What is common between biology and philosophy. The role of biology in the development of the philosophy of life. The subject and tasks of social ecology
Life, philosophy of life and biophilosophy
The end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century were marked by a growing interest in naturalism as a way of scientific interpretation of all the most important problems and realities that are the subject of philosophical research, including the world of purely human values. One of the main reasons for this turn to naturalism is, apparently, that in the face of the super-real threat of an ecological crisis and the destruction of natural biocenoses, humanity at the end of the 20th century realized with all its might the entire existential significance of the trivial fact that it is just a part of living nature, therefore cannot continue uncontrollably and with impunity to build its relations with it on the basis of predatory consumption and extermination. The realization of this required a reorientation of attitudes from positions of naive anthropocentrism to more realistic positions of biocentrism. This circumstance in itself has led to a noticeable increase in the rank of the natural sciences (primarily ecology and biology in general) in the discussion of traditionally humanitarian problems, including the problem of values.
Another circumstance that has had a huge impact on the revival of naturalism in our time is the deep conceptual developments and transformations that are taking place in modern natural science (and in science in general) and which have already led to a significant change in modern ideas about what nature, man is. and what is its place in the universe. The theoretical resources possessed by the concepts of self-organization and global evolutionism are already enough today to use their positions in a new and meaningful way to discuss the issues of the formation of life, man, human culture and the world of human values.
However, the decisive factor in the new turn of philosophical thought towards the paradigm of naturalism, of course, are the achievements of evolutionary theory in biology over the past two or three decades. Here we mean, first of all, deep breakthroughs in understanding the population-genetic mechanisms of the formation of complex forms of social behavior and life in communities, which allowed the emergence of a fundamentally new field of scientific research - sociobiology and gave impetus to the formation of a whole bunch of new scientific areas - evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics , evolutionary epistemology, bioethics, biopolitics, biolinguistics, biosemiotics, and even biohermeneutics. It is the achievements of the life sciences - from molecular genetics and population genetics to cognitive psychology and research in the field of creating "artificial intelligence" that have highlighted a fundamentally new perspective for the naturalization of the entire complex of philosophical research (from ethics to metaphysics), the development of the concepts of post-nonclassical rationality and "new humanism".
In this regard, the line of development of the philosophy of the 20th century deserves the closest attention, which is capable of turning into a full-scale alternative to the postmodern confusion and confusion of minds that largely ended the past century in the 21st century.
As we know, in the field of philosophy, it started with a direction that was called the "philosophy of life." In literature, it was fixed thanks to the authority of one of the leaders of the Baden school of neo-Kantianism, G. Rickert, who, looking for a common name for the motifs that dominated the motley flood of intellectual innovations in the first decades of the 20th century, settled on this phrase. “The best designation for a concept that now dominates to an exceptionally high degree over average opinions,” he wrote, “is the word life for us ... For some time now it has been increasingly used and plays a significant role not only among publicists, but also among scientific philosophers. "Experience" and "living" are favorite words, and the opinion is considered most modern that the task of philosophy is to give a doctrine about life, which, arising from experiences, would be clothed in a truly life form and could serve a living person. According to new trends, he wrote further, “life should be placed at the center of the world whole, and everything that philosophy has to interpret should be related to life. It seems to be the key to all the doors of the philosophical building. Life is declared to be its own “essence” world and at the same time the organ of its cognition. Life itself must philosophize from itself without the help of other concepts, and such a philosophy will have to be directly experienced.
1 Rickert G. Philosophy of life. Presentation and criticism of fashionable trends in the philosophy of our time // Rickert G. Nauki o prirode i nauki o kul'tury [Sciences of Nature and Sciences of Culture]. M., 1998. S. 209-210.
2 Ibid. S. 210.
In philosophical literature, it is generally accepted that the philosophy of life reaches its greatest influence in the first quarter of the 20th century, later giving way to existentialism and other personalistically oriented philosophical trends. We can only partly agree with this. Despite the fact that the popularity of the philosophy of life was actually suppressed by philosophical anthropology, personalism and existentialism (especially in the period after the Second World War), its ideas did not leave the stage and did not lose their independent significance. Moreover, at the end of the century, or rather, in the last two or three decades, one can again observe a heightened interest in the phenomenon of life and, as it were, a rebirth of the philosophy of life, but with a curious inversion of the term: the name "biophilosophy" has been increasingly used in literature. The beginning of this process was laid a little earlier, when, after revealing the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) - this mysterious "substance of heredity" - scientists vied with each other to talk about a change in the leader in natural science. Biology was resolutely promoted to the role of the new leader (after physics). In an even more massive (although not in such a sensational) form, biology declared itself as the basis of the entire sphere of socio-humanitarian knowledge in the last third of the 20th century, especially after the publication of the book "Sociobiology. A New Synthesis" by the American entomologist E. Wilson ( 1975). Literally within a decade after this, a whole field of quite promising research areas was formed, including the prefixes "bio-" and "evolutionary-" in their names. In the same years, the first attempts were made to generalize the significance of the events taking place, to find ideological bonds, through philosophical lines of the newly emerging movement. In 1968, a monograph by one of the classics of modern evolutionism, the German scientist B. Rensch, was published, which the author called "Biophilosophy". It was the first swallow. In the 1970s, several monographs with the title "Philosophy of Biology" appeared at once, among which the most significant were the works of M. Ruse and D. Hull. In the 1980s, this process continued to gain momentum and, in particular, the fundamental work of the Canadian scientist R. Sattler appeared, in the title of which the author again introduced the term "Biophilosophy". Since 1986, under the editorship of M. Ruse, the international journal "Biology and Philosophy" (in English) begins to appear, in which the questions put forward by the biophilosophical movement are systematically developed.
So, the term "biophilosophy" persistently came to the fore in the role of expressing the essence of the new movement. There is a temptation to draw a beautiful trajectory from the philosophy of life to biophilosophy, covering the entire 20th century. Moreover, the philosophy of life at the beginning of the century arose under the strong influence of the boom that biological science was then experiencing. The influence of biology on the concepts of F. Nietzsche, A. Bergson, M. Scheler and other prominent representatives of the philosophy of life of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was so significant that it gave G. Rickert reason to call this current of thought "biologism". At the same time, the works of biophilosophers of our day are filled with a discussion not only of what could be called "philosophical problems of biology" in the narrow sense of the word, they fall into the sphere of competence of the social and human sciences, ethical, epistemological and metaphysical problems (B. Rensch tries to synthesize the data of modern biology with the ideas of pantheistic philosophy in the form of a new holistic worldview).
