are relevant to an organism’s life. (shrink)

Eric Vogelstein has defended Don Marquis’ ‘future-like-ours’ argument for the immorality of abortion against what is known as the Identity Objection, which contends that for a fetus to have a future like ours, it must be numerically identical to an entity like us that possesses valuable experiences some time in the future. On psychological accounts of personal identity, there is no identity relationship between the fetus and the entity with valuable experiences that it will become. Vogelstein maintains that a non‐sentient (...) fetus nonetheless has a future like ours because it is numerically identical with a future organism that has a mind that bears valuable experiences. Skott Brill, drawing on Jeff McMahan’s embodied mind account, denies that human organisms directly have experiences, claiming that they only have experiences derivatively by virtue of their thinking part, and the loss of a future like ours is not transferred to the organism. I show that on McMahan’s account, a strong case can be made for the organism having experiences directly, and the subject having these experiences derivatively. This negates Brill’s reasoning, although it does imply that non-sentient fetuses do not have a future like ours in quite the same way as we do. I conclude this is not problematic for Marquis’ argument. (shrink)

In this article, I outline various ways in which artifacts are interwoven with autobiographical memory systems and conceptualize what this implies for the self. I first sketch the narrative approach to the self, arguing that who we are as persons is essentially our (unfolding) life story, which, in turn, determines our present beliefs and desires, but also directs our future goals and actions. I then argue that our autobiographical memory is partly anchored in our embodied interactions with an ecology of (...) artifacts in our environment. Lifelogs, photos, videos, journals, diaries, souvenirs, jewelry, books, works of art, and many other meaningful objects trigger and sometimes constitute emotionally-laden autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memory is thus distributed across embodied agents and various environmental structures. To defend this claim, I draw on and integrate distributed cognition theory and empirical research in human-technology interaction. Based on this, I conclude that the self is neither defined by psychological states realized by the brain nor by biological states realized by the organism, but should be seen as a distributed and relational construct. (shrink)

The relation between organisms and machines is very old. Over a century ago, the French historian and philosopher Alfred Victor Espinas observed that from the Greeks onwards the intelligibility of the organic world presupposed a comparison with technical objects. Aristotle, for instance, associated living organs with mechanical artefacts in order to understand animals ‘movements. In the modern period, Descartes, Borelli and other mechanists defended the idea that organisms are, in reality, machines. Today, philosophers and scientists still argue that the genome (...) is like a software and the brain is like a computer. In this article I reconsider the relation between organisms and machines from the perspective of the German geographer and philosopher Ernst Kapp, one of the founding fathers of the Philosophy of Technology. Breaking with a long and venerable philosophical tradition, Kapp argued that machines are, in reality, “organic projections”. Organisms are not machines; they are an imitation or reflection of the organic world. First of all, I clarify the hypothesis of “organic projection”. Secondly, I consider some of the philosophical consequences that such a hypothesis entails over the debate between machinists and anti-mechanists. Finally, and following the previous considerations, I defend the importance of reconnecting the philosophy of technology with philosophy of biology in order to better understand the development of contemporary biology. (shrink)

The relation between organisms and machines is very old. Over a century ago, the French historian and philosopher Alfred Victor Espinas observed that from the Greeks onwards the intelligibility of the organic world presupposed a comparison with technical objects. Aristotle, for instance, associated living organs with mechanical artefacts in order to understand animals ‘movements. In the modern period, Descartes, Borelli and other mechanists defended the idea that organisms are, in reality, machines. Today, philosophers and scientists still argue that the genome (...) is like a software and the brain is like a computer. In this article I reconsider the relation between organisms and machines from the perspective of the German geographer and philosopher Ernst Kapp, one of the founding fathers of the Philosophy of Technology. Breaking with a long and venerable philosophical tradition, Kapp argued that machines are, in reality, “organic projections”. Organisms are not machines; they are an imitation or reflection of the organic world. First of all, I clarify the hypothesis of “organic projection”. Secondly, I consider some of the philosophical consequences that such a hypothesis entails over the debate between machinists and anti-mechanists. Finally, and following the previous considerations, I defend the importance of reconnecting the philosophy of technology with philosophy of biology in order to better understand the development of contemporary biology. (shrink)

In this article, I outline various ways in which artifacts are interwoven with autobiographical memory systems and conceptualize what this implies for the self. I first sketch the narrative approach to the self, arguing that who we are as persons is essentially our life story, which, in turn, determines our present beliefs and desires, but also directs our future goals and actions. I then argue that our autobiographical memory is partly anchored in our embodied interactions with an ecology of artifacts (...) in our environment. Lifelogs, photos, videos, journals, diaries, souvenirs, jewelry, books, works of art, and many other meaningful objects trigger and sometimes constitute emotionally laden autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memory is thus distributed across embodied agents and various environmental structures. To defend this claim, I draw on and integrate distributed cognition theory and empirical research in human-technology interaction. Based on this, I conclude that the self is neither defined by psychological states realized by the brain nor by biological states realized by the organism, but should be seen as a distributed and relational construct. (shrink)

The coevolution of objectivity and subjectivity and the nature of both their division and connection are central to this paper. Section 2 addresses the nature of meaning from the subjective perspective. Initially, I examine the meaningful engagement that exists between the unicellular organism and its environment. In this respect, I focus on the ontological importance of the qualitative biochemical assimilation of the physical rather than on the evolution of form and function. In Section 3, I broaden the discussion to (...) include multicellular organisms and introduce the idea that meaning, at various levels, qualifies different objective and informational constructs of the world. These determine the character of interactive engagement and reveal much about the way in which an agent signifies the external. In Section 4, I review Darwinian evolution from the position of the existential self. I emphasize that meaning is that which qualifies the human concept of objectivity, rather than that objectivity is that which will help humankind qualify or understand meaning. Ultimately, this outlook challenges scientific disciplines that have tended to obscure the relevance of meaning and sought, instead, to explain it from an epistemological footing. In its overall scope, I try to establish the view that the subjective and objective domains are more nuanced, layered, and intertwined ontologically than the default stance that presents a binary juxtaposition between the two. (shrink)

Using concepts of evolutionary game theory, this paper presents a critique of ethical intuitionism, or non-naturalism, in its cognitivist and objectivist interpretation. While epistemological considerations suggest that human rational learning through experience provides no basis for objective moral knowledge, it is argued below that modern evolutionary theory explains why this is so, i.e., why biological organisms do not evolve so as to experience objective preferences and obligations. The difference between the modes of the cognition of objective and of valuative environmental (...) attributes is explained with reference to different modes of natural selection acting on the cognitive apparatus of the organism. The negative implications are pointed out which the observable diversity of intraspecific behavioural adaptations and of cultural values has for the cognitivist, objectivist foundation of ethics. Eventually a non-cognitivist alternative to ethical intuitionism is outlined in terms of empirical authority relations, with the ritualisation of dominance-submission patterns as the evolutionary origin of human charismatic authority. (shrink)

This article argues that understanding everyday practices in neurobiological labs requires us to take into account a variety of different action positions: self-conscious social actors, technical artifacts, conscious organisms, and organisms being merely alive. In order to understand the interactions among such diverse entities, highly differentiated conceptual tools are required. Drawing on the theory of the German philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner, the paper analyzes experimenters as self-conscious social persons who recognize monkeys as conscious organisms. Integrating Plessner’s ideas into the (...) stock of concepts used in science and technology studies provides richer descriptions of laboratory life. In particular, this theory allows an understanding of a crucial feature of neurobiological brain research: the construction of the brain as the epistemic object of brain research. As such, the brain must be isolated from the acting and interacting organism in a complicated process. (shrink)

Neo-Aristotelian metaethical naturalism is a modern attempt at naturalizing ethics using ideas from Aristotle’s teleological metaphysics. Proponents of this view argue that moral virtue in human beings is an instance of natural goodness, a kind of goodness supposedly also found in the realm of non-human living things. Many critics question whether neo-Aristotelian naturalism is tenable in light of modern evolutionary biology. Two influential lines of objection have appealed to an evolutionary understanding of human nature and natural teleology to argue against (...) this view. In this paper, I offer a reconstruction of these two seemingly different lines of objection as raising instances of the same dilemma, giving neo-Aristotelians a choice between contradicting our considered moral judgment and abandoning metaethical naturalism. I argue that resolving the dilemma requires showing a particular kind of continuity between the norms of moral virtue and norms that are necessary for understanding non-human living things. I also argue that in order to show such a continuity, neo-Aristotelians need to revise the relationship they adopt with empirical science and acknowledge that the latter is relevant to assessing their central commitments regarding living things. Finally, I argue that to move this debate forward, both neo-Aristotelians and their critics should pay attention to recent work on the concept of organism in evolutionary and developmental biology. (shrink)

This is a digest of how various researchers in biology and astrobiology have explored questions of what defines living organisms—definitions based on functions or structures observed in organisms, or on systems terms, or on mathematical conceptions like closure, chirality, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, or on biosemiotics, or on Darwinian evolution—to clarify the field and make it easier for endeavors in artificial intelligence to make progress. Current ideas are described to promote work between astrobiologists and computer scientists, each concerned with living (...) organisms. A four-parameter framework is presented as a scaffold that is later developed into what machines lack to be considered alive: systems, evolution, energy and consciousness, and includes Jagers operators and the idea of dual closure. A novel definition of consciousness is developed which describes mental objects both with and without communicable properties, and this helps to clarify how consciousness in machines may be studied as an emergent process related to choice functions in systems. A perspective on how quantization, acting on nucleic acids, sets up natural limits to system behavior is offered as a partial address to the problem of biogenesis. (shrink)

For Kant, the main aim of teleology in nature is to identify or to segregate as a particular class of objects certain types of causal systems, specifically, systems of interdependent parts.With the development of physiology as a distinct science at the beginning of the 18th century, the idea of interdependence or reciprocity of parts in a system was well-established as a fundamental principle for the specification of organisms. Kant combined the ideas of teleology and causal reciprocity in his systems-theoretical foundation (...) of organized beings in nature. In the analysis of such systems teleological thinking, i.e. the focus on end states or outcomes, is prevalent because the outcome of each process is relevant for the perpetuation of the system as a whole. Teleological thinking thus plays a methodological role in Kant’s philosophy of nature. Its status ismerely reflective, in that it neither postulates a separate ontological category for living beings nor does it constrain mechanical explanations. But at the same time, teleology is constitutive for a particular class of objects and their scientific study. In Kants Philosophie der Naturwissenschaften kommt der Teleologie eine wesentliche Rolle in der Identifikation und Ausgliederung einer bestimmten Klasse von kausalen Systemen zu: den Systemen aus wechselseitig voneinander abhängigen Teilen. Die Vorstellung der wechselseitigen Abhängigkeit zwischen den Teilen eines Ganzen entwickelt sich mit der Etablierung der Physiologie als einer besonderen Wissenschaft zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts zu einem grundlegenden Prinzip, das der Spezifizierung von Organismen dient. Kant verbindet diese Vorstellung der Wechselseitigkeit mit der Teleologie in seiner systemtheoretischen Fundierung des Begriffs eines organisierten Wesens der Natur. In der Analyse dieser Systeme spielt die Teleologie im Sinne der Konzipierung eines Prozesses ausgehend von seinem Resultat eine wichtige Rolle, weil die Wirkung eines physiologischen Vorgangs für die Erhaltung des ganzen organischen Systems entscheidend ist. Da das System in seiner Einheit und Ganzheit erst in der teleologischen Beurteilung erkannt wird, kommt dem teleologischen Denken in Kants Philosophie der Naturwissenschaften eine methodologische Funktion zu. Die teleologische Beurteilung hat allerdings einen bloß reflektierenden Status, insofern über sie keine neue ontologische Kategorie für Lebewesen begründet wird und die Reichweite mechanistischer Erklärungen durch sie nicht beschränkt wird. Trotzdem ist die Teleologie konstitutiv für die Erkenntnis einer bestimmten Klasse von Gegenständen und deren wissenschaftliche Untersuchung. (shrink)

This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents. In order to elucidate the nature of agent-files, three views of the (...) relation between object- and agent-tracking are distinguished: the Independence, Deflationary and Organism-Dependence Views. The correct view is argued to be the latter, which states that perceptual and epistemic tracking of a unique human organism requires tracking both its spatio-temporal object-properties and its agent-properties. (shrink)

A common object found within medical museums is the developmental series: an arrangement of embryos depicting the transformation of an unremarkable blob into an anatomically organized and recognizable organism. The developmental series depicts a normative process, one where bodies emerge in reliable sequential stages to reveal anatomically perfect beings. Yet a century before the developmental series would become a visual model of embryological development, the very process of development itself was discerned through the comparative study of preserved human (...) fetuses—specifically, those deemed “monstrous” or characterized as “malformations.” This article examines how anatomically diverse fetal bodies were reformulated from singular curiosities into alternative developmental pathways whose characteristics testified to the laws of nature and to the primordial, physical relationship between humans and other species. In early nineteenth century Amsterdam, the father-son team of physicians Gerard and Willem Vrolik built up an internationally renowned anatomical museum famous especially for Willem’s collection of fetal malformations. Physical preparations of fetal malformations play a central role in Willem’s monumental handbook on developmental embryology: comparing human embryos against one another and the embryos of other species, Willem plots out a sequence of embryological development in which a body’s form marks its place within the ever-unfolding natural order. In conversation with the literature on model organisms, this article explores how the “monstrous” gets standardized and, in doing so, contributes to the scientific production of a normative physiological process. (shrink)

Philippa Foot’s virtue ethics remains an intriguing but divisive position in normative ethics. For some, the promise of grounding human virtue in natural facts is a useful method of establishing normative content. For others, the natural facts on which the virtues are established appear naively uninformed when it comes to the empirical details of our species. In response to this criticism, a new cohort of neo-Aristotelians like John Hacker-Wright attempt to defend Foot by reminding critics that the facts at stake (...) are not claimed to be explanatory descriptions of the kind provided by empirical science. Instead, they are derived from a logical form that is presupposed when we categorize something as a living organism. Neo-Aristotelian naturalism is therefore said to be immune to the empirical defeaters put forward as criticism of the theory. I argue that neo-Aristotelians like Hacker-Wright can only rescue Foot’s naturalism from being uninformed by exposing it to an indeterminacy objection: if claim.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.1 (2006) 35-53 [Access article in PDF] "Truth Is What Works": Francisco J. Varela on Cognitive Science, Buddhism, the Inseparability of Subject and Object, and the Exaggerations of Constructivism—A Conversation Francisco J. Varela Bernhard Poerksen Institut für Journalistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft Universität Hamburg Francisco J. Varela (1946-2001) studied biology in Santiago de Chile, obtained his doctorate 1970 at Harvard University with a dissertation on (...) the insect eye, and worked there for some time in the laboratory of Torsten Wiesel, the later Nobel Laureate for medicine. From his scientific beginnings as a researcher in biology, he not only studied and practiced biology but, resisting the dominating mainstream, pursued a research program that ignored and broke down traditional disciplinary boundaries. This research program is best characterized as experimental epistemology, a concept introduced by the neuropsychiatrist and cybernetician Warren S. McCulloch. Francisco J. Varela's great aspiration was to examine and answer the philosophical ur-question of cognition with scientific precision and with the help of the best possible theoretical framework. [End Page 35]Having obtained his doctorate, he went back to Chile to work as a professor of biology together with Humberto R. Maturana. He contributed to the writing of the theory of autopoiesis, which was to cause a furor in the world of science as a universally applicable explanatory model. After the overthrow of Allende and the installation of the dictatorship by the putsch general Pinochet, Francisco J. Varela first escaped to Costa Rica, then became a professor at the American University of Colorado and University of New York, and finally returned in 1980 to the University of Chile in Santiago for five years. Temporary positions as guest professor for neurobiology, philosophy, and cognitive science in Germany, Switzerland, and France led him to Paris in the end, where he worked as research director of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique until his death on May 28, 2001.In his research work embracing cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and immunology, Francisco J. Varela, constantly inspired by his fundamental interest in the key questions of epistemology, gave the epistemological debate a new orientation. In his thinking he refuses to accept the strict separation of subject and object, of knower and known, which as a rule unites realists and constructivists alike. Francisco J. Varela rejects the fundamental dualism dividing mind and world, which had shaped Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings. He does not subscribe to the idea that human individuals can invent their own realities—blindly and arbitrarily, and without experiencing any resistance from the external world and all other things given. He equally distances himself, however, from the diametrically opposite position that overstates the eigenpower of the world of objects. The external world and all other things given cannot determine what happens in an organism. Varela's claim is that individual and world create each other. The Computational Model of the Mind Poerksen: The ancient key questions of philosophy are at the center of modern cognitive science. What is the essence of the mind? Do our conceptions represent a given world, which is independent from our minds? What is the formative power of external objects over our perceptions? How does cognition function? The search for an adequate answer and an improved understanding of the human mind has led many cognitive scientists to entertain the assumption that the brain is actually a kind of computer. Memory is taken to be a store. Thinking and perceiving are understood as data processing in the sense that an independent external world is computationally transformed into symbols and represented in the organism in this manner. You are very critical of this view. Why?Varela: If the brain is considered as a kind of computer, then cognitive research is limited to discovering certain self-sufficient shapes—the symbols—together with the rules [End Page 36] governing them—the programs. But this search for symbols and programs will never be profitable because it... (shrink)

