Campbell Rider

Over the last decade, work on the role of naturalized teleology, function, and “closure of constraints” has seen substantial uptake in efforts to theorize and model living systems. Guglielmo Militello’s new book 'Functional Integration: A Theoretical Enquiry into the Biological Unit of the Individual' represents a considerable achievement in extending the framework to a grounded and informed analysis of the inner workings of the cell. In this review, I consider how Militello's approach addresses ongoing theoretical debates among philosophers interested in biological autonomy, organizational closure, and anti-mechanism.

In this thesis I undertake a close analysis of Schelling’s theory of the organism as it is elaborated across key texts of his Naturphilosophie. The purpose of this analysis is to uncover aspects of Schelling’s philosophy that may be fruitfully brought into dialogue with contemporary “organism-centred” perspectives in analytic philosophy of biology. Key resonances and continuities include the centrality of nature as a process, able to internally differentiate itself into particular forms and entities, as well as the organic unity and systematicity of nature as a whole. In Schelling, the organism is theorised as a process stabilised in the flow of natural productivity by its activities of self-organisation. Through these activities, life separates itself from the world and thus constitutes itself as a structure of interiority and exteriority, or subject and object. During biological development, the organism harnesses the productivity of nature as a means of propagating a formative process of individuation and progressive self-differentiation, realising its “ideal” form in interactive relation with its materiality. Schelling’s concept of nature as a systematic whole also enables some proto-ecological considerations, particularly in his analysis of the instincts and behaviours of animals. As a German idealist, the “ideal” figures prominently in his description of the activities of life, but is everywhere considered through its modes of realisation in nature. The biological organism, as an especially privileged structure of nature’s processual self-movement, is constitutively purposive and agential, as well as sensible and world-forming. From this perspective, I claim, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie does not belong to a speculative and metaphysical “pre-history” of biology, but provides the conceptual resources for a “dialectical” biology in the present day.

In this paper I offer a model-theoretic interpretation of Autonomy Theory as defended by Moreno, Mossio, Montévil, and Bich. I address accusations that Autonomy Theory is excessively liberal, such as those made by Garson (2017), arguing that these misunderstand the role of strategic abstractions and generalizations in theory construction. Conceiving of closure of constraints as a model-building effort that emphasizes generality—in the spirit of Levins (1966)—also clarifies its potential for application in empirical contexts.

In this paper I consider Kendall Walton’s provocative views on the visual arts, including his approaches to understanding both figurative and nonfigurative painting. I introduce his central notion of fictionality, illustrating its advantages in explaining the phenomenon of ‘perceptual twofoldness’. I argue that Walton’s position treats abstract artwork reductively, and I outline two essential components of our aesthetic encounters with the nonfigurative that Walton excludes. I then offer some criticisms of his commitment to photographic realism, emphasising its theoretical inconsistencies with his account of representation. My own proposal is that in our apprehension of non-figurative artworks, our attention is drawn to the underlying structures of both emotive and perceptual experience. In this way, paintings, particularly abstract ones, disclose human cognition in a manner that makes fictionality an inappropriate tool for their analysis.