DOCSLIB.ORG

Against Organicism: a Defence of an Ontology of Everyday Objects

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Against Organicism: a Defence of an Ontology of Everyday Objects Against Organicism: a defence of an ontology of everyday objects Sean Lastone Michael Jennings University College London PhD 2009 1 Declaration I, Sean Lastone Michael Jennings, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract This thesis claims that attempts to eliminate everyday objects from ontology on the basis of a priori reasoning about the composition relation fail. The thesis focuses on the positions of ‗Organicist‘ philosophers; philosophers who argue that all that exists are organisms and microscopic (or smaller) mereological simples. Organicist positions have two key foundations: 1) arguments from compositional failure, which conclude that there are no everyday objects because (it is argued) there are no non-living composite entities. 2) A rhetorical move, the ‗O-arranging manoeuvre‘, whereby it is claimed that the elimination of everyday objects from our ontology would make ‗no-difference‘ because object-wise arrangements of mereological simples take their place. The thesis maintains that arguments from compositional failure should be reinterpreted as arguments to the conclusion that the notion of ‗composition‘ being employed by Organicists is inadequate for the purposes of metaphysics. A minimal alternative account of everyday objects is posited. It is shown that by deploying the O-arranging manoeuvre Organicists (and other Eliminativists) commit themselves to all that is required on the presented account to entail the conclusion that everyday objects exist. The thesis concludes that there are everyday objects. It suggests that we should reject the idea that composition is what matters in ontology, but if one does not then the thesis gives reasons for rejecting compositional ontologies that entail the non-existence of everyday objects. 3 Contents Declaration .................................................................................................................................... 2 Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... 3 Contents ........................................................................................................................................ 4 Figures .......................................................................................................................................... 5 Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 7 Chapter One: Organicism and compositional ontology .............................................................. 14 1.1 Compositional ontology ................................................................................................................. 16 1.2 Organicism and Extensional Mereology...................................................................................... 22 1.3 Other notions of part and other sorts of ‗compositional‘ ontology. ...................................... 28 1.4 Questions about composition ....................................................................................................... 35 1.5 What we can learn from answers to questions about composition ........................................ 43 1.6 Simples ............................................................................................................................................... 49 1.7 Could everyday objects be mereologically simple? .................................................................... 58 1.8 From composition to ontology? ................................................................................................... 61 Chapter Two: Arrangements of simples and the bundle theory of everyday objects .................. 67 A glossary of terms introduced in Chapter 2 .................................................................................................. 68 2.1 Everyday objects .............................................................................................................................. 71 2.2 Object concepts ............................................................................................................................... 84 2.3 A theory of everyday objects ......................................................................................................... 93 Chapter Three: substance and property bundle views ............................................................... 107 3.1 Property cluster theories: substance-attribute or bundle? ...................................................... 112 3.2 Locke‘s substance-attribute theory ............................................................................................. 121 3.3 Bundle theories and sortal theories ............................................................................................ 130 Chapter Four: The O-arranging Manoeuvre .............................................................................. 137 4.1 What is an o-wise arrangement? .................................................................................................. 138 4.2 What is the point of the O-arranging manoeuvre? .................................................................. 148 4.3 The property role. .......................................................................................................................... 151 Chapter Five: The O-arranging manoeuvre, object concepts and metaphysical commitment . 159 5.1 Merricks on the falsity of our object speech and beliefs ........................................................ 164 5.2 Van Inwagen on the truth of object speech and beliefs ......................................................... 170 5.3 Objects and objectivity ................................................................................................................. 178 5.4 Object concepts revisited ............................................................................................................. 185 4 Chapter Six: The overdetermination argument for the elimination of everyday objects ............ 188 6.1 The argument from overdetermination ..................................................................................... 189 Chapter Seven: Organicism and puzzles about everyday objects .............................................. 