At first glance, such a convergence of biophilosophy with the philosophy of life is hindered by the fact that in all versions of the philosophy of life, the original concept of "life" has always been interpreted as a designation of reality, which is essentially irrational, inaccessible to rational, scientific-rational comprehension, while within the framework of biophilosophy " life" is understood in the sense in which it appears for modern biology (and the natural sciences in general). On the other hand, it is precisely in this that one could see the direction of the historical dynamics of philosophical thought: from a worldview, which is based on "life" in its expressive-irrational interpretation (the philosophy of life), to a worldview, which is also based on "life", but already in its scientific and rational interpretation, that is, in the light of the outstanding results of the development of biology (biophilosophy). However, however tempting the idea of drawing a straight line from the philosophy of life to biophilosophy, on closer examination one has to admit that drawing it runs into serious difficulties.
The fact is that the philosophy of life is precisely the philosophy and the concept of life in it, no matter how it is more specifically interpreted in one or another variety of this philosophical direction, in terms of universality and breadth of its content, it is quite comparable with such concepts of classical philosophy as "space ", "substance", "matter", "subject" and others. The concept of "life" was put forward as the most adequate for expressing the very essence of the world and human existence and, therefore, capable of becoming the core of a new holistic worldview. Such a concept of life cannot be borrowed from science, including biological science. On the contrary, it could be constructed in many respects precisely in opposition to the understanding of life that was accepted in biology at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Biology turned out to be important then in the formation of the philosophy of life only in the sense that, with its powerful cultural resonance (at first thanks to Darwinism, and then, in the first decades of the 20th century, to Mendelian genetics), it drew general attention to the phenomenon of life. As we now know, this grain fell on well-prepared soil. Philosophy, which by that time was painfully overcoming the one-sidedness and limitations of its methodological and epistemological orientation, into which it was driven by positivism and neo-Kantianism of the second half of the 19th century, was in dire need of a new key concept capable of becoming the center of crystallization of a new worldview and lifeview. And under these conditions, biology turned out to be a powerful heuristic principle. In this regard, it makes sense to recall that the creators of the philosophy of life themselves associated with the appeal to the concept of "life" the hope of overcoming those contradictions and dead ends of classical modern European philosophical thought, into which they were driven by ignoring the first, completely obvious reality. After all, the origins of all the main philosophical concepts of the New Age go back to R. Descartes, in whose dualistically split world there was no place at all for life as a categorical phenomenon. M. Scheler formulated this idea very clearly in his work "The Position of Man in Cosmos": "By dividing all substances into "thinking" and "extended", Descartes introduced into the European - for such a division of the entire surrounding world, to come to terms with the senseless denial of the mental nature of all plants and animals, and to explain the "appearance" of the animation of plants and animals, which before him was always taken for reality, to explain by the anthropopathic "feeling" of our vital feelings in the external images of organic nature, and on the other hand, to give a purely "mechanical" explanation of everything that is not human consciousness and thinking. The consequence of this was not only the isolation of man, torn from the maternal embrace of nature, brought to the point of absurdity, but also the elimination from the world with a simple stroke of the pen of the fundamental category of life and its ancestral phenomena ... Only one thing is valuable in this teaching: the new autonomy and sovereignty of the spirit and the knowledge of this of his superiority over everything organic and simply alive. Anything else is the greatest delusion."
1 Scheler M. The position of man in space // The problem of man in Western philosophy. M., 1988. S. 77.
Thus, the period between the final decades of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century was a period of intense search for reality, which, for some reason, was missed by classical philosophy and the restoration of the “legitimate” rights of which would make it possible to make a breakthrough to new worldview and human science horizons. So the susceptibility of the philosophical thought of that time to biological movement was not at all a historical accident, but it was not so decisive that it was possible to reduce the matter to the emergence of a variety of "biologism". Therefore, the concept of life, with which the philosophy of life began to work in any of its variants - either as a pure immediate givenness of human experiences, or as pure duration, that is, a creative cosmic substance, comprehensible again only by direct human experience, intuition - was It was constructed on the basis of the internal needs of philosophy and was, in its content, very far from the corresponding ideas about life within the framework of biological science.
As for biophilosophy, the situation here is just the opposite in many important points: for all the uncertainty of the content of this term itself, there is a clear focus on biology (and the natural sciences in general) as the main source of ideas about what life is. From this it is clear that no matter how broadly the phenomenon of life is understood within the framework of modern science (even in such exotic forms as "eternal life" or as life arising not from modern inanimate matter, but from hypothetical primary matter), in any case it will represent is only a part of the world and cannot be the basis of the world and life outlook. In this sense, biophilosophy is not just some kind of rationalistic analogue of the philosophy of life, in which the scientific-rational interpretation of life has taken the place of its irrational interpretation.
PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE SCIENCES:
textbook for graduate students and applicants
Orenburg - 2005
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
FEDERAL AGENCY FOR EDUCATION
State educational institution
higher professional education
"ORENBURG STATE UNIVERSITY"
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department of Social Philosophy
V.V. KASHIN
PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE SCIENCES
Orenburg 2005
Scientific editors of the textbook:
doctor of geographical sciences V.E. Tikhonov,
Doctor of Biological Sciences S.A. Miroshnikov,
Doctor of Philosophy P.A. Gorokhov.
Philosophy of the Sciences of Living Nature: Textbook for Postgraduate Students and Applicants.
Orenburg: IPK GOU OGU, 2005. - 70p.
The textbook has been prepared in accordance with the Programs of Candidate's Examinations in "History and Philosophy of Science" for graduate students and applicants for specialties: "Biology", "Ecology", "Agricultural Sciences".
The nature of biological knowledge. Essence and specificity of philosophical and methodological problems of biology.
The role of biological sciences in the life of society.
Biology in the context of the philosophy and methodology of science of the twentieth century.
The essence of the living.
Levels of organization of the living.
Origin of life on Earth.
The principle of development in biology. The main stages in the formation of the idea of development in biology.
The problem of biological progress.
Synthetic theory of evolution.
The role of chance in the evolutionary process.
Biological evolutionism and global evolution.
The problem of biological safety.
Unity of organization and development of living systems.
The evolution of ideas about organization in systematicity in biology according to the works of V.I. Vernadsky.
The truth of Darwin and the lies of Darwinism.
Discussion in Russian genetics in the 30-50s of the twentieth century.
Problems of systems biology.
Cloning and bioethics.
subject of biophilosophy.
Ecological meaning of human evolution.
Genesis of ecological problems.
The subject and tasks of social ecology.
Environmental law.
Ecological systems.
Ecology and education.
philosophy of biology
1. The nature of biological knowledge. Essence and specificity of philosophical and methodological problems of biology.
Modern biology is a whole system of sciences about living nature, about the laws of its existence and development. This complex complex was formed historically over many centuries of the development of biology as a science. .
