Greetings all, This Monday, March 10, 1.00-2.30 in the philosophy common room we have Charles Wolf from the University of Sydney:
Do organisms have an ontological status or: a cautionary tale about crying reductionist! 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 (along with Erwin Straus, and Viktor von Weizsäcker), 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? I give a tentative answer (instrumentalism) and then challenge it. See you all there.... Dr. Kristie Miller Australian Research Council Post-doctoral Fellow School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and The Centre for Time The University of Sydney Sydney, Australia Room 411, A18 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ph: (work) 02 93569663 Ph: (mobile) 0432 275 286 http://homepage.mac.com/centre.for.time/KristieMiller/Kristie/Home%20Page.html _______________________________________________ SydPhil mailing list [email protected] List Info: http://lists.arts.usyd.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/sydphil NEW LIST ARCHIVE: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