207 7.1 The sorites paradox ....................................................................................................................... 208 7.2 The Ship of Theseus ..................................................................................................................... 215 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 231 References .................................................................................................................................. 235 Figures Figure 1: A colour continuum: p. 210 5 Acknowledgements I studied for this PhD part-time, and it has gone on for a long while. In that time I have had cause to be grateful to many people and one organisation. The organisation is the Royal Institute of Philosophy, which provided me with bursary funding sufficient to cover my course fees on two separate years. This has been important in my finishing this thesis debt free. Equally important in this regard are my parents who have put a roof over my head for the years I have been studying. Without my family‘s ongoing support, it seems unlikely that I would have reached this stage. I am especially grateful to all those family members who, many years before the start of this project, spent hours teaching me to read. Particularly noteworthy in this regard are my aunt, Brenda Martin, and my grandmother, Eunice L‘amie—to both of whom I would like to dedicate this thesis. I want especially to thank my occasionally exasperated partner Liz, who has waited a long time for me to complete this thesis. I should thank too my colleagues at my workplace, the Institute of Education, who have been very supportive and have allowed me an exceptional amount of flexibility in my working arrangements so that I could meet my course‘s requirements. Lastly, I want to thank the students and staff in the philosophy department at University College London. I have been blessed with excellent supervisors at UCL; Jose Zalabardo, Lucy O‘Brien and Tim Crane all deserve my thanks. I would like to mention Lucy and Tim in particular, however. Lucy who got me on the right track at a time when she really had much more pressing concerns, and Tim who has helped me through to the end of this project. Thanks guys. 6 Introduction ‗Organicists‘ are committed to the claim that although there are people, strictly speaking none of them are wearing clothes. For Organicists claim that the only things bigger than an atom that exist are living things. Organisms exist, they claim, but clothes, cups, mountains, pebbles and lakes do not. Trees exist, but firewood does not. Apples cease to exist once plucked from the tree. People exist, but corpses do not1, and so on. It is important to be clear: this is not a sceptical claim. It is not the claim that we do not have sufficient reason to believe in
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Approaches to Organic Form Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science
    APPROACHES TO ORGANIC FORM BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Editor ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University Editorial Advisory Board ADOLF GRUNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University MARX W. WARTOFSKY, Baruch College of the City University of New York VOLUME 105 APPROACHES TO ORGANIC FORM Permutations in Science and Culture Edited by FREDERICK BURWICK University of California, Los Angeles D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP DORDRECHT/BOSTON/LANCASTER/TOKYO Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Poblication Data Approaches to organic form. Boston studies in the philosophy of science v. 105) Includes index. 1. Organism (Philosophy) 2. Aesthetics. I. Burwick, Frederick. II. Series. 0174.B67 vol. 105 001'.01 s (146) 87-23482 [B105.074) ISBN-13: 978-94-010-8237-2 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-3917-2 DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-3917-2 Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland. All Rights Reserved © 1987 by D. Reidel Publishing Company Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1987 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner TABLE OF CONTENTS Editorial Preface VB FREDERICK BURWICK / Introduction ix Acknowledgments xix RICHARD OLSON / On the Nature of God's Existence, Wisdom and Power: The Interplay between Organic and Mechanistic Imagery in Anglican Natural Theology- 1640-1740 1 NINA GELBART / Organicism and the Future of Scientific Utopia 49 WALTER D.
    [Show full text]
  • The Cosmology of Cognitive Science from Hesiod, Socrates, and Plato to Wittgenstein
    Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts - Volume 8, Issue 2, April 2021 – Pages 107-136 The Cosmology of Cognitive Science from Hesiod, Socrates, and Plato to Wittgenstein By Richard McDonough* Cognitive science, the attempt to provide an account of human intelligence and behavior by reference to physical ‚mechanisms‛ in the alleged neural control center of human beings, is one of the dominant philosophical projects of our time. The paper argues that Wittgenstein in para. 608 of Zettel develops an alternative to this almost universally accepted modern paradigm. However, his efforts have been widely misunderstood, in a fashion clarified by Kuhn, because scholars read competing paradigms in the light of their own cognitive science paradigm. In the present case, scholars have assumed that the words in Zettel (para. 608), especially ‚the center‛ and ‚chaos,‛ must have the same meanings that they would naturally be assigned in cognitive science. The result is, inevitably, that Zettel (para. 608) either looks like it anticipates one of the various cognitive science paradigms or it looks absurd. In opposition to this, the paper argues that the language in Zettel (para. 608) is not the language of modern cognitive science, but, rather, is the language of the emergence of order from chaos by virtue of a stabilizing center with which the Western intellectual tradition began in ancient Greek cosmology. When read against this background, it becomes clear that Zettel (para. 608) is an attempt to formulates an alternative to the cognitive science paradigm by retrieving a paradigm found in ancient Greek philosophy and literature. The idea that the brain is not the control center of the human organism is in Plato.
