![]()
1 The idea of ‘philosophy of biology before biology’
A methodological provocation
Cécilia Bognon-Küss and Charles T. Wolfe
Philosophy of biology before biology: an absurd idea?
The title of this volume and of the present chapter may sound provocative. Scholars may feel their anachronism radar stirring to life: in what sense could there be ‘philosophy of biology,’ the name for a professional subdiscipline in philosophy which emerged – in its current form – in the 1960s, before the emergence of biology itself, sometime in the late years of the eighteenth century?1 Indeed, beyond the problem of anachronism, this seems like a matter of common sense. In fact, we believe that philosophy of biology existed in a variety of forms before the particular professional crystallization we have mentioned.
Differently put, philosophers obviously did not wait for the 1960s to raise questions about the fact and the nature of life: Aristotle’s telos, Descartes’s ‘animal-machine,’ and Kant’s ‘teleological judgment’ immediately come to mind for any contemporary philosopher. More specifically, in the eighteenth century, philosophers interested in empirical findings concerning vital phenomena shared the concerns of naturalists facing recently observed organic phenomena that were difficult to explain: the regeneration of polyps, details of the embryogenesis of chicks, Galvanism, Mesmerism, and so on. This could be illustrated by Diderot’s writings on Trembley’s polyp in the 1750s–1760s, Charles Bonnet’s reactivation of Leibniz’s preformationism (1762, 1764, 1769), or Kant’s engagement with the question of nervous diseases, in the 1760s but also in his later Anthropology (1798).2 Metaphysical issues such as organization, vital forces and the creativity of nature thus came to the fore. This interplay between philosophy and natural science accompanied the constitution of biology as a science, jointly involving French, German, English and Scottish authors, to name the more prominent cases.
Biology and philosophy of biology
Despite the appearance of more careful specialized scholarship over the past few decades, it is still standard to trace the usage of the term ‘biology’ back to Treviranus and Lamarck around 1800,3 but, as Jacques Roger observed nicely, ‘biology did not just appear suddenly at the end of the eighteenth century like Athena born from the head of Zeus.’4 Earlier, the term ‘biology’ was used in the context of German Naturphilosophie, in Theodor Georg August Roose, Karl Friedrich Burdach, and Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, in the 1790s,5 and recent research has pointed to its usage in a treatise of natural philosophy by a Danzig professor named Michael Christoph Hanov, the four-volume Philosophia naturalis sive physica dogmatica, of which volume 3, published in Halle in 1766, deals with ‘geology, biology and botany.’6 Yet, the exact meaning of the term ‘biology’ remained unstable until the end of the century (Linnaeus had already used it a generation earlier, but to mean something close to ‘biography,’ a usage which Kai Torsten Kanz has traced back as far as 1660), and, conversely, if one approaches the issue from the standpoint of the existence of a new science of life and how to designate it, the terminology was quite variable, including ‘zoonomy,’ ‘general zoology,’ ‘biology,’ ‘physiology,’ ‘bionomy,’ ‘biogeography,’ and ‘general natural history,’ a term which was used until the mid-nineteenth century, e.g., by Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.7 The term ‘life science’ or ‘science of life’ (Lebenswissenschaft; Wissenschaft des Lebens) itself appears in the title of an 1800 work by Christoph Meiners (Meiners 1800), but in an antiquated sense, which refers to morals – the ‘art of living,’ as it were. Only some 15 years later this expression would be used in the sense of a specifically biological (or medical, or physiological) body of knowledge, in the first sentence of the Chevalier de Richerand’s physiology textbook.8
It is thus widely agreed among historians that biology as a science of the functioning and development of living bodies emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, integrating methodological or empirical advances in various disciplines, namely physiology, embryology, comparative anatomy, natural history, and medicine. The fact that the word ‘biology’ was simultaneously and independently coined by several authors from different national and disciplinary backgrounds (Hanov 1766, Bichat 1800, Lamarck 1809, Treviranus 1802–1822) is commonly seen as a testimony of this epistemic emergence (Duchesneau 1982, Barsanti 1994, 2000, McLaughlin 2002, Wolfe 2011b). Even though scientists had, of course, been dealing with living phenomena prior to this, what is striking here is the constitution of a unified framework for developing research focused on ‘vital’ phenomena.
