Philippe Huneman, Biological individuality: organisms, ecosystems, or agents? 

Philippe Huneman is CNRS Director of research at the Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS / Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne). He is an expert in Philosophy of biology, Kantism and modern German philosophy, History of 18-19th century biology, & Philosophy of science. He is the author of many books and papers.

This talk will be hybrid.

Abstract

Biological individuality and organisms seem to be two coextensive concepts. While philosophers often take organisms – trees, camels, etc.- as paradigm examples of individuality, individuality in general, for most biologists, exist as organisms. However the concept of organism may pertain to two kinds of rationality. In the wake of developmental theory and comparative anatomy, it has been understood as a organized and self-organized whole –  a Kantian view often held nowadays by evo-devo thinkers (e.g. Gilbert and Sarkar 2000), as well as many theoretical biologists (e.g. Varela). But another view, stemming from evolutionary biology’s questioning of the evolution of individuality (Michod 1999), addresses individuals from the perspective of units of selection (e.g. Clarke 2010). Organisms then appear as a result of evolution instead of an ontological category. They are, as Huxley (1942) wrote, ‘bundles of adaptation’, which strongly opposes the evo-devo intuition of organisms as a cohesive self-organizing and self-maintaining process. As a consequence, in this second view, individuality does not require self-organisation, and the concept becomes much more  liberal than the Kantian view. 

But in this talk I’ll confront this conceptual duality to another one, which appears when one considers recent theoretical literature about organisms. In some areas of philosophy and biological theory, authors defend the idea that organisms are agents (be it in an analogical mode, e.g. Grafen 2014, Okasha 2018, or in a strongly ontological mode, e.g. Walsh 2015). In other areas, wholly distinct, people use the ecosystem concept as a scheme to understand organisms (e.g. Costello 2012). Hence, organisms can be understood either as agents pursuing goals, or as sets of heterospecific elements made cohesive by a network of ecological interactions. Both schemes shed light on distinct phenomena, but their articulation remains problematic.

By exploring these two conceptual distinctions regarding biological individuals, I intend to expose the conceptual map proper to the notions of individuality and organisms, and question its internal unity.