    [Show full text]
  • New Yorkers Had Been Anticipating His Visit for Months. at Columbia
    INTRODUCTION ew Yorkers had been anticipating his visit for months. At Columbia University, where French intellectual Henri Bergson (1859–1941) Nwas to give twelve lectures in February 1913, expectations were es- pecially high. When first approached by officials at Columbia, he had asked for a small seminar room where he could directly interact with students and faculty—something that fit both his personality and his speaking style. But Columbia sensed a potential spectacle. They instead put him in the three- hundred-plus-seat lecture theater in Havemeyer Hall. That much attention, Bergson insisted, would make him too nervous to speak in English without notes. Columbia persisted. So, because rhetorical presentation was as impor- tant to him as the words themselves, Bergson delivered his first American lec- ture entirely in French.1 Among the standing-room-only throng of professors and editors were New York journalists and “well-dressed” and “overdressed” women, all fumbling to make sense of Bergson’s “Spiritualité et Liberté” that slushy evening. Between their otherwise dry lines of copy, the reporters’ in- credulity was nearly audible as they recorded how hundreds of New Yorkers strained to hear this “frail, thin, small sized man with sunken cheeks” practi- cally whisper an entire lecture on metaphysics in French.2 That was only a prelude. Bergson’s “Free Will versus Determinism” lec- ture on Tuesday, February 4th—once again delivered in his barely audible French—caused the academic equivalent of a riot. Two thousand people attempted to cram themselves into Havemeyer. Hundreds of hopeful New Yorkers were denied access; long queues of the disappointed snaked around the building and lingered in the slush.
    [Show full text]
  • Chapter 4 Multifaceted Ecology Between Organicism, Emergentism and Reductionism Donato Bergandi1 the Classical Holism-Reductioni
    Chapter 4 Multifaceted Ecology Between Organicism, Emergentism and Reductionism Donato Bergandi1 The classical holism-reductionism debate, which has been of major importance to the development of ecological theory and methodology, is an epistemological patchwork. At any moment, there is a risk of it slipping into an incoherent, chaotic Tower of Babel. Yet philosophy, like the sciences, requires that words and their correlative concepts be used rigorously and univocally. The prevalent use of everyday language in the holism-reductionism issue may give a false impression regarding its underlying clarity and coherence. In reality, the conceptual categories underlying the debate have yet to be accurately defined and consistently used. There is a need to map out a clear conceptual, logical and epistemological framework. To this end, we propose a minimalist epistemological foundation. The issue is easier to grasp if we keep in mind that holism generally represents the ontological background of emergentism, but does not necessarily coincide with it. We therefore speak in very loose terms of the “holism-reductionism” debate, although it would really be better characterised by the terms emergentism and reductionism. The confrontation between these antagonistic paradigms unfolds at various semantic and operational levels. In definitional terms, there is not just emergentism and reductionism, but various kinds of emergentisms and reductionisms. In fact, Ayala (1974; see also Ruse 1988; Mayr 1988; Beckermann et al. 1992; Jones 2000) have proposed a now classic trilogy among various semantic domains – ontology, methodology and epistemology. This trilogy has been used as a kind of epistemological screen to interpret the reductionist field. It is just as meaningful and useful, however, to apply the same trilogy to the emergentist field.
    [Show full text]
  • The Concept of Organism, a Historical and Conceptual Critique
    Do organisms have an ontological status? Charles T. Wolfe Unit for History and Philosophy of Science University of Sydney [email protected] forthcoming in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32:2-3 (2010) 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. 1. What is an organism? There have been a variety of answers to this question, not just in the sense of different definitions (an organism is a biological individual; it is a living being, or at least the difference between a living organism and a dead organism is somehow significant in a way that does not seem to make sense for other sorts of entities, like lamps and chairs; it is a self-organizing, metabolic system; etc.) but more tendentiously, in the 1 sense that philosophers, scientists, „natural philosophers‟ and others have both asserted and denied the existence of organisms.
