Wolfe, Charles T. (2010) Do organisms have an ontological status? [Preprint]

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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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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Wolfe, Charles T.
Keywords:	organism, organization, holism, Kant, Goldstein, Varela
Subjects:	General Issues > History of Philosophy of Science Specific Sciences > Biology General Issues > Reductionism/Holism General Issues > Values In Science
Depositing User:	Charles T. Wolfe
Date Deposited:	14 Jun 2010
Last Modified:	07 Oct 2010 15:19
Item ID:	5410
Subjects:	General Issues > History of Philosophy of Science Specific Sciences > Biology General Issues > Reductionism/Holism General Issues > Values In Science
Date:	April 2010
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/5410

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