Philosophy of Biology

This is an accepted proposal for a forthcoming publication in a special issue of The Comparatist entitled "ONTOLOGIES" which solicited responses to the material/ontological turn in continental philosophy. I defend a preservation of Kant and the trascendental following my teacher Catherine Malabou and push for a life philosophy in lieu of a pure mathematics as practiced by speculative realists, referring the reader to Canguilhem's work on Kant on Life, how this influenced Foucault, and how his final epistemic opening as gestured in his last essay "Life: experience and science". Combined with Malabou's work on Epigenesis, there is indeed a coming of a continental philosophy of life sciences, a new metaphysica specialis of nature, that may be able to confront the continental/analytic split as well as the split between science and philosophy, unlike the fugue and abandon of the speculative realists who have cast themselves in their own private world altogether.

The present article intends to show that genetic phenomenology, as conceived by Edmund Husserl, implies an essential biological dimension. In his later research manuscripts, from the 1920s and 1930s , Husserl not only reflects on the conceivability of forms of intropathy (Einfühlung) regarding animal and plant bodies, based on dismantling reduction (Abbaureduktion), but also on the embeddedness of the human monad in ontogenetic and phy-logenetic generative becoming. On that basis, the article aims to locate the place of bio-generative phenomena within the field of genetic analysis in the theories of monadic gradualism and of somatic anomalism. However, by taking into consideration that new attempts to approach biological generativity from a Husserlian perspective (A. Steinbock, R. Affifi) are only partly successful , the article ends with a delimitation of certain elements that require further elaboration,namely the investigation into the biological implications of monadology, the determination of forms of corporeal anomality, and the vindication of the notion of essential limit-phenomena.

For a few decades, the questions raised by biology and medicine have taken a central place in the philosophical reflection at the international scale. The bio-medical sciences have become (once again) a privileged object of study within different research traditions such as historical epistemology and analytic philosophy. If the interest for living beings and for life itself has always been part and parcel of historical epistemology, as is testified by the works of Auguste Comte or Georges Canguilhem, this interest is on the contrary a more recent interest for analytically-oriented philosophy. Against this background, the emergence, since the 1980s, of philosophy of biology is even more remarkable. 

A particularly relevant aspect of these new researches on biology and medicine is their ambition to intervene as directly as possible in the latest scientific debates. It is as if the development of science – and in particular that of molecular biology and of the theory of evolution – renewed the need to question traditional categories, such as that of “organism”, “individual” and “species”, or of more recent ones, more prominently those of “gene” and “cell”. This particular position of biology is the reason why it is at the crossroad of many areas of research concerning normativity and the status of norms (including meta-ethics), including debates over the respective roles of nature and social forces in defining these norms. It is thereby no surprise that the developments of biology continue to represent new ethical and political challenges for societies.

The impressive development of medical and bio-medical technologies only furthers the questioning of everyday notions such as “life”, “health” or “illness”. Moreover, the advancement of neurological research on the brain, specifically for what concerns the cerebral localization of mental functions, continuously challenges the philosophical definitions of the self and of personal identity. The clarification of the conceptual content of these various notions is a primary concern for the public space of contemporary societies.

Finally, the identity of the bio-medical sciences is confronted directly with the problem of the possibility of an authentic science of the living. This question has crossed a good part of the history of philosophy, from Kant to Rheinberger and Müller, through Bergson and Canguilhem. The old alternative between mechanism and vitalism demands today to be reworked, especially under the light of the organic perspectives directly connected, according to some, to the emergence of systematic or integrative biology.

We characterize access to empirical objects in biology from a theoretical perspective. Unlike objects in current physical theories, biological objects are the result of a history and their variations continue to generate a history. This property is the starting point of our concept of measurement. We argue that biological measurement is relative to a natural history which is shared by the different objects subjected to the measurement and is more or less constrained by biologists. We call symmetrization the theoretical and often concrete operation which leads to considering biological objects as equivalent in a measurement.  Last, we use our notion of measurement to analyze research strategies. Some strategies aim to bring biology closer to the epistemology of physical theories, by studying objects as similar as possible, while others build on biological diversity.

Forthcoming: eLife

Advances in microbiomics have changed the way in which many researchers think about health and disease. These changes have also raised a number of philosophical questions around these topics, such as the types of living systems to which these concepts can be applied. Here, I discuss the human microbiome from two perspectives: the first treats the microbiome as part of a larger system that includes the human; the second treats the microbiome as an independent ecosystem that provides services to humans. Drawing on the philosophy of medicine and ecology, I explore two questions: i) how can we make sense of disease and dysfunction in these two perspectives? ii) are these two perspectives complimentary or do they compete with each other?

IMPACT STATEMENT: The interactions between communities of microbial species and their human hosts raise questions about the nature of health and disease.

Jacques Monod (1971) argued that certain molecular processes rely critically on the property of ​ chemical arbitrariness​, which he claimed allows those processes to "transcend the laws of chemistry". It seems natural, as some philosophers have done, to interpret this in modal terms: a biological relationship is chemically arbitrary if it is possible, within the constraints of chemical "law", for that relationship to have been otherwise than it is. But while modality is certainly important for understanding chemical arbitrariness, understanding its biological role also requires an account of the concrete causal-functional features that distinguish arbitrary from non-arbitrary phenomena. In this paper I elaborate on this under-emphasised aspect by offering a general account of these features: arbitrary relations are instantiated by mechanisms that involve molecular ​ adapters​ , which causally couple two properties or processes which would otherwise be uncorrelated. More specifically, adapters work by acting as ​ intermediate rather than ​ cooperating​ causes.

Villalobos and Razeto-Barry's embodied reformulation of the autopoietic theory (AT) replaces AT's reference to autopoietic 'systems' with a reference to autopoietic 'bodies' so as to prevent an extended enactivist reading of AT. I argue that the specific notions of 'body' and 'embodiment' invoked by Villalobos and Razeto-Barry appear to be in tension with AT and are problematic as such.

I agree with Villalobos and Razeto-Barry’s main argument that living beings are autopoietic bodies. I suggest, however, that if we apply this definition of life to a consideration of living beings as dissipative systems, we find opportunities for further refinement. I propose that living bodies are autopoietic bodies that maintain themselves by using their boundaries to control their constituent processes of dissipative adaptation.

After having reconstructed a minimal biological characterisation of species, we endorse an “empirical approach” based on the idea that it is the peculiar evolution- ary history of the species at issue—its peculiar origination process, its peculiar metapopulation structure and the peculiar mixture and strength of homeostatic pro- cesses vis à vis heterostatic ones—that determines species’ identity at a time and through time. We then explore the consequences of the acceptance of the empirical approach in settling the individuals versus kinds dispute. In particular, while con- ceptual arguments have been proposed to show that species can be equally treated as individuals and kinds because mereology’s and set-theory’s languages are inter- translatable, we advance instead a causal argument to sustain the claim that each species is both a kind (i.e., a class whose members share some properties included in a cluster) and an individual (i.e., a whole made of parts).

Though biologists identify individuals as ‘male’ or ‘female’ across a broad range of animal species, the particular traits exhibited by males and females can vary tremendously. This diversity has led some to conclude that cross-animal sexes (males, or females, of whatever animal species) have “little or no explanatory power” (Dupré 1986: 447) and, thus, are not natural kinds in any traditional sense. This essay will explore considerations for and against this conclusion, ultimately arguing that the animal sexes, properly understood, are “historical explanatory kinds”: groupings that can be scientifically significant even while their members differ radically in their current properties and particular histories. Whether this makes them full-fledged natural kinds is a question I take up at the very end.