    [Show full text]
  • Holism Organicism Verific
    HOLISM, ORGANICISM AND THE RISK OF BIOCHAUVINISM Charles Wolfe To cite this version: Charles Wolfe. HOLISM, ORGANICISM AND THE RISK OF BIOCHAUVINISM. Verifiche. Rivista di scienze umana, 2014. hal-02070000 HAL Id: hal-02070000 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02070000 Submitted on 26 Mar 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. HOLISM, ORGANICISM AND THE RISK OF BIOCHAUVINISM by Charles T. Wolfe Abstract. In this essay I seek to critically evaluate some forms of holism and organicism in biological thought, as a more deflationary echo to Gilbert and Sarkar’s reflection on the need for an ‘umbrella’ concept to convey the new vitality of holistic concepts in biology (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000). Given that some recent discussions in theoretical biology call for an organism concept (from Moreno and Mossio’s work on organization to Kirschner et al.’s research paper in Cell, 2000, building on chemistry to articulate what they called “molecular vitalism,” studying the “vitalistic” properties of molecular, cellular, and organismal function,
    [Show full text]
  • Whitehead's Philosophy
    Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought1 The rapid spread of the term postmodern in recent years witnesses to a grow- ing dissatisfaction with modernity and to an increasing sense that the modern age not only had a beginning but can have an end as well. Whereas the word modern was almost always used until quite recently as a word of praise and as a synonym for contemporary, a growing sense is now evidenced that we can and should leave modernity behind—in fact, that we must if we are to avoid destroying ourselves and most of the life on our planet. Modernity, rather than being regarded as the norm for human society toward which all history has been aiming and into which all societies should be ushered—forcibly if necessary—is instead increasingly seen as an aberration. A new respect for the wisdom of traditional societies is growing as we realize that they have endured for thousands of years and that, by contrast, the existence of modern civilization for even another century seems doubtful. Likewise, modernism as a worldview is less and less seen as The Final Truth, in comparison with which all divergent world- views are automatically regarded as “superstitious.” The modern worldview is increasingly relativized to the status of one among many, use- ful for some purposes, inadequate for others. Although there have been antimodern movements before, begin- ning perhaps near the outset of the nineteenth century with the Romanticists and the Luddites, the rapidity with which the term post- modern has become widespread in our time suggests that the antimodern sentiment is more extensive and intense than before, and also that it in- cludes the sense that modernity can be successfully overcome only by going beyond it, not by attempting to return to a premodern form of ex- istence.
    [Show full text]
  • Philosophy, Human Nature, and Society - Jeff Noonan
    PHILOSOPHY AND WORLD PROBLEMS – Vol . III – Philosophy, Human Nature, and Society - Jeff Noonan PHILOSOPHY, HUMAN NATURE, AND SOCIETY Jeff Noonan Department of Philosophy, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada Keywords: metaphysical, human nature, self-determination, critical social philosophy, life-grounded Contents 1. Introduction 2. The Divine Grounds of Social Hierarchy: Greek Metaphysics 3. Medieval Christian Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy: Aquinas 4. Divine Indifference and Human Power: Spinoza 5. Social Freedom as a Historical Project: Kant, Hegel, Marx 6. The Unifying Principle of Critical Social Philosophy Glossary Bibliography Biographical Sketch Summary The chapter traces the development of critical social philosophy out of the speculative metaphysical tradition. It argues that left on their own, metaphysical concepts trap human thinking in conceptual circles that are blind to the needs and capabilities of people who find themselves at the bottom of social hierarchies. These concepts, however, are open to transformation in response to social struggles against oppressive hierarchies. Critical social philosophy emerges out of this dialectical interaction between metaphysical concepts and struggles for freedom. The process is complete once contingent institutional structures rather than human nature are understood as the cause of oppressively limited life-activity. 1. Introduction Western philosophy’s classical metaphysical aim– the comprehension and systematic explication of the principles of universal order and purpose–
    [Show full text]
  • View of Life with Soul As the Driver of the Machine
    SYMPOSIUM .109 The Emergence of Subtle Organicism Michael Towsey Queensland University of Technology Australia Introduction Western science rests on the philosophical foundation of materialist monism,1 according to which only physical matter exists and therefore only physical matter can be known. Furthermore, matter is known to us only through the sense organs or indirectly through instruments. Consequently valid knowledge can only be derived from a logical interpretation of sensory experi- ence. Materialist monism (henceforth materialism) also asserts that mind and consciousness are epiphenomena of matter. Mind is not a thing – mind is what the brain does. The neurobiologist Steven Rose defines mind as: ... equivalent to the sum total of brain activity for discussions within the universe of discourse at a hierarchical level above that of the physiological description of the interaction of cells and below that of social analysis. (Rose, 1976, p.30) Rapid advances in neuro-science have bolstered support for materialism because each new dis- covery seems to support the premise that "there can be no change in the mental states of a person without a change in brain states" (Pinker, 1997), from which it is but a short step to the conviction that matter is the ultimate reality and all mental experience is purely derivative of matter. Despite the remarkable achievements of Western science, its materialist foundations are not universally accepted. Furthermore a new philosophy of the natural sciences is emerging which leads one to ask if we are witnessing the early stages of a Kuhnian style revolution in Western science. The evidence for such a shift comes from a surprising number of "apostates" (Gilbert & Pinker, 2000), practising scientists going public with their loss of faith, not in the scientific enterprise itself but in its materialist foundation.