‘Philosophy of biology’ in turn is a fairly recent area of academic expertise. It developed from the postpositivist tradition of the philosophy of science in the late 1960s,9 and is characterized by specific journals (Biology and Philosophy, Studies C, Biological Theory …), scientific societies (e.g., ISHPSSB), and a core group of issues that mostly revolve around evolutionary biology and molecular biology and are supposed to be simultaneously relevant for metaphysics and theoretical biology, e.g., molecular reductionism, adaptationism, units of selection, genetic information and so on. Biologists such as Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould were highly influential in this growing subfield of philosophy. Originally stemming from the desire to emancipate the field from neopositivist philosophy of science and reductionism (Hull 1969), philosophy of biology developed as a specific field devoted to the study of biological science as such, viewed as an autonomous science – and not as a mere exemplification of mainstream philosophy of science concepts and problems. So conceived, philosophy of biology is quite exclusive of historical concerns, even though its ‘founding parents’ (Michael Ruse, Marjorie Grene, and David Hull) actually devoted a significant amount of their work to the history of biology (see Gayon 2009, passim, on the question of the gradual self-definition of philosophy of biology as a discipline).
Biological philosophy and philosophy of biology
One earlier distinction was that between ‘biological philosophy’ and ‘philosophy of biology.’ Those two expressions are rather old, respectively coined by Auguste Comte in his Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830–1842; volume 3, dealing with ‘chemical philosophy and biological philosophy,’ appeared in 1838), and William Whewell in Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840). For Comte, ‘biological philosophy’ referred to something like theoretical biology, i.e., the systematic enquiry into biology’s ‘fundamental conceptions,’ and by that he meant that ‘biological philosophy’ was a genuine part of biology – its theoretical part (Gayon 2009).10 Contrasting with that view, the ‘philosophy of biology’ Whewell advocated for was in principle external to biology, and consisted in the reflexive and critical examination of its concepts. Thereon, ‘biological philosophy’ freed itself from Comte’s original intentions, and was commonly used so to designate the attempt to ground the elucidation of traditional philosophical questions about life, the place of man in the universe, the nature of mind and free will, on the bases of current biological knowledge. It predated the ‘philosophy of biology’ and is instantiated in works such as Kurt Goldstein’s Der Aufbau des Organismus (Goldstein 1934), Woodger’s Biological Principles (Woodger 1929), or Hans Jonas’s Phenomenon of Life (Jonas 1966) or arguably earlier in works on metaphysics such as those of Whitehead or Bergson. ‘Philosophy of biology’ in its current, academic sense is mostly concerned, as noted above, with conceptual issues in biology as an institutionalized science, thus raising issues proper to this science as such, at the risk of drowning out other equally central topics, as we will elaborate on below.
Yet, this helpful distinction may not be enough to capture the nature of philosophical reflection concerning biological phenomena. For such reflection is neither ‘biological philosophy,’ because this project is not exactly grounded on an extant biology, with its uncontroversial findings and its identified avenues of enquiries, nor does it target a set of issues emerging from biological practice and theorizing, as ‘philosophy of biology’ does. To some extent, there is a sense that Buffon’s speculations on the originality of organic matter, Kant’s theory of organized beings and natural purposes, and many other eighteenth-century scientists’/philosophers’ accounts of life, organic matter, generation, etc. that predated the formation of biology as a science belong to this interplay between biological philosophy and philosophy of biology. The present volume intends to consider this interplay, for which we propose the label, ‘philosophy of biology before biology.’
Such an interplay has two ‘dimensions,’ so to speak. There is a sociological dimension, constituted by the fact that at some point philosophy and biology were not separate fields, practiced by different actors in distinct institutions – and this impinges on the content of any philosophical discussions of objects and issues pertaining to ‘life.’ And there is a dimension proper to the ‘conceptual foundations of science’ (or what some choose to call ‘historical epistemology,’ a term we discuss below), constituted by the fact that, whereas some current questions in the philosophy of biology today (e.g., reductionism, information, selection, adaptation, and teleology) are a bit like scientific questions, i.e., they are framed in paradigmatic terms, with rival accounts (is genetic information a spurious concept or not? what is the extent of adaptation in evolution? etc.), this paradigmatic framing of philosophical issues did not exist in the period ‘before biology.’ Neither of these two dimensions yields a picture of ‘philosophy of biology before biology’ that is reducible to philosophy of biology, or biological philosophy.
‘Historical epistemology of the life sciences’ and philosophy of biology
We find the way in which philosophy of biology crystallized around a core set of concepts and problems tied to evolutionary biology to be problematic,11 namely in the way it does not reflect the wealth and diversity of philosophical problems contained in biology. In that sense, one of the goals of the present volume is to create some distance with regard to the ‘problem space’ that seems to have been imposed on us by a certain history of biology, with its highlighted or heroic entities such as the organism or the gene.12 Which philosophical consequences might we expect (or hope for) from a philosophy of biology before biology, that is, a philosophy of b...
