Members

Even if the concept of organization is increasingly recognized as crucially important to (philosophy of) biology, the fear of thereby collapsing into vitalism, understood as the metaphysical thesis that “life” involves special principles irreducible to (and that perhaps even run counter to) the principles governing the physical order, has persisted. In trying to overcome this tension, Georges Canguilhem endorsed an attitudinal form of vitalism. This “attitudinal stance” (a term coined by Charles Wolfe) shifts the issue of organization away from ontological commitments regarding the nature of things as they are in themselves, in favor of epistemological issues concerning the stance of the knowing subject. However, it is based on some epistemological tenets that deserve further examination. Firstly, in spite of its anti-Cartesian spirit, the attitudinal stance implicitly relies on a Cartesian perspective on the relation between subject and object. Secondly, it rests on the idea that some objects can meaningfully be identified as persisting individuals—living organisms—in a way in which others cannot, even if it denies that the capacity to be meaningfully identified as such reflects an actual property of them. This chapter outlines a possible alternative viewpoint that takes these challenges to heart by developing a co-constitutive picture of the relation between subject and object—a picture based on Georges Canguilhem’s own theory of judgment, but supplemented by Immanuel Kant’s transcendental logic. Most fundamentally, it is argued that the (self-)organization of living beings draws attention to and is structurally intertwined with the (self-)organization of the thinking subject’s rational (i.e., logical, conceptual, judging) capacities.

The present dissertation offers an interpretation of the so-called “metaphysical deduction” of the categories (=MD), the chapter of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft in which Kant seeks to establish “the origin of the a priori categories [...] through their complete coincidence” with the “logical functions of thinking” (B159). Generally speaking, then, the dissertation is concerned with the relation between two of Kant’s ‘tables’: the table of judgments or logical functions, on the one hand, and the table of categories, on the other. I argue we cannot properly appreciate Kant’s argument in the MD without sharply distinguishing between categories (qua concepts of transcendental logic) and empirical concepts (qua concepts of formal logic). While empirical concepts arise on the basis of the logical application of the functions on sensible objects, so as to bring them under the analytic unity of consciousness, categories arise when those same functions are applied not to sensible objects, but to sensibility per se, namely so as to synthetically transform our raw and blind sensible intuitions into representations of objects — objects that can be subsumed under empirical concepts. Thus, I maintain that we must view Kant’s derivation of the categories as a critique of predication, i.e., as an outline of the conditions of possibility of relating (empirical) concepts to objects and vice versa. Methodologically, I claim that we should pay attention to Kant’s philosophy of biology if we are seriously committed to grasping why the spontaneous understanding must be assumed to play a role even at the heart of the receptivity of our senses. I substantiate this methodological choice, in Part 0, through a survey of Kant’s disagreements with Johann Gottfried von Herder on epigenesis, the categories, and their entwinement. This paves the way for my reconstruction of the MD in Part 1, where I defend the following overarching claim: Kant’s argument in the MD is operating under the architectonic idea that the functions of thought serve as the understanding’s preformed germs and predispositions, capable of epigenetically giving rise to either formal-logical or analytical activities of thought, or to transcendental-logical or synthetical activities. Part 2 then applies this methodological framework to a case-study: the derivation of the categories of quantity (unity, plurality, and totality) from the quantitative functions of thinking (the universal, particular, and singular judgments). Here, I make more concrete what it means for categories to be normative constraints on the synthesis of intuitions. Without the quantitative categories of unity, plurality, and totality, we would not be able to identify spatiotemporal individuals, and hence we would not be able to form empirical concepts and predicate them of objects. Finally, through a reading of the Kritik der Urteilskraft’s “Analytic of the Sublime”, I explore what it would be like (epistemically) to try and bring representations under the analytic unity of empirical concepts without having brought them to the synthetic unity of the categories first.

