Philosophy of Biology

No hay evidencia de por qué considerar la filosofía en las ciencias humanas, pero tampoco dónde empieza y acaba la tarea humanística. Asimismo, la tarea científica dista de ser evidente cuando pensamos en temas biológicos, los relacionados con seres vivos, y por ende con el ser humano. Este texto parte de que las ciencias humanas y naturales son objeto de reflexión filosófica, que no pueden ser privatizadas por los filósofos y que ni humanistas ni científicos están privados de la filosofía. Oponerse a estas cuestiones no sólo parece antifilosófico, sino que conlleva un marasmo con inconvenientes prácticos.

Philosophical tradition demands rational reflection as a condition for genuine moral acts. But the grounds for that requirement are untenable, and when the requirement is dropped morality comes into clearer view as a naturally developing phenomenon that is not confined to human beings and does not require higher-level rational reflective processes. Rational consideration of rules and duties can enhance and extend moral behavior, but rationality is not necessary for morality and (contrary to the Kantian tradition represented by Thomas Nagel) morality cannot transcend its biological roots. Recognizing this helps forge a complementary rather than competitive relation between feminist care-based ethics and rationalistic duty-based ethics. Moral behavior requires rational reflection. Philosophers regard that as a common starting point for examinations of morality, a textbook truth that defines moral inquiry. Behavior without moral reflection does not qualify as morally good. A virtuous act must be done deliberatively for the right reasons, and a virtuous life requires reflective development of a virtuous character. Whatever its philosophical charms, this standard position is misguided. Rational reflection is not necessary for moral behavior. True enough, moral behavior requires a deeper level. If one saves a child from toppling over the ledge, we require further investigation before judging the act virtuous. If a clumsy would-be murderer was attempting to shove the child off the ledge, the act was vicious. If the rescuer's hand stretched out due to a sudden seizure the motion is fortunate but not morally significant. If the rescuer was motivated solely by hope of rich reward, then the act loses its positive moral worth. So we must look deeper than the rescuer's extended hand to determine moral worth; but it is motives-rather than reasons-that must be examined, and those motives need not stem from deliberation. If I am a vicious and mercurial but clumsy killer, my spontaneous nondeliberative attempt to shove you from a ledge is morally vicious though it accidentally saves your life. The spontaneous loving unreflective rescue of a child is morally virtuous: if the act is motivated by affection for the child the absence of deliberation does not imply absence of moral worth. 1

Following Ernst Haeckel and many other fin-de-siecle scientists, Freud conceived mankind's oldest ancestor to be an urmetazoan, or "first animal," a microorganism whose primary organ was its stomach. This primeval organ began as a simple concavity formed by a tensing of cell fibers near the surface of the urganism (this latter term, the present author's coinage, is introduced in place of the less inclusive and more unwieldy urmetazoan; the term also has the advantage of underscoring the first animal's primary activity or urge, which is to eat or otherwise penetrate the membranes of other protists). As the urganism evolved, its primal gastraea developed first into a mouth, next into an anus, and finally, into an armlike or penile appendage that served as a channel or conduit through which food, waste and genetic material passed. Both Freud's ego-libido theory as well as his life instinct-death instinct binary can be interpreted in terms of the Bölschean dividing-melding dichotomy outlined in the essay's opening paragraphs. Divisive love, for Freud, is associated with the maintenance of the organismic boundary or skin by deflecting environmental stimuli and satisfying internal drives that goad the organism into fleeting sexual or consumptive activity; unitive or boundary-dissolving love, on the other hand, Freud saw as an expression of the death instinct, and as such was a denial of the need for a conduit or bridge between self and other.

In this paper, I argue that brain death is death because, despite the appearance of genuine integration, the brain-dead body does not in fact possess the unity that is proper to a human organism. A brain-dead body is not a single entity, but a multitude of organs and tissues functioning in a coordinated manner with the help of artificial life support. In order to support this claim, I first lay out Hofmann and Rosenkrantz’s ontological account of the requirements for organismal unity and summarize an earlier paper in which I apply this account to the brain death debate.
I then further support this ontological argument by developing an analogy between the requirements for the unity of an organism and the requirements for the unity of an orchestra. To do so, I begin by examining the role that a conductor plays in unifying a traditional orchestra, and then go on to show that the human organism (at least
in postnatal stages) functions like a traditional orchestra that relies upon a conductor (the brain) for its unity. Next, I consider the conditions required to achieve orchestral unity in conductorless orchestras and show that, in contrast to simpler organisms like plants, the postnatal human organism lacks those conditions. I argue, in other words, that although conductorless orchestras do exist, the human organism is not
one of them. Like a traditional orchestra without a conductor, the brain-dead body is not a unified whole.

This paper introduces and defends an account of model-based science that I dub model pluralism. I argue that despite a growing awareness in the philosophy of science literature of the multiplicity, diversity, and richness of models and modeling-practices, more radical conclusions follow from this recognition than have previously been inferred. Going against the tendency within the literature to generalize from single models, I explicate and defend the following two core theses: (i) any successful analysis of models must target sets of models, their multiplicity of functions within science, and their scientific context and history and (ii) for almost any aspect x of phenomenon y, scientists require multiple models to achieve scientific goal z.