We single out three successive stages that biology has passed in the process of its formation.
Before Darwin, biology was dominated by the typological concept. For this concept to emerge, thousands of paganels tirelessly chased butterflies to add to their collections. Thousands of pedants calmly and selflessly classified the creatures they observed. The typological concept did not completely reject biological evolution, but did not have the ability to interpret evolution as self-development, i.e. as a true genetic process.
Biology experienced an extraordinary rise and received the harmonious contours of its entire building during the emergence of the Darwinian theory of evolution, created on the basis of the application of the historical method of research. . At this stage, in addition to the functions of collecting, describing and classifying material, characteristic of previous biological knowledge, she was able to add the function of explaining the paths of the historical development of organisms.
But soon after that, contemporaries witnessed attempts to overthrow Darwinism from its pedestal as the leader of biology by representatives of the newly emerging science of genetics. W. Batson, the author of the name of this new science, declared in those years that Darwinism already belongs to history, that Darwin's theory now is nothing more than natural philosophy, that Darwin's scheme of evolution can be read in the same way as the books of Lucretius Cara or J.B. . Lamarck.
It took years and years of work and search for Darwinism, in the figurative expression of J. Huxley, “like a phoenix was reborn from the ashes of a funeral pyre”, for the evolutionary idea in genetics to acquire a Darwinian character, for the principle of historicism to penetrate into genetics and in turn raise it to a qualitatively new level of research.
Then came the stage of outstanding discoveries and successes based on the development of molecular biology. These discoveries, which can be called fundamental for biological knowledge, led to a rethinking of all the material accumulated in biology and to the emergence of new approaches and principles of biological research.
Three stages in the development of biology have led to the fact that modern biological knowledge develops, as it were, in three planes. This is, firstly, a field of study traditional for classical biology at the level of biological organisms. Various biological sciences, including morphology, physiology, embryology, and others, explore the regularities of the organismic level of organization of the living by various methods and from different initial positions.
Another section of biological reality studied by modern science is the suborganismal area, the sphere of study of the “lower floors” of the organization and functioning of a living, unique microcosm of biological objects. Genetics and developmental biology, cytology, biochemistry and biophysics and many other sciences study the structure and vital activity of living things at the microscopic and submicroscopic, molecular levels. Great successes along this path were largely determined by the extensive use of the methods of physics, chemistry, and mathematics.
Finally, another significant area of research in modern biology is the field of study of supraorganismal formations. Modern ecology and ethology, biogeography and biocenology make it possible to analyze the complex interactions of organism systems with each other and their environment, and make it possible to study the structure and patterns of organization of large biological and biogeocenotic systems.
Even such a brief historical sketch gives an idea of the diversity of the ways of development and functioning of biological knowledge, of the plurality of principles and methods used in biological research and contributing to the acquisition of new knowledge about the laws of the biological form of the movement of matter.
The emergence of each new method in the structure of cognition is determined, of course, primarily by the structure and functioning of the object under study and the goals of the researcher. However, in a broad sense, the formation of new methods is mediated by the entire system of culture of a particular historical period. When analyzing the “object-knowledge” relationship, it must be remembered that “in the subject there is a special content of the activity of thought, fixed by the social history of science, which functions and is developed within science itself, and it is this content, and not the object of passive perception that is indifferent to activity, that directs the structure of thought. in the process of acquiring new knowledge. (Mamardashvili M.K. Form and content of thinking. M., 1968. S. 21-22). This is determined by the fact that in the process of the development of cognition there always arises an attitude of reflection over science, an attitude that leads to the realization of the nature of a given scientific cognition.
Such an understanding of the formation of scientific methods as the main tools of scientific knowledge makes it possible to interpret the fact that, despite the multiplicity of methods used, we can talk about the dominant role in the development of knowledge at each specific stage of a single methodological approach that combines a certain section of scientific methods. The spiritual climate of the era determines what can be called the style of scientific thinking or, using the terminology of T. Kuhn, the paradigm of scientific knowledge. By the term "paradigm" we mean the set of basic ideas, beliefs and facts that underlie a particular science.
From the time of Aristotle to Lamarck and Darwin, biology has been dominated by the organism-centric way of thinking. The organism was the alpha and omega of any biological study. And only in the 30s of the twentieth century, starting with the works of S.S. Chetverikov on population genetics and V.I. Vavilov on the theory of the biosphere, sprouts of a new style of thinking began to appear.
It should be noted that the methods of biological cognition can be conditionally divided into two large groups. The first group includes methods that, in order to obtain new knowledge, involve a direct appeal to a biological object. Among them are such methods as descriptive, comparative, experimental.
Another group includes such methods as the method of idealization, formalization, axiomatization, systematization, and others. The methods of this group make it possible to obtain new knowledge without directly addressing a biological object through the study of knowledge already accumulated in science through the prism of their new systematization, organization or a new perspective of consideration.
Naturally, each of these groups of methods reflects different stages in the development of biological knowledge and characterizes different levels of the movement of biology towards its theorization. Note that the application of the methods of the second group met and continues to meet opponents. Until now, for example, the problem of mathematization of the knowledge of biological processes remains a “bottleneck”.
The difficulty here is that the classical mathematical apparatus is developed, as a rule, for application to closed, or closed, systems. In the case of biological reality, the researcher is always dealing with open, developing systems that take part in complex metabolic processes. However, attempts to formalize biological knowledge on a mathematical basis continue.
Of the works devoted to the analysis of this problem, the study of the English biologist B. Goodwin attracts attention. (Goodwin B. Temporal organization of the cell. M., 1966). He tried to construct a proper biological formal theory, taking the ready-made apparatus of statistical mechanics and introducing variables formally identical to them, but purely biological in meaning, instead of the variables present in it. This is an interesting idea that opened the way for other formal methods that act as the "languages" of life science, including information theory, communication theory, game theory, various types of modeling, systems theory. So I.I. Schmalhausen was one of the first scientists who extended the principles of the cybernetic approach to the analysis of the theory of biological evolution. (Shmalgauzen I.I. Cybernetic questions of biology. Novosibirsk, 1968). In solidarity with the ideas of V.N. Sukachev about biogeocenosis as an integral bioabiotic system, Schmalhausen, on the basis of his cybernetic scheme of self-regulation of the evolutionary process, showed that the regulation of the evolutionary process is carried out within the population system by natural selection of options based on their comparative assessment in the biogeocenosis. According to Schmalhausen, the result of regulation is transmitted through the signals of the hereditary code of germ cells, is amplified in the process of reproduction and is converted into feedback signals that enter the biogeocenosis via the output communication channel to control execution. Using the cybernetic concepts of positive and negative feedback, Schmalhausen manages to clarify and concretize the understanding of two possible forms of natural selection: driving and stabilizing. This is just one example of the fruitful impact of cybernetic methods in the development of biological research, which can be multiplied.
