Values in evolutionary biology: a comparison between the contemporary debate on organic progress and Canguilhem’s biological philosophy (original) (raw)

A note on the situation of biological philosophy

Revue internationale de philosophie, 2024

In a short and rarely discussed paper published in 1947 in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, entitled "Note sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique" (untranslated), Canguilhem is quite blunt in denouncing the "situation" of what he calls biological philosophy in France, in favour of a more developed Germanic tradition. He explains that French thought on biological questions is in a state of arrest, both due to its Cartesian heritage and to a kind of unstated fear with respect to the Romantic lebenspphilosophisch tradition in Germany and its political outcomes. This is unusual enough in an essay appearing shortly after the war, authored by someone who had been an active resistant. But rather than reflect on the possible socio-historical juncture and set of influences that may have led to Canguilhem's "Note," I wish to reflect on and evaluate his claims. What would this biological philosophy be? A Germanic philosophy of life translated into French? In a sense, Canguilhem's very enthusiastic reception of the work of Kurt Goldstein (the translation of which he was instrumental in enabling) is one part of such a translatio (if not translation). But in another sense, not all his work fits this program: in some ways, The Normal and the Pathological (1943, revised and expanded in 1966) does, but the various essays collected in volumes like Knowledge of Life (first edition 1952, expanded in 1965) do not, notably due to their more 'historicist' focus. The latter case makes this particularly clear: a historical epistemology of the life sciences is quite a different project from a Romantically inspired "biological philosophy" (or philosophy of life). In closing, I reflect on how these Canguilhemian projects might speak to us, including in the sense of the 'prospects' of a biological philosophy today.

Michael Ruse & Robert J. Richards (eds.), "The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics

Philosophy in review, 2019

This excellent collection focuses on three major approaches in current academic philosophy to the question of the relationship between ethics and human evolution. Perhaps a bit more than is usual in edited volumes of this type, it is constructed around the particular interests and philosophical proclivities of editors Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards. This is a strength in that Ruse and Richards can afford the space to provide an historical perspective of how the debate in which both are avid participants came to take shape, and to present different arguments by multiple philosophers defending a limited set of competing positions. It is a weakness in that the contributors too often refer to each other, and thus allow themselves to neglect too many important contemporary philosophical perspectives on this topic, as well as the insights and discoveries of many scientists and scholars outside of philosophy departments which could (and should) inform their arguments. Part I traces how the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species (in 1859) and The Descent of Man (in 1871) affected academic moral philosophy. With the exception of Naomi Beck's discussion of Friedrich von Hayek (Chapter 4), this section directly addresses the interests of the editors and thus works effectively as a springboard to what comes after. Lillihammer (Chapter 1) shows that Anglophone philosophers through much of the twentieth century 'explicitly responded to' evolutionary approaches to ethics and, for the most part, 'turned away from them on the basis of what they thought of as decisive arguments' (15). Several of these arguments are revived and updated in Part III. In the meantime Jeffrey O'Connell (Chapter 2) explores Friedrich Nietzsche's loathing of evolutionary theory, while Trevor Pearce (Chapter 3) wades through the more ambivalent reception Darwin's ideas found among American pragmatic philosophers. Pearce and Abraham Gibson (Chapter 5) pay special attention to the competition between Darwin's and Herbert Spencer's very different conceptions of evolution. Unlike Darwinism, which is decidedly non-teleological, the Spencerian view highlights the 'correspondence between organism and environment' and envisions an ever-improving natural world in which '[m]ore evolved species … are able to meet a wider and more complicated set of environmental challenges' (45). Spencer was, as Gibson points out, 'the most widely read philosopher in the United States through the second half of the nineteenth century' (74). Yet, 'mastery of the atom' and the discovery of DNA 'accelerated the biological sciences' wholesale shift towards reductionism' (80) and with it Darwinism's rise to hegemonic supremacy. As Ruse points out in his contribution (Chapter 6), which opens Part II of the book, Spencer's ideas remain influential among ecologists such as Rachel Carson and James Lovelock (89), as well as many philosophers, writers, and artists. He even taunts his coeditor Richards for being a Spencerian (90), a charge that Richards good-humoredly rejects as 'the product of a long day in the sun' (5). Yet the question is of paramount importance to metaethical debates about moral justification and indeed about the nature of morality itself. 'The world after Darwin,' declares Ruse, all too rightly, 'is very different from the world before Darwin' (89). If one accepts Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection as fact-and how can one not, given the heaps of extant evidence in support of it, not least of which is the entire field of genetics?-then one must confront its implications: evolution is purposeless and directionless, a product of uncountable random mutations and fortuitous, transient conjunctions between species and environments.

