Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
functions that they perform, and correlatively, virtues (
aretai
) that enable
them to perform these functions. “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly; rocks
gotta go to the center of the earth, the natural place for rocks.” The
science of biology is the study of how different kinds of organisms
respond to the tasks constitutive of life itself; nutrition, growth, sensa-
tion, reproduction, locomotion, and, in the case of humans alone,
complex thought. The way each sort of living thing answers each of these
challenges determines its
telos
, its nature, its final cause, what it does.
In Aristotle's commonsense worldview, then, living things are the par-
adigm for all things. There is no one set of rules or laws that governs the
behavior of all things, as the mechanists suggest, so even if everything is
in fact made of atoms, atomic explanations do not explain function; to
think otherwise is to commit a category mistake. At best, mechanistic
explanations are only one “cause” or principle of explanation—the effi-
cient—and certainly not the most important for understanding nature.
Biology, