Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 1:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shps (2014)
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Abstract |
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rejections: as just an instrument of transmission for the selfish gene, but also, historiographically, as part of an outdated ‘vitalism’.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.
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Keywords | organism mechanism vitalism reductionism |
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DOI | 10.1016/j.shpsc.2014.06.006 |
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References found in this work BETA
Why I Stopped Worrying About the Definition of Life... And Why You Should as Well.Edouard Machery - 2012 - Synthese 185 (1):145-164.
The Epistemic Goal of a Concept: Accounting for the Rationality of Semantic Change and Variation.Ingo Brigandt - 2010 - Synthese 177 (1):19-40.
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Citations of this work BETA
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The Organism as Reality or as Fiction: Buffon and Beyond.Boris Demarest & Charles T. Wolfe - 2016 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (1):3.
The Myth of Frederic Clements’s Mutualistic Organicism, Or: On the Necessity to Distinguish Different Concepts of Organicism.Thomas Kirchhoff - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (2):1-27.
Disciplinary Fields in the Life Sciences: Evolving Divides and Anchor Concepts.Alessandro Minelli - 2020 - Philosophies 5 (34):34-0.
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