En el presente escrito tenemos como objetivo mostrar que la función de las creencias no es la verdad, sino la supervivencia. Este trabajo surge dado que se ha dicho comúnmente (en la tradición filosófica) que la creencia apunta a la verdad (autores clásicos como Platón-con su noción de conocimiento como creencia verdadera y justificada-y autores contemporáneos como C.S Peirce y B. Williams han sostenido dicha tesis)1. En este escrito defenderemos que ese no es el caso. Argumentaremos que las creencias del ser humano, en tanto ser biológico, práxico e inacabado (antes que ser intelectual), deben apuntar prima facie a la supervivencia y no a la verdad. Puede ser que la verdad sea importante para la supervivencia, pero no siempre es el caso.2 Y, si buscamos la verdad, la buscaremos desde la aceptación. Para sustentar esto, argumentaremos que la creencia es involuntaria y que la aceptación es voluntaria. Para ello, aludiremos principalmente a la visión antropológica de Gehlen y el enfoque disposicionalista de la creencia y la aceptación de Jonathan Cohen. Posteriormente, mostraremos cómo podemos pensar que la creencia alude a la supervivencia y la aceptación tanto a la supervivencia como al conocimiento (y, por ende, a la verdad).

Aunque este tema sobre la naturaleza de la creencia ha sido debatido por otros autores como Peirce (1871), B. Williams (1973), J. Cohen (1992) o Huber (2009). Incluso cuando autores como Frankish (2004) ya han sostenido que la creencia no apunta necesariamente a la verdad, nos parece que nuestro trabajo puede realizar una vinculación muy fuerte (entre biología y filosofía de la mente) para rebatir la tesis clásica de que la creencia apunta a la verdad. Además, al parecer no hay (no conocemos) una teoría sobre las creencias que explica su naturaleza mediante alguna teoría biológica del ser humano. Justamente en esto reside nuestro aporte a la literatura sobre la creencia: se trata de una tesis innovadora acerca de la naturaleza de la creencia. El material específico que usaremos para este trabajo se encuentra al final de este escrito.

Palabras clave: creencia, aceptación, supervivencia, ser práxico, cognición humana.

ANALYSE : Henri Bergson n'a pas bien été accueilli par la communauté des biologistes. Pourtant, sa philosophie est un garde-fou contre le mécanisme de la théorie de l'Evolution, qui est en réalité un finalisme «honteux», souligne la philosophe des sciences Mathilde Tahar, qui note que les questions que l'auteur de L'Evolution créatrice pose à la biologie sont plus actuelles que jamais. Agrégée de philosophie, Mathilde Tahar est enseignante et doctorante en philosophie de la biologie à l'Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès et au Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, où ses recherches portent sur Bergson, Darwin et l'évolution. Elle présente dans iPhilo les enjeux de sa thèse.

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The fracture in the emerging discipline of biosemiotics when the code biologist Marcello Barbieri claimed that Peircian biosemiotics is not genuine science raises anew the question: What is science? When it comes to radically new approaches in science, there is no simple answer to this question, because if successful, these new approaches change what is understood to be science. This is what Galileo, Darwin and Einstein did to science, and with quantum theory, opposing interpretations are not merely about what theory is right, but what is real science. Peirce's work, as he acknowledged, is really a continuation of efforts of Schelling to challenge the heritage of Newtonian science for the very good reason that the deep assumptions of Newtonian science had made sentient life, human consciousness and free will unintelligible, the condition for there being science. Pointing out the need for such a revolution in science has not succeeded as a defence of Peircian biosemiotics, however. In this paper, I will defend the scientific credentials of Peircian biosemiotics by relating it to the theoretical biology of the bio-mathematician, Robert Rosen. Rosen's relational biology, focusing on anticipatory systems and giving a place to final causes, should also be seen as a rigorous development of the Schellingian project to conceive nature in such a way that the emergence of sentient life, mind and science are intelligible. Rosen has made a very strong case for the characterization of his ideas as a real advance not only in science, but in how science should be understood, and I will argue that it is possible to provide a strong defence of Peircian biosemiotics as science through Rosen's defence of relational biology. In the process, I will show how biosemiotics can and should become a crucial component of anticipatory systems theory.

The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework to understand how multicellular systems realize functionally integrated physiological entities by organizing their intercellular space. From a perspective centered on physiology and integration, biological systems are often characterized as organized in such a way that they realize metabolic self-production and self-maintenance. The existence and activity of their components rely on the network they realize and on the continuous management of the exchange of matter and energy with their environment. One of the virtues of the organismic approach focused on organization is that it can provide an understanding of how biological systems are functionally integrated into coherent wholes. Organismic frameworks have been primarily developed by focusing on unicellular life. Multicellularity, however, presents additional challenges to our understanding of biological systems, related to how cells are capable to live together in higher-order entities, in such a way that some of their features and behaviors are constrained and controlled by the system they realize. Whereas most accounts of multicellularity focus on cell differentiation and increase in size as the main elements to understand biological systems at this level of organization, we argue that these factors are insufficient to provide an understanding of how cells are physically and functionally integrated in a coherent system. In this paper, we provide a new theoretical framework to understand multicellularity, capable to overcome these issues. Our thesis is that one of the fundamental theoretical principles to understand multicellularity, which is missing or underdeveloped in current accounts, is the functional organization of the intercellular space. In our view, the capability to be organized in space plays a central role in this context, as it enables (and allows to exploit all the implications of) cell differentiation and increase in size, and even specialized functions such as immunity. We argue that the extracellular matrix plays a crucial active role in this respect, as an evolutionary ancient and specific (non-cellular) control subsystem that contributes as a key actor to the functional specification of the multicellular space and to modulate cell fate and behavior. We also analyze how multicellular systems exert control upon internal movement and communication. Finally, we show how the organization of space is involved in some of the failures of multicellular organization, such as aging and cancer.