A significant contribution to the improvement and enrichment of the conceptual baggage of biology was also made through the use of the idealization method, as well as the use of probabilistic representations in the field of biological research.
The methods of the second group mark the beginning of the transition from the empirical level of research to the theoretical one. Their detailed design, hampered by the great diversity and complexity of the sphere of life, is just beginning. But it is precisely in the improvement of these methods that one can see a real prospect for the further progress of biological knowledge, the formation of its theoretical concepts. It was in the bosom of these methods that the existing leading theoretical concepts of modern biology took shape - the theory of biological organization and the synthetic theory of evolution.
The analysis of biological objects as systems led to a comprehensive consideration and analysis of the problems of biological organization, to an understanding of organization as one of the basic principles of life. A wide variety of organizational forms of living objects leads to the need to comprehend and classify them based on different criteria. There are two main trends in the development of these approaches. It is supposed to allocate levels of organization of the living based on taking into account a whole group of criteria, such as universality, implementation mechanism, degree of integration. The second position assumes only one criterion - complexity. But both tendencies have drawbacks. K.M. Zavadsky put forward the idea of a hierarchical non-linear classification of living systems, in which, within each basic form of organization of living things, it is proposed to distinguish between the stages of evolutionary development of each specific form. This creates the possibility of combining structural and evolutionary representations within the framework of the principle of consistency. It should be noted that modern biology has achieved outstanding successes in the development of structural studies. In a number of cases, this approach led to an underestimation of the role of historicism as the main leading factor in the integration of biological knowledge. At the same time, any structure or function in the body is the result of a long historical development and cannot be fully studied without an analysis of their formation and development. Such an understanding contributes to the establishment of the principle of historicism in biology as a philosophical principle for the development of biological knowledge.
The synthetic approach is especially noticeable at a new stage in the development of a rapidly progressing science - ethology. By studying behavior, ethology, focused on the organismic level, was able to reach new qualitative frontiers by turning to the molecular genetic and population levels.
The life sciences, occupying an intermediate position between the sciences of nature and the sciences of man, lead to the understanding that one can comprehend the role and place of biological knowledge by referring to the general system of culture within which this knowledge functions.
In modern biology, man is not only the subject of cognition, but in some respects the object of it. Achievements in genetic engineering lead to the fact that there is a need to study and discuss a number of problems of biological research that have a socio-ideological character and stand at the intersection of biology and sociology, biology and medicine, biology and geography, ethics and biology. The biological knowledge of our days for its further fruitful development requires overcoming the usual framework and boundaries of the division of spheres of influence of various natural sciences and the humanities, new complex forms of organization of science.
Thus, the task of protecting the hereditary factors of mankind, the treatment of hereditary diseases requires expanding the front of research in the field of human medical genetics.
No less acute are the tasks of socio-philosophical orientation in solving modern problems of interaction between society and nature. The fallacy of opposing man and nature is becoming increasingly recognized. The limitations of the concept of the complete dependence of man on the forces of nature, as well as the concept of the boundless domination of man over nature, are well clear. It is necessary to eliminate the already accumulated negative results of technical activity, limit similar consequences in the future, and restore balance. The sphere of biological knowledge faces the responsible task of studying the ways and possibilities of adapting the human biosphere to new conditions that have arisen as a result of scientific and technical activity. The solution of this problem, to one degree or another, captures the entire complex of biomedical sciences and determines the strategy for their development. The task is set, in the words of Academician N.I. Conrad, the inclusion of nature "not just in the sphere of human life, but in the sphere of humanism, in other words, in the most resolute humanization of the whole science of nature." (Konrad N.I. West and East. M., 1972. S. 484).
PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY - a branch of philosophy that deals with the analysis and explanation of the patterns of development of the main directions of the complex of life sciences. F.b. explores the structure of biological knowledge; the nature, features and specificity of scientific knowledge of living objects and systems; means and methods of such knowledge. F.b. is a system of generalizing judgments of philosophy. character about the subject and method of biology, the place of biology among other sciences and in the system of scientific knowledge as a whole, its cognitive and social role in modern society.
The content and problems of F.b. have changed significantly in the course of the development of biology and other life sciences, in the process of changing their subject, the transformation of strategic directions of research. At the initial stages of its formation as a science, biology, not yet being theoretically formalized, was essentially a part of philosophy. This was clearly manifested already in antiquity, primarily in the teachings of Aristotle. The problem of cognition of the living is presented by him both within the framework of speculative philosophy, the doctrine of logical forms and methods of cognition, and as a special, relatively independent sphere of the study of nature. In his treatise On the Parts of Animals, he did a great job of creating the scientific foundations for the classification of species of living organisms. In modern times, the methodological awareness of the ways and forms of cognition of life has made significant progress in the search for a scientific method. In particular, R. Descartes extended the mechanistic method to the sphere of the living, which led to the concept of living beings as complex machines subject to the laws of mechanics. In the developed form, the mechanistic concept of cognition of the living was embodied in the philosophy of B. Spinoza, who substantiated it from rationalistic and mathematical positions, proceeding from the tradition of G. Galileo, T. Hobbes, Descartes. G. V. Leibniz tried to go beyond the framework of mechanistic materialism, proceeding from the concept of the continuity of development and the all-organism of nature, arguing that the unity of the organism is such an organization of parts in one body that participates in common life. Developing the idea of the development of pre-existing inclinations in the development of new organisms, he substantiated the preformist concept in philosophy. understanding of the living. Original concepts were proposed in it. classical philosophy of the 19th century. When considering living organisms, I. Kant considered it insufficient to focus only on mechanical causes, because the organism, from its point of view, is an active formation that simultaneously contains both cause and effect. The task of knowing the living is reduced by Kant to the definition of the transcendental conditions of its conceivability, the search for regulatory concepts for the reflective ability of judgment. In natural philosophy, F.V.I. Schelling, the problem of the knowledge of living nature does not appear as a problem of empirical natural science, but as one of the main problems of natural philosophy. Nature appears in the form of a universal spiritual organism, spiritualized by a single world soul, passing through various stages of its development at different stages of the development of nature. In explaining life, Schelling does not accept either vitalism or mechanism. Life, in his interpretation, is not something stable, but a constant change - the destruction and restoration of those processes that form it. G.W.F. Hegel the necessity of philosophy. comprehension of nature associated with the resolution of the internal contradiction inherent in the theoretical attitude towards nature. Its essence is that natural science, as a form of theoretical relationship to nature, seeks to know it as it really is. However, at the same time, it turns nature into something completely different: by thinking objects, we thereby turn them into something universal, while things are in reality single. This is a theoretical-cognitive difficulty and should resolve the philosophy. consideration of nature. According to Hegel, the philosophy of nature not only reveals the universal in the natural world, but also characterizes natural objects from the point of view of their relationship to human sensibility. Thus, significantly ahead of his time, Hegel holds the idea that in the philosophy of nature the objective correlates with the subjective.
