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and goals of understanding nature. A great contemporary philosopher reluctantly
acknowledged (Gadamer, 1993) that the ability of philosophy 'to preserve a
unity within the totality of what is meets with ever greater mistrust'. The
particular mastery of nature offered by science satisfies humanity, Hans-Georg
Gadamer acknowledged, and science has assumed the traditional role of philos-
ophy to prescribe normative ways of understanding, at least, he specified, within
science's 'particularity'. Scientists' freedom, to create a philosophy that satisfies
their needs, is reinforced and accepted by the retreat of traditional philosophy
from that prescriptive role.
The efforts that have claimed center stage in the contemporary human
endeavors to understand and control the world are the products of scientific
methodology. Although many of the questions about the natural world do not
have definite answers, still the great authority of science brings humans to
science for answers about the unknown. However, there are many mansions in
the house of science - there is no one scientific method, and scientific methods
of explanation vary. Psychology that considers the brain to function like a Turing
computer, sociology that depends upon quantitative statistics, economics that
depends upon individuals making rational choices all have developed methods
that are properly called scientific, and all these methods, with their implicit
goals, have created understandings of their fields that are most properly called
philosophy. Hence it is not surprising that the pursuit of a philosophy of sys-
temic biology raises questions about the methods proposed to study the subject,
because those methods lead not only to specific explanations but also create
a philosophy in which values are defined by the methods proposed and the
assumptions made.
Before developing, for the case at hand of systemic biology, the interplay
between the philosophies that scientists create and their activities as scientists,
let us return to Descartes. With the clarity offered by distance and by Descartes'
autobiographical account in his Discourse on Method we can ask how Descartes'
personal scientific methods influenced, or even determined, his philosophy.
Imagine that we are in his (enviable) position, in his later formulation ofMethod,
of having discovered analytical geometry in his early twenties. He had started
with algebra and geometry, each based upon intuitive, a priori assumptions, whose
deductive consequences formed the classical fields of pure mathematics. These
fields had neither material content, nor were they dependent upon their applica-
tions; theywere based on incontrovertible conclusions derived fromwhat appeared
to be absolute certainties. Parallel lines never meet; the angles of a triangle add
up to 180 . He had combined these fields showing that algebraic functions could
be performed by geometric procedures. From this fusion, within a few months he
solved problems that had puzzledmathematics since its origin: findingmethods for
geometrically performing the basic operations of addition, subtraction, division,
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