In this Introduction we lay out the context of a ‘Continental philosophy of biology’ and suggest why Georges Canguilhem’s place in such a philosophy is important. There is not one single program for Continental philosophy of biology, but Canguilhem’s vision, which he referred to at one stage as ‘biological philosophy’, is a significant one, located in between the classic holism-reductionism tensions, significantly overlapping with philosophy of medicine, philosophy of technology and other themes moving away from the more common existential and phenomenological motifs of post-war European thought. Chapters examine (among other themes) his relation to Lebensphilosophie, to authors such as Kant, Nietzsche and Marjorie Grene, and to current theoretical biology

This paper articulates the idea that the drive to know is the key to sexuality, and that sexuality is the key to subjectivation. It approaches Lacan’s formulae of sexuation starting from the background of Frege’s distinction between function (predicate) and object (argument) on the one hand, and propositional function and quantifier on the other hand. On this basis, the two sides of the Lacanian formulae are interpreted as ‘the all predicative’, le tout prédicat on the one hand, and the courage of the indecision on the other. That a radically escaping point is not without subjective effect, and does make a difference, epistemologically, ontologically and ethically, is what these formulae are seen to illustrate. Where possible, a comparison is being made with Kant’s transcendental philosophy and logics.

This article discusses the affinity between Kant’s notion of objectivity and Wittgenstein’s view on the limitations of language by addressing both philosophers’ relation to the constitutive space at work in a transcendental logic. For both, the system and conceptual room hosting the activity of subjective conditionality is dynamically connected to what can be seen as an object in response to the heterogeneity between concepts and sensibility. In his work On the Genealogy of Universals. The Metaphysical Origins of Analytic Philosophy (2018) Fraser MacBride makes a plea for the importance of Kant in the history of the origin of analytical philosophy, more specifically, the philosophies of Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein. He nevertheless does so in an inadequate way, because he understands Kant from a realist perspective striving to see ‘objects’ as an awaiting reality ‘out there’ to be made our own. Contrary to that, we make the case that a transcendental dynamics of a ‘lost’ primordial captivity is at work in the process of the constitution of objects. We look into Wittgenstein’s notion of substance and the problematic subreptitious exchange between the notions of substance and attribute on the one hand and the relation between the particular and the universal according to MacBride on the other. We propose that both Kant and Wittgenstein sharpen the awareness for the transcendental anticipatory activity of a presupposition, to be seen as a crucial moment within pure formalization and logical strictness, built on a minimal ontology of openness to what is determinable within the action of determination, opposite to a realism of what is simply determined as ‘what is the case’ without taking into account the constituting subject-pole.

By reappraising the biological theory of vitalism, Canguilhem attempted to give pride of place to the idea that acquiring knowledge about living beings is an activity of living beings. Canguilhem’s legacy is exactly this: rationality is rooted in life, not the other way around. And yet, in “Le concept et la vie” (from 1966) and “De la science et de la contre-science” (from 1971), Canguilhem seems to tell another story about the complex intertwinement of life and rationality. Not only are we condemned to enter the realm of rationality (i.e., to take part in logical activities such as forming concepts and judgments about the world and about our own condition) because we have needs and desires as living beings, but we also have needs and desires as living beings that depend on the fact we are always already caught up in the dynamics of rationality, i.e., always already logically active. At this point, Canguilhem’s thinking comes closer than ever to a Kantian, transcendental point of view on rationality. Paradoxically, the inscription of human rationality in organic life brings with it the idea of a subject, divided between two inverse but correlated realms in which it cannot but participate: the singular realm of sensibility and the general realm of logic.

This edited volume presents papers on this alternative philosophy of biology that could be called “continental philosophy of biology,” and the variety of positions and solutions that it has spawned. In doing so, it contributes to debates in the history and philosophy of science and the history of philosophy of science, as well as to the craving for ‘history’ and/or ‘theory’ in the theoretical biological disciplines. In addition, however, it also provides inspiration for a broader image of philosophy of biology, in which these traditional issues may have a place. The volume devotes specific attention to the work of Georges Canguilhem, which is central to this alternative tradition of “continental philosophy of biology”. This is the first collection on Georges Canguilhem and the Continental tradition in philosophy of biology. The book should be of interest to philosophers of biology, continental philosophers, historians of biology and those interested in broader traditions in philosophy of science.