Marxism came out not only with a critique of natural philosophy of the 19th century, but also with a general denial of the actuality of the philosophy of nature as such. The anti-natural-philosophical pathos of Marxism is due to its sociologism, the desire to explain everything based on the social characteristics of a particular socio-economic formation. This approach organically followed the limitation of the problems of the philosophy of science only by the methodology of science and logic, the refusal to understand and analyze various ontological schemes and models that are effective in the natural sciences at any stage of their development.
Therefore, under the conditions of the domination of Marxism-Leninism in the USSR, it was precisely the methodological problems of biological science that received the greatest development and development. This is an important and relevant direction in the development of F.6., but it by no means exhausts all of its diverse problems.
In parallel with the development of philosophy. understanding of the living in the works of professional philosophers, certain pictures of F.b. were presented in the studies of prominent biologists of the 17th-20th centuries, who discussed general philosophies on the basis of biological material. problems of constancy and development, integrity and elementarism, gradualness and leaps, and so on. The most striking among them are the concepts of K. Linnaeus, J.B. Lamarck, J. Cuvier, E. Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, E. Baer, Ch. Darwin, G. Mendel, the creation of a synthetic theory of evolution, the synthesis of evolutionary and organizational ideas based on the combination of the theory of evolution, genetics and ecology, etc.
K. Lynn her (1707-1778) - Swede, naturalist, creator of biological systematics. In his monograph "Systems of Nature" (1735), which gained worldwide fame, he laid the foundations for the classification of the "three kingdoms of nature": plants, animals and minerals. Moreover, for the first time in this classification, a person was assigned to the class of mammals and the order of primates, which dealt a significant blow to the anthropocentric thinking that dominated in those years. Having made a fundamental contribution to the study of the biological diversity of life, Linnaeus formulated the principle of the hierarchy of systematic categories, according to which neighboring taxa are connected not only by similarity, but also by kinship. This idea has become one of the cornerstones on the way to the approval of evolutionary ideas. The first holistic concept of evolution in her philosophy. comprehension was formulated by fr. naturalist Zh.B. Lamarck (1744-1829). With the greatest completeness, it is set forth in his "Philosophy of Zoology" (1809). The leitmotif of the book is the assertion that every science must have its own philosophy. basis, and only under this condition will it make real progress. From these positions, the author draws attention to the universal nature of variability, to the progressive course of progressive evolution, considering the adequate direct influence of the environment as the main factor in evolution. Lamarck accepted the inheritance of acquired traits as the main mechanism of evolution. He considered the tendency to complicate the organization of living organisms as the result of the internal desire of organisms for progress and improvement. This internal goal is inherent in organisms, according to Lamarck, from the very beginning. The outlook is Lamarckadeist: recognizing the natural order of nature, he considered God as the root cause of this order. Fundamental philosophy. a moment in Lamarck's work is the replacement of preformist ideas coming from Leibniz and others with the ideas of transformism - the historical transformation of some species into others. However, this approach had many opponents, one of the most prominent among which was J. Cuvier (1769-1832) - fr. zoologist, systematic theorist, founder of paleontology, biostratigraphy and historical geology as a science. The system proposed by Cuvier is the first system of organic nature in which modern forms were considered next to fossils. In his Op. "The Animal Kingdom" (1817) Cuvier formulated the principle of subordination of signs. Developing the ideas of Linnaeus, he divided the whole variety of animals into four branches, each of which is characterized by a common structural plan. And between these branches, according to Cuvier, there are no and cannot be transitional forms. In the principle of the conditions of existence put forward by him, called the principle of final goals, the ideas of Aristotle’s “concrete teleology” are developed: the body as a whole is adapted to the conditions of existence, and this fitness dictates both the correspondence of organs to the functions performed and the correspondence of some organs to others, and their interdependence within a single whole. Being a committed creationist, he believed that correlations are immutable. Having shown for the first time on the most extensive factual material the grandiose change of life forms on Earth and the gradual complication of these forms, i.e. actually laying the foundations of evolutionary views, Cuvier, by virtue of his philosophies. beliefs, he reduced them to the idea of the immutability of nature and persistently defended this position, which was clearly manifested in his famous dispute with E. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1782-1844).
This outstanding fr. the naturalist was a consistent supporter of the idea of transformism. In his work "Philosophy of Anatomy" (1818-1822), he turned to one of the fundamental biological problems that have a philosophy. character: the problem of the meaning and essence of the similarity of signs. Solving this problem, posed by Aristotle, Geoffroy purposefully searched for homology in various animal species, developing the idea of the unity of the structural plan of all living things, as opposed to the views of Cuvier outlined above. However, the discussion ended in victory for Cuvier, who refuted the mechanistic interpretation of the unity of the morphological type proposed by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.
Original evolutionary philosophies. views in the field of f.b. belong to the outstanding Russian biologist K.M. Baer (1792-1876), who described the laws of embryogenesis in his major work The History of Animal Development (1828). The essence of development, according to Baer, is that from the homogeneous and the general, the heterogeneous and the particular gradually emerge. This phenomenon of embryonic divergence has been called Baer's law. However, embryonic development does not mean repetition among lower organized adult animals and is not straightforward. Baer was the first scientist who came to evolutionary ideas without constructing any speculative schemes and not looking up from the facts.
The synthesis of previous evolutionary ideas was carried out by C. Darwin (1809-1882), the creator of evolutionary theory. The fundamental difference between the Darwinian concept and other evolutionary and transformist views is that Darwin revealed the driving factor and causes of evolution. Darwinism introduced the historical method into biology as the dominant method of scientific knowledge, as the leading cognitive orientation.
For many years it became the paradigm of evolutionary ideas, marking a whole era in biology, science in general and in culture. The development of evolutionary ideas on the basis of Darwinism in depth and breadth led at the end of the 20th century. to the formation of the concept of global evolutionism, which offers an evolutionary view of the entire universe as a whole.
