A Novel "Third Way:" Synthesizing Autonomy and New Mechanism

“. . . [A} great deal of the conceptual history of biology may be read as a struggle between two philosophical positions: reductionism and holism” (Piggliuci 2014). This enduring tension has fueled deep disagreement about the nature and study of life. In twentieth-century biology, the organicist tradition sought to resolve this tension by seeking a “third-way” that rejects the reductionist assumption that life can be analyzed exhaustively in physico-chemical terms while, at the same time, rejecting dubious appeals to immaterial vital forces to explain the behavior of whole living systems.

In contemporary philosophy of biology, a prominent manifestation of the holist tradition is the Theory of Biological Autonomy (ToBA) which explains the causal structure of a whole living organism in terms of constraints and energetic processes. A prominent manifestation of the reductionist tradition, on the other hand, is New Mechanism (NM) which, traditionally, analyzes the causal structure of biological mechanisms in terms of entities, activities, and organization.

Recently, however, a number of philosophers have been developing an updated New Mechanist analysis of biological mechanisms that construes them as consisting of constraints and energetic processes . As philosophers have pointed out, this conceptual overlap between the ToBA and NM offers opportunities for theoretical synthesis and, more ambitiously, the possibility of establishing a novel “third way” to resolve the conflicting holist and reductionist tendencies running through the history of biology.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of philosophers, biologists, and historians to foster dialogue across theoretical traditions to develop the

ToBA-NM synthesis and critically assess it from historical and social scientific perspectives on the wider interacting histories of reductionism and holism in biology.

Thus, while the proposed synthesis of ToBA and NM will thematize discussion, the workshop hopes to encourage wider interdisciplinary reflection on historical and contemporary theoretical and empirical practice in the life sciences. We aim to: 1) Clarify the conceptual and methodological relationship between ToBA and the updated NM framework. 2) consider a) their theoretical and historical relationship to other forms of reductionism and holism and b) evaluate the prospects for the synthesis of ToBA and NM succeeding as a “third way” by the lights of the wider organicist tradition. 3) Draw upon insights derived from recent inter-disciplinary efforts between philosophers in the autonomy tradition and various scientists seeking to apply the theory of autonomy in empirical investigation of biological systems at different levels of organization (e.g. ecosystems, organogenesis). 4) Reflect on the broader implications of the proposed synthesis for ongoing debates about explanation and organization in the life sciences.

A small amount of money will be available to off-set student travel costs.