The paper proposes an outline of a reconciliatory approach to the perennial controversy between epistemological realism and anti-realism (constructionism). My main conceptual source in explaining this view is the philosophy of pragmatism, more specifically, the epistemological theories of George H. Mead, John Dewey, and also William James’ radical empiricism. First, the paper analyzes the pragmatic treatment of the goal-directedness of action, especially with regard to Mead’s notion of attitudes, and relates it to certain contemporary epistemological theories provided by the cognitive (...) sciences (Maturana, Rizzolatti, Clark). Against this background, the paper presents a philosophical as well as empirical justification of why we should interpret the environment and its objects in terms of possibilities for action. In Mead’s view, the objects and events of our world emerge within stable patterns of organism-environment interactions, which he called “perspectives”. According to pragmatism as well as the aforementioned cognitive scientists, perception and other cognitive processes include not only neural processes in our heads but also the world itself. Elaborating on Mead’s concept of perspectives, the paper argues in favor of the epistemological position called “constructive realism.”. (shrink)

Hegel's system is not teleological. For a philosophy to be teleological, as I shall use the term, means that it takes the basic nature of the world itself or any foundational account of that world to be defined ultimately by final causality. Such a view has, of course, long stood as the dominant model for interpreting Hegel's system. This essay argues, to the contrary, that the accounts of Teleology and Life in the Science of Logic, and more precisely their analyses (...) of what Hegel calls there subjective purpose and objective purpose, actually demonstrate this conception of teleology to be profoundly mistaken.The conventional reading of these sections is that they argue for two related claims: (1) that the means-ends relationship of extrinsic purposiveness—subjective purpose—is made possible by the intrinsic self-organizing process of intrinsic purposiveness; and (2) that intrinsic purposiveness—objective purpose—takes the basic structure of an organism, a natural purpose (Naturzweck), as its model, a model defined by final causality. I show this to be a deeply flawed interpretation. Hegel certainly shows that extrinsic purposiveness entails intrinsic purposiveness, but he does not conceive of intrinsic purposiveness, objective purpose, in terms of the final causality inherent in the model of a natural purpose. Rather, the systematic account of logical life argues that the activity of life must be understood as genus and this as a process of self-differentiation where the immanent and necessary unfolding of determinate negation itself, and itself alone, engenders the development without possessing or relating itself to any antecedent content. Hence, this austere thesis, rather than any form of final causality, is, as Hegel puts it, the truth of teleology, the nature of the absolute idea, and, as a result, Hegel's system is shown, at its very core, not to be teleological. (shrink)