In parallel with evolutionism, which focuses on the idea of development, in F.b. continued to develop ideas focused on the idea of constancy, stability, organization. The emergence of genetics as a science marked a fundamentally new stage in their development, the beginning of which was laid by the studies of the Austrian naturalist Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). Using statistical methods to analyze the results of hybridization of pea varieties, Mendel identified and formulated patterns of heredity. For the first time in the history of science, using quantitative approaches to study the inheritance of traits, Mendel established new biological laws, thereby laying the foundations of theoretical biology. Later, ideas about invariance, discreteness, and stability in the living world were developed in the works of G. de Vries, K. Correns, E. von Cermak, and other researchers.
However, up to Ser. 1920s the development of genetics and evolutionism proceeded independently, apart, and sometimes even confrontational in relation to each other. Only by the 1950s. there was a synthesis of genetics and classical Darwinism, which led to the establishment of a new population thinking in biology. This was the most important methodological achievement in the field of biological knowledge ser. 20th century Developing research in this direction, A. N. Severtsov clarified the concept of biological and morphophysiological progress, showing that they are not equivalent. J. Simpson and I.I. Schmalhausen, in addition to the driving form of natural selection described by Darwin, which cuts off any deviations from the average norm, singled out a stabilizing form of selection that protects and maintains average values in a series of generations. In 1942, J. Huxley published the book. "Evolution: modern synthesis", which marked the beginning of a new synthetic theory of evolution, in which the synthesis of genetic and evolutionary concepts was realized.
However, this synthesis was carried out before the era of molecular biology. From Ser. 20th century the intensive development of molecular and physicochemical biology began. At this stage, a huge factual material was accumulated, which is fundamental for biological knowledge. We can name the discovery of the DNA double helix, the deciphering of the genetic code and protein biosynthesis, the discovery of the degeneracy of the genetic code, the discovery of extranuclear DNA, the discovery of silent genes, the discovery of fractions of unique and repetitive sequences among DNA, the discovery of "jumping genes", the awareness of genome instability, and much more. In the same years, a fundamental breakthrough occurred in the traditional field of biology for the study of the biology of organisms, and the developmental biology of organisms began to progress rapidly. Finally, in the second half of the century, an intensified intrusion of biological knowledge into the sphere of supraorganismal formations, into the study of ecological, ethological and anthropobiogeocenotic connections and relationships, and the formation of global ecology began.
These new areas of biological research and the facts accumulated in them required a reassessment and rethinking of the concepts that were in force in biology, the creation of new ones, and their understanding from the methodological, worldview and value positions.
At the present stage of its development, biology requires philosophy. rethinking traditional forms of knowledge organization, creating a new image of science, forming new norms, ideals and principles of scientific research, a new style of thinking. The development of biology in our days is beginning to give more and more fruitful ideas for the fields of both biological knowledge and those that have wide extensions beyond biology proper - into science and culture as a whole. All these new problems are included in the subject of modern F.B.
From the modern point of view of philosophy. understanding of the living world is presented in four relatively autonomous and at the same time internally interconnected directions: ontological, methodological, axiological and praxeological.
Natural science 20th century deals with many pictures of nature, ontological schemes and models, often alternative to each other and not related to each other. In biology, this was clearly reflected in the gap between evolutionary, functional and organizational approaches to the study of the living, in the discrepancy between the pictures of the world offered by evolutionary biology and ecology, and so on. The task of the ontological direction in F.b. - identification of ontological models that underlie various divisions of modern life science, critical-reflexive work to comprehend their essence, relationships with each other and with ontological models presented in other sciences, their rationalization and ordering.
The methodological analysis of modern biological knowledge not only pursues the task of describing the research methods used in biology, studying the trends in their formation, development and change, but also orients knowledge towards going beyond existing standards. Due to the fact that the regulatory methodological principles of biological cognition are of a generative nature, the awareness and formulation in biology of a new methodological orientation leads to the formation of a new picture of biological reality. This was clearly manifested in the process of establishing in biology new cognitive attitudes of systemicity, organization, evolution, and co-evolution.
Significantly increased in recent years, the importance of axiological and praxeological directions in the development of F.b. This is explained by the fact that the biology of our time has become a means not only of studying, but also of direct influence on the living world. The tendencies of designing and constructing biological objects are growing in it, the tasks of managing living objects and systems are manifested. In the strategy of research activity in biology, such new directions as foresight and forecasting appear. There is a need to develop scenarios for the foreseeable future for all levels of biological reality. Modern biology is entering a new stage of its development, which can be called bioengineering. The formation and rapid development of genetic and cellular engineering, engineering of biogeocenoses, solving the problems of interaction between the biosphere and humanity require the improvement of methods of analysis and conscious control of the entire new complex of these studies and practical developments. These tasks are served by the intensive development of such new sciences as bioethics, ecoethics, biopolitics, bioaesthetics, sociobiology, etc., generated by the modern stage of development of biological sciences.
Philosophy: Encyclopedic Dictionary. - M.: Gardariki. Edited by A.A. Ivin. 2004.
PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY
PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY
A branch of philosophy that deals with the analysis and explanation of the patterns of development of the main directions of the complex of life sciences. F.b. explores the structure of biological knowledge; the nature, features and specificity of scientific knowledge of living objects and systems; means and methods of such knowledge. F.b. - this is a generalizing judgments philosophy. character about the subject and method of biology, the place of biology among other sciences and in the system of scientific knowledge as a whole, its cognitive and social role in modern society.