Finding common ground between evolutionary biology and continental philosophy

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2007

This article identifies already existing theoretical and methodological commonalities between evolutionary biology and phenomenology, concentrating specifically on their common pursuit of origins. It identifies in passing theoretical support from evolutionary biology for present-day concerns in philosophy, singling out Sartre's conception of fraternity as an example. It anchors its analysis of the common pursuit of origins in Husserl's consistent recognition of the grounding significance of Nature and in his consistent recognition of animate forms of life other than human. It enumerates and exemplifies five basic errors of continental philosophers with respect to Nature, errors testifying to a philosophical fundamentalism that distorts the intricate interconnections and relationships of Nature in favor of a preferred knowledge rooted in ontological reductionism. It shows that to discover and appreciate the common ground, one must indeed study "the things themselves."

The long reach of philosophy of biology

Biology and Philosophy, 2011

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology covers a broad range of topics in this field. It is not just a textbook focusing on evolutionary theory but encompasses ethics, social science and behaviour too. This essay outlines the scope of the work, discusses some points on methodology in the philosophy of biology, and then moves on to a more detailed analysis of cultural evolution and the applicability of a philosophy of biology toolkit to the social sciences. It is noted that concepts like the species concept may generalize to other domains whilst failing to account for the nature of all species. Finally, the author notes the omission of any discussion of information in biology.

The difficult though essential dialogue between biology and its philosophy

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Charges leveled against Evolutionary Theory by Natural Selection (ETNS) of not being falsifiable are not adequately answered, not to mention dispelled, by exhibiting any amount of empirical evidence. Immunity to falsification means that ETNS can assimilate any possible data as a favorable case, and therefore empirical evidence cannot affect ETNS’s truth value. As a consequence, any attempt to provide an answer to such charges can only dwell at a philosophical level of analysis, whereas assessing the quality and quantity of the evidence supporting ETNS (whether such evidence comes from systematics, ecology, ethology, physiology or molecular genetics) belongs in the scientific level. Since ETNS is a central element for the intelligibility of biological science, it is of fundamental importance to pay attention to the philosophical arguments that counsel to mitigate the role of falsifiability as a criterion for good science. The relevant criteria should take into account both that factual theories need empirical content and that historical disciplines should be part of science. The consequences of those arguments for research practice in evolutionary ecology were previously assessed (Marone et al., 2002). Sadly, our attempt was misunderstood by Néspolo (2003), who construed it as an attack to evolutionary theory. In the present paper we briefly review both mentioned papers, attempt to further analyze the consequences of ETNS being a premise of ecological research, and conclude by suggesting that evolutionary biology would benefit, as every scientific discipline, from a more fluid dialogue between science and its philosophy.

Canguilhem: a philosophy of life and a philosoph- ical history of the life sciences

Philosophy and History of Biology (Filosofia e História da Biologia), 2018

At first, Georges Canguilhem's philosophy is a philosophy of medicine recognizing the main contribution of biological knowledge to medicine. However, this philosophy also questions the nature of life. Life involves biological processes, but life is also normativity. In this paper, we question the normativity and the epistemological history in Canguilhem's works in order to understand their relevance for current scientific questions. According to Canguilhem, the epistemological history of the life sciences concerns an activity of constitution of (biological) scientific disciplines. The relevance of Canguilhem is the fact that a historian of science has not only to restore a history of the scientific theories or a history of the development of the sciences in context, but he has also to explore the relationship and the limits between life science and its context in the process of genesis and scientific elaboration. A scientific work is a vital activity of the human being, the history of science is the history of this axiological activity, and this implies a philosophical approach. In this paper, we propose that the history of ecology may give a good example of a scientific elaboration from various elements and from diverse skills: ideologies that announce or extend a scientific construction also affect this discipline.