Philosophy of nature and organism's autonomy: on Hegel, Plessner and Jonas' theories of living beings

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
Francesca MicheliniDirk Stederoth

Abstract

Following the revival in the last decades of the concept of "organism", scholarly literature in philosophy of science has shown growing historical interest in the theory of Immanuel Kant, one of the "fathers" of the concept of self-organisation. Yet some recent theoretical developments suggest that self-organisation alone cannot fully account for the all-important dimension of autonomy of the living. Autonomy appears to also have a genuine "interactive" dimension, which concerns the organism's functional interactions with the environment and does not simply derive from its internal organisation. Against this background, we focus on a family of natural philosophical approaches that historically have already strongly taken in account this aspect of autonomy, notably going beyond Kant's perspective on self-organisation. We thus review Hegel, Plessner, and Jonas' different perspectives on living beings, focussing in particular on four points: the distinction between organic and inorganic, the theory of biological organisation, the processuality of the living, and the "boundary" between inside and outside, through which the organism establishes its relationship to the environment. We, then, compare the three perspectives on these fo...Continue Reading

References

Jun 1, 1997·Brain and Cognition·F J Varela
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Apr 7, 2005·Artificial Life·Alvaro Moreno, Arantza Etxeberria
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Oct 25, 2008·Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society·John W Pepper, Matthew D Herron
Feb 14, 2012·Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences·Francesca Michelini

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Citations

Sep 26, 2019·Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience·Evert A Boonstra, Heleen A Slagter

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