The content and problems of F.b. have changed significantly in the course of the development of biology and other life sciences, in the process of changing their subject, the transformation of strategic directions of research. At the initial stages of its formation as a science, while not yet being theoretically formalized, it was essentially a part of philosophy. This was clearly manifested already in antiquity, primarily in the teachings of Aristotle. The problem of cognition of the living is presented by him both within the framework of speculative philosophy, the doctrine of logical forms and methods of cognition, and as a special, relatively independent study of nature. In his treatise On the Parts of Animals, he did a great job of creating the scientific foundations for the classification of species of living organisms. In the new methodological ways and forms of knowledge of life has made significant progress in the search for a scientific method. In particular, in R. Descartes, the mechanistic was extended to the sphere of the living, which led to the idea of living beings as complex machines subject to the laws of mechanics. In the developed form, the mechanistic knowledge of the living was embodied in the philosophy of B. Spinoza, who substantiated it from rationalistic and mathematical positions, coming from G. Galileo, T. Hobbes, Descartes. G. V. Leibniz tried to go beyond the framework of mechanistic materialism, proceeding from the idea of the continuity of development and the all-organism of nature, arguing that an organism is such a part in one body that participates in common life. Developing the idea of the development of pre-existing inclinations in the development of new organisms, he substantiated the preformist concept in philosophy. understanding of the living. Original concepts were proposed in it. classical philosophy of the 19th century. When considering living organisms, I. Kant considered it insufficient to focus only on mechanical causes, because, from his point of view, there is an active, containing both a cause and at the same time. The task of knowing the living is reduced by Kant to the definition of the transcendental conditions of its conceivability, the search for regulatory concepts for reflective judgment. In natural philosophy, F.V.I. Schelling's knowledge of living nature appears not as a problem of empirical natural science, but as one of the main problems of natural philosophy. Nature appears in the form of a universal spiritual organism, spiritualized by a single world soul, passing through various stages of its development at different stages of the development of nature. In explaining life, Schelling does not accept either vitalism or mechanism. Life, in his interpretation, is not sustainable, but permanent - the destruction and restoration of those processes that form it. G.W.F. Hegel philosophy. comprehension of nature associated with the resolution of the internal contradiction inherent in the theoretical attitude towards nature. Its essence is that, as a form of theoretical attitude to nature, it seeks to know it as it really is. However, at the same time, it turns nature into something completely different: by thinking objects, we thereby turn them into something, while things are actually single. This is a theoretical-cognitive difficulty and should resolve the philosophy. consideration of nature. According to Hegel, it not only reveals the universal in the natural world, but also characterizes natural objects from the point of view of their relationship to human sensibility. Thus, significantly ahead of his time, Hegel talks about what in the philosophy of nature correlates with the subjective.
Marxism came out not only with a critique of natural philosophy of the 19th century, but also with a general denial of the actuality of the philosophy of nature as such. The anti-natural-philosophical nature of Marxism is due to its sociologism, the desire to explain everything based on the social characteristics of a particular socio-economic formation. From such an approach, the problems of the philosophy of science organically followed only by the methodology of science and logic, the refusal to understand and analyze various ontological schemes and models that are effective in the natural sciences at any stage of their development.
Therefore, under the conditions of the domination of Marxism-Leninism in the USSR, it was precisely the methodological problems of biological science that received the greatest development and development. This is an important and relevant direction in the development of F.6., but it by no means exhausts all of its diverse problems.
In parallel with the development of philosophy. understanding of the living in the works of professional philosophers, certain pictures of F.b. were presented in the studies of prominent biologists of the 17th-20th centuries, who discussed general philosophies on the basis of biological material. problems of constancy and development, integrity and elementarism, gradualness and leaps, and so on. The most striking among them are the concepts of K. Linnaeus, J.B. Lamarck, J. Cuvier, E. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, E. Baer, Ch. Darwin, G. Mendel, the creation of a synthetic theory of evolution, evolutionary and organizational ideas based on the combination of the theory of evolution, genetics and ecology, etc.
K. Lynn her (1707-1778) - Swede, naturalist, creator of biological systematics. In his monograph "Systems of Nature" (1735), which gained worldwide fame, he laid the foundations for the classification of the "three kingdoms of nature": plants, animals and minerals. Moreover, for the first time in this classification, it was assigned to the class of mammals and the order of primates, which dealt a significant blow to the anthropocentric thinking that dominated in those years. Having made a fundamental contribution to the study of the biological diversity of life, Linnaeus formulated the hierarchy of systematic categories, according to which neighboring taxa are connected not only by similarity, but also by kinship. This has become one of the cornerstones on the way to the approval of evolutionary ideas. The first holistic concept of evolution in her philosophy. comprehension was formulated by fr. naturalist Zh.B. Lamarck (1744-1829). With the greatest completeness, it is set forth in his "Philosophy of Zoology" (1809). The leitmotif of the book is that everyone should have their own philosophy. basis, and only under this condition will it make real progress. From these positions, the author draws on universal variability, on the progressive course of progressive evolution, considering the adequate direct influence of the environment as the main factor in evolution. Lamarck accepted the inheritance of acquired traits as the main mechanism of evolution. He considered the tendency to complicate the organization of living organisms as the result of the internal desire of organisms for progress and improvement. This internal is incorporated in organisms, according to Lamarck, initially. Worldview Lamarckadeist: recognizing the natural nature, he considered God as the root cause of this order. Fundamental philosophy. a moment in Lamarck's work is the replacement of preformist ideas coming from Leibniz and others with the ideas of transformism - the historical transformation of some species into others. However, this approach had many opponents, one of the most prominent among which was J. Cuvier (1769-1832) - fr. zoologist, systematic theorist, founder of paleontology, biostratigraphy and historical geology as a science. The system proposed by Cuvier is the first system of organic nature in which modern forms were considered next to fossils. In his Op. "The Animal Kingdom" (1817) Cuvier formulated the principle of subordination of signs. Developing the ideas of Linnaeus, he divided the whole variety of animals into four branches, each of which is characterized by a common structural plan. And between these branches, according to Cuvier, there are no and cannot be transitional forms. In the principle of the conditions of existence put forward by him, called the principle of final goals, the ideas of Aristotle’s “concrete teleology” are developed: the body is adapted to the conditions of existence, and this fitness dictates both the correspondence of organs to the functions performed and the correspondence of some organs to others, and them within a single whole. . Being a committed creationist, he believed that correlations are immutable. Having shown for the first time on the most extensive factual material the grandiose change of life forms on Earth and the gradual complication of these forms, i.e. actually laying the foundations of evolutionary views, Cuvier, by virtue of his philosophies. beliefs, he reduced them to the idea of the immutability of nature and persistently defended this position, which was clearly manifested in his famous dispute with E. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1782-1844).
This outstanding fr. the naturalist was a consistent supporter of the idea of transformism. In his work "Philosophy of Anatomy" (1818-1822), he turned to one of the fundamental biological problems that have a philosophy. character: the problem of the meaning and essence of the similarity of signs. Solving this problem, posed by Aristotle, Geoffroy purposefully searched for homology in various animal species, developing the idea of the unity of the structural plan of all living things, as opposed to the views of Cuvier outlined above. However, it ended in the victory of Cuvier, who refuted the mechanistic interpretation of the unity of the morphological type proposed by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.
Original evolutionary philosophies. views in the field of f.b. belong to the outstanding Russian biologist K.M. Baer (1792-1876), who described the laws of embryogenesis in his major work The History of Animal Development (1828). The essence of development, according to Baer, is that from the homogeneous and the general, the heterogeneous and the particular gradually emerge. This embryonic divergence has received "Baer's law". However, embryonic development does not mean repetition among lower organized adult animals and is not straightforward. Baer was the first scientist who came to evolutionary ideas without constructing any speculative schemes and not looking up from the facts.
