Nature and Agency: Towards a Post-Kantian Naturalism

Abstract

We outline an alternative to both scientific and liberal naturalism which attempts to reconcile Sellars’ apparently conflicting commitments to the scientific accountability of human nature and the autonomy of the space of reasons. Scientific naturalism holds that agency and associated concepts are a mechanical product of the realm of laws, while liberal naturalism contends that the autonomy of the space of reason requires that we leave nature behind. The third way we present follows in the footsteps of German Idealism, which attempted to overcome the Kantian chasm between nature and agency, and is thus dubbed ‘post-Kantian.’ We point to an overlooked group of scholars in the naturalism debate who, along with recent work in biology and cognitive science, offer a path to overcome the reductive tendencies of empiricism while avoiding the dichotomy of logical spaces. We then bring together these different streams of research, by foregrounding and expanding on what they share: the idea of organisms as living agents and that of a continuity without identity between life and mind. We qualify this as a bottom-up transformative approach to rational agency, which grounds cognition in the intrinsically purposive nature of organisms, while emphasizing the distinction between biological agency and full-fledged mindedness.

¿Qué es la filosofía de la biología organismal?

“…of the potential meta-scienti c extensions that remain to be addressed could be: assessing the role given to organisms within scienti c explanations and theories in the various elds that make up the contemporary research landscape in biology and biomedicine; envisioning the need for a methodological restructuring of modeling practices in order to more accurately re ect the epistemically central role of organisms and their activities in our understanding of the phenomena studied (e.g., the case of model organisms; see Ankeny and Leonelli, 2021); examining the place of organismality within current debates on individuality in the biological and biomedical sciences; discussing how organismal agency might t into naturalist positions and debates on life-mind continuity (see Gambarotto and Nahas, 2023); rethinking some bioethical debates, for instance, on the value of life or the notion of 'death,' that arise from distinct concepts of 'organism' (see Rendón and Klier, 2017;Nowak and Stencel, 2022); and becoming aware of the possible conceptual and epistemological limitations of a scienti c practice based on the organism as the central epistemic and ontological unit of biology, thus avoiding falling into a rei cation regime similar to that committed by population thinking. In short, multiple epistemological, ontological, heuristic, methodological, pragmatic and axiological issues related to organisms as loci of analysis in the life sciences remain to be thoroughly articulated and linked.…”