My Biophilosophy Conference Talk

Below is my talk at the “Revitalizing Biophilosophy” conference I co-hosted earlier this week. It is based on a long paper I am working on both for this conference and for “Cognizing Life,” another conference that I’ll present at next week in Tübingen, Germany (there is a free livestream option if you’d like to tune in).

Here’s the working abstract of the paper I am still polishing titled “Romanticizing Evolution: Recuperating Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism as Examples of a Participatory Approach to the Life Sciences”:

This essay argues that mechanistic biology, despite its technical successes, fundamentally misunderstands life by reducing organisms to externally related parts governed solely by efficient causation. Drawing on a philosophical lineage from Kant through Goethe, Novalis, Schelling, Peirce, and Whitehead, I develop an alternative participatory approach that recognizes self-organization and purposiveness as constitutive features of nature rather than mere projections of human judgment. The argument proceeds by first demonstrating the inherent limitations of mechanistic explanation: Kant showed that organisms exhibit a self-causing purposiveness irreducible to mechanism, while Darwin’s theory presupposes rather than explains the creative variations it filters. In response, I recuperate Romantic Naturphilosophie and process philosophy to show how living beings exist as “subject-superjects”—simultaneously cause and effect of themselves within a double stream of time where past and future converge in present becoming. This participatory framework, exemplified in Goethe’s intuitive science, Peirce’s abductive reasoning, and Rudolf Steiner’s esoteric phenomenology, reveals evolution not as random variation under differential selection but as purposive metamorphosis guided by what Whitehead terms an immanent divine “initial aim.” The essay concludes that revitalizing the life sciences requires not just new models but a transformation of scientific consciousness itself: from detached observation to co-creative participation, recognizing that in studying life's evolution we study our own creative potential as nature’s self-conscious expression.

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