The synthesis of previous evolutionary ideas was carried out by C. Darwin (1809-1882), the creator of evolutionary theory. The fundamental difference between the Darwinian concept and other evolutionary and transformist views is that Darwin revealed the driving factor and causes of evolution. Darwinism introduced the historical method into biology as the dominant method of scientific knowledge, as the leading cognitive orientation.
For many years it became the paradigm of evolutionary ideas, marking a whole era in biology, science in general and in culture. The development of evolutionary ideas on the basis of Darwinism in depth and breadth led at the end of the 20th century. to the formation of the concept of global evolutionism, which offers an evolutionary view of the entire universe as a whole.
In parallel with evolutionism, which focuses on the idea of development, in F.b. continued to develop ideas focused on the idea of constancy, stability, organization. The emergence of genetics as a science marked a fundamentally new stage in their development, the beginning of which was laid by the studies of the Austrian naturalist Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). Applying to the analysis of the results of hybridization of pea varieties, Mendel identified and formulated heredity. For the first time in the history of science, using quantitative approaches to study the inheritance of traits, Mendel established new biological laws, thereby laying the foundations of theoretical biology. Later, ideas about invariance, discreteness, and stability in the living world were developed in the works of G. de Vries, K. Correns, E. von Cermak, and other researchers.
However, up to Ser. 1920s the development of genetics and evolutionism proceeded independently, apart, and sometimes even confrontational in relation to each other. Only by the 1950s. there was a synthesis of genetics and classical Darwinism, which led to the establishment of a new population thinking in biology. This was the most important methodological achievement in the field of biological knowledge ser. 20th century Developing research in this direction, A. N. Severtsov clarified the concept of biological and morphophysiological progress, showing that they are not equivalent. J. Simpson and I.I. Schmalhausen, in addition to the driving form of natural selection described by Darwin, which cuts off any deviations from the average norm, singled out a stabilizing form of selection that protects and maintains average values in a series of generations. In 1942, J. Huxley published the book. "Evolution: modern synthesis", which marked the beginning of a new synthetic theory of evolution, in which the synthesis of genetic and evolutionary concepts was realized.
However, this synthesis was carried out before the era of molecular biology. From Ser. 20th century the intensive development of molecular and physicochemical biology began. At this stage, a huge factual material was accumulated, which is fundamental for biological knowledge. We can name the discovery of the DNA double helix, the deciphering of the genetic code and protein biosynthesis, the discovery of the degeneracy of the genetic code, the discovery of extranuclear DNA, the discovery of silent genes, the discovery of fractions of unique and repetitive sequences among DNA, the discovery of "jumping genes", the awareness of genome instability, and much more. In the same years, a fundamental breakthrough occurred in the traditional field of biology for the study of the biology of organisms, and the developmental biology of organisms began to progress rapidly. Finally, in the second half of the century, an intensified intrusion of biological knowledge into the sphere of supraorganismal formations, into the study of ecological, ethological and anthropobiogeocenotic connections and relationships, and the formation of global ecology began.
These new areas of biological research and the facts accumulated in them required a reassessment and rethinking of the concepts that were in force in biology, the creation of new ones, and their understanding from the methodological, worldview and value positions.
At the present stage of its development, biology requires philosophy. rethinking traditional forms of knowledge organization, creating a new image of science, forming new norms, ideals and principles of scientific research, a new style of thinking. The development of biology in our days is beginning to give more and more fruitful ideas for both biological knowledge, and those having wide outlets beyond biology proper - into science and culture as a whole. All these new problems are included in modern F.B.
From the modern point of view of philosophy. understanding of the living world is presented in four relatively autonomous and at the same time internally interconnected directions: ontological, methodological, axiological and praxeological.
Natural science 20th century deals with many pictures of nature, ontological schemes and models, often alternative to each other and not related to each other. In biology, this was clearly reflected in the gap between evolutionary, functional and organizational approaches to the study of the living, in the discrepancy between the pictures of the world offered by evolutionary biology and ecology, and so on. The task of the ontological direction in F.b. - identification of ontological models that underlie various divisions of modern life science, critical-reflexive work to comprehend their essence, relationships with each other and with ontological models presented in other sciences, their rationalization and ordering.
The methodological of modern biological knowledge not only pursues the task of describing the research methods used in biology, studying the trends in their formation, development and change, but also focuses on going beyond existing standards. Due to the fact that the regulatory methodological principles of biological cognition are of a generative nature, the awareness and formulation in biology of a new methodological orientation leads to the formation of a new picture of biological reality. This was clearly manifested in the process of establishing in biology new cognitive attitudes of systemicity, organization, evolution, and co-evolution.
Significantly increased in recent years axiological and praxeological directions in the development of F.B. This is explained by the fact that the biology of our time has become a means not only of studying, but also of direct influence on the living. The tendencies of designing and constructing biological objects are growing in it, the tasks of managing living objects and systems are manifested. In the strategy of research activities in biology, new areas such as forecasting appear. There is a need to develop scenarios for the foreseeable future for all levels of biological reality. Modern biology is entering a new stage of its development, which can be called bioengineering. The formation and rapid development of genetic and cellular engineering, engineering of biogeocenoses, problems of interaction between the biosphere and humanity require the improvement of methods of analysis and conscious control of the entire new complex of these studies and practical developments. These tasks are served by the intensive development of such new sciences, generated by the modern stage of the development of biological sciences, as ecoethics, biopolitics, bioaesthetics, etc.
Philosophy: Encyclopedic Dictionary. - M.: Gardariki. Edited by A.A. Ivina. 2004 .
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Encyclopedia
Paul Griffiths
philosophy of biology
The growing interest of philosophers in biology over the past thirty years reflects the growing importance of the biological sciences characteristic of this period. To date, there is an extensive literature on many problems in biology, and one article is not enough to summarize all the work done. Instead, I will try to explain what the philosophy of biology is. Why is biology important to philosophy, and vice versa? At the end of the article there is a list of other articles of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, devoted to specific problems in the philosophy of biology.
The philosophy of biology includes three different types of philosophical research. First, the main provisions of the philosophy of science are considered in the context of biology. Secondly, the conceptual riddles that arise within the framework of biology itself are subjected to philosophical analysis. Thirdly, biology is addressed in the course of discussion of traditional questions of philosophy. The first two types of philosophical work are usually carried out on the condition that the researcher has a good idea of the current state of biology, in the third case this is not so necessary.
The philosophy of biology can also be divided into different areas depending on which subsection of biological theory it considers. Biology includes many diverse disciplines, from the historical sciences (such as paleontology) to the engineering sciences (such as biotechnology). Each field raises specific philosophical questions. Philosophical approaches to major biological disciplines are discussed below.
Original: Griffiths, Paul, "Philosophy of Biology", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
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