    [Show full text]
  • Ecological Urbanism, Circulation, and the Immunization of Nature
    Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2014, volume 32, pages 12 – 29 doi:10.1068/d17012 Natura Urbans, Natura Urbanata: ecological urbanism, circulation, and the immunization of nature Ross Exo Adams The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, Faculty of the Built Environment, Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0QB, England; e-mail: [email protected] Received 20 September 2012, in revised form 9 July 2013 Abstract. While ‘ecological urbanism’ promises the introduction of a new generation of apparatuses, exacting control ever more deeply within the social whole, the logic by which such networks of power operate has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century. This paper will demonstrate the persistence of this logic by placing ecological urbanism within a genealogy of the concept of urbanization. Looking at the work of Spanish civil engineer, Ildfonso Cerdá, I will examine his remarkably prescient theory in which he proposed to replace what he saw as the ‘anachronistic’ ciudad (city) with the ‘modern’ figure of the urbe—a generic, scaleless template of territorialization engulfed in expansive urbanización. The first part of the paper focuses on Cerdá’s concept of vialidad (roughly, ‘circulation’), which formed the basis of his theory of urbanization and provided its origin in ‘nature’ itself. Urbanization was an effort to free mankind from political domination and recover it’s ‘natural’ destiny by unifying a latent global society in a single, interconnected global urbe. However, not only did Cerdá’s theory introduce a new, far more pervasive technological relationship of power between government and population; it also set free to circulate what was previously fixed in the space and form of the city: the apparatus.
    [Show full text]
  • Neither Logical Empiricism Nor Vitalism, but Organicism: What the Philosophy of Biology Was
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by PhilPapers HPLS (2015) 37(4):345–381 DOI 10.1007/s40656-015-0085-7 ORIGINAL PAPER Neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but organicism: what the philosophy of biology was 1 2 Daniel J. Nicholson • Richard Gawne Received: 17 April 2015 / Accepted: 3 September 2015 / Published online: 9 October 2015 Ó Springer International Publishing AG 2015 Abstract Philosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and as a result philosophy of biology languished in a state of futility for much of the twentieth century. The situation, we are told, only began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a new generation of researchers began to focus on problems internal to biology, leading to the consolidation of the discipline. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted narrative of the history of philosophy of biology. We do so by arguing that the most important tradition within early twentieth-century philosophy of biology was neither logical empiricism nor vital- ism, but the organicist movement that flourished between the First and Second World Wars.
    [Show full text]
  • Chance Between Holism and Reductionism: Tensions in the Conceptualisation of Life Charles Wolfe
    Chance between holism and reductionism: Tensions in the conceptualisation of Life Charles Wolfe To cite this version: Charles Wolfe. Chance between holism and reductionism: Tensions in the conceptualisation of Life. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, Elsevier, 2012, Chance at the heart of the cell, 110 (1), pp.113-120. 10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2012.05.005. hal-01233183 HAL Id: hal-01233183 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01233183 Submitted on 24 Nov 2015 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Chance between holism and reductionism: tensions in the conceptualisation of Life Charles T. Wolfe Centre for History of Science, Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, University of Ghent Blandijnberg 2, B-9000 Ghent T +32 9264 3952, F +32 9264 4187 [email protected] Abstract In debates between holism and reductionism in biology, from the early twentieth century to more recent re-enactments involving genetic reductionism, developmental systems theory, or systems biology, the role of chance – the presence of theories invoking chance as a strong explanatory principle – is hardly ever acknowledged. Conversely, Darwinian models of chance and selection (Dennett 1995, Kupiec 1996, Kupiec 2009) sit awkwardly with reductionist and holistic concepts, which they alternately challenge or approve of.
    [Show full text]