Abstract
In this talk we will provide a philosophical account of purposiveness grounded in the organization of biological organisms. The core of the argument consists in establishing a connection between purposiveness and organization through the concept of self-determination. Our account relies and elaborates on the organicist tradition in philosophy and biology, which traces back to the work of Kant on self-organizing entities (1790), and crosses the 19th and 20th centuries with the contributions of authors such as Bernard (1865), Canguilhem (1965), Varela (Weber and Varela 2002), Rosen (1991) and Kauffman (2000). On this account, biological organisms are capable of actively responding to perturbations and maintaining themselves by exchanging matter and energy with their environment without being completely driven by external factors. This autonomy is achieved by realizing what is referred to as “organizational closure,” a network of mutually dependent constraints that are (1) continuously constructed by an organism and (2) functionally control the flow of matter and energy in far from equilibrium conditions. Accordingly, a biological organization that realizes closure determines itself in the sense that the effects of its own activity contribute to establishing and maintaining its conditions of existence. Several examples of how organisms actively exert control over their own conditions of existence through the coordinated activity of their functional constraints will be provided at different degrees of complexity. We will mention examples in which organisms select between different available courses of action on the basis of their needs and environmental conditions: from chemotaxis and envelope stress response in E. coli, to endocrine control in mammals.
