La catégorie d' « organisme » dans la philosophie de la biologie.

Abstract

Wolfe Charles, « La catégorie d' « organisme » dans la philosophie de la biologie. » Retour sur les dangers du réductionnisme,

The Animal Economy as Object and Program in Montpellier Vitalism

“…Even though Leibniz granted that bodies were to be studied "mechanically," he always insisted on a deeper metaphysical ground of life which is not itself mechanical, causal, or measurable; and this "deeper source" is not a heuristic, analogical construct designed for methodological purposes, in contrast to Barthez's vital principle (among other representative vitalist examples): in the third edition of his Nouveaux essais, Barthez insisted in response to various criticisms and mistaken "borrowings" of his ideas by others, that "I have never used the term 'Vital Principle' to explain any of the phenomena of life, but only for greater ease and sureness in [accounting for] the formation of new results of these phenomena" ("Discours préliminaire," § 1, in Barthez 1858, vol. 37 While it may be the case that "from organisation to organism, there is only one step to be taken, which Romantic philosophy will take" (Leduc-Fayette 1978, 45), we wish to stress that this is a big step to take: conceptually, organisation is far more materialism-friendly than organism (see Wolfe 2004 and2006a;Cheung 2006) and historically, no vitalist drops his copy of d'Holbach's Système de la nature after having opened it, exclaiming in horror at the "deadly, morbid coldness" of the book which "horrifies us as if we had seen a ghost," in an "atheistic twilight" (this is Goethe) (Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, XI, in Goethe 1887-1919. .…”

“…Neo-vitalism in the late nineteenth century, from Driesch to Goldstein, often insists on the essentially temporal character of organisms as opposed to the spatial, mechanical character of the non-organic world (Wolfe 2004(Wolfe , 2006a. Neo-vitalism in the late nineteenth century, from Driesch to Goldstein, often insists on the essentially temporal character of organisms as opposed to the spatial, mechanical character of the non-organic world (Wolfe 2004(Wolfe , 2006a.…”

The organism as ontological go-between: Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual history

“…Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the 'theorization' of Life (for instance, in the sense that biology is a science of organisms or is nothing; Grene and Depew, 2004). Similarly, at a more conceptual level, perhaps because it is experientially closer to the 'body' than to the 'molecule', the organism is often the object of quasi-affective theoretical investments presenting it as essential, perhaps even as the pivot of a science or a particular approach to nature (from Hegel onwards, and explicitly with thinkers such as Kurt Goldstein and, with more metaphysical investment, Hans Jonas; see Wolfe, 2004Wolfe, , 2010. Conversely, it has also been the target of some influential rejections, classically in Dawkins' vision of the organism as just an instrument of transmission for the selfish gene (Dawkins, 1976), but also, at a historiographic level, as a denunciation of 'vitalism' in the history of science (Schiller, 1978) or, as Laublicher has noted, in the kinds of attacks that go beyond scientific claims and counter-claims (Laubichler, 2000), assimilating its concept to a mysterious 'vitalist' ontology of non-causal forces, or some other 'pre'-or 'pseudo'-scientific doctrine; or at least, "a highly contestable notion" (Sterelny and Griffiths, 1999, p. 173).…”

“…In earlier work on the concept of organism I first made a case for an instrumentalist concept (Wolfe, 2004), which would dissolve ontological debates between reductionist and heavily organismic approaches to the nature or individuality of living beings; more recently (Wolfe, 2010) I argued for a weakly ontological view in which organizational concepts, whether primarily structural (the 'animal economy' in Montpellier vitalism) or also homeostatic (as in Claude Bernard and more recently, Alvaro Moreno and William Bechtel's discussion of organizational closure in biological systems), were the 'realest' yet also least ideological concept of organism. While I return to what I'll call 'weak organicism' in the last sections of this essay, I will be more interested here in these reality claims as part of a broader phenomenon of hybridity, borrowing, transplantation and displacement.…”

“…", Ruse, 1989), or as philosophers and theoretical biologists have more recently (Wolfe, 2004, Cheung, 2006, Huneman and Wolfe, eds., 2010, Toepfer, 2013. This ontological question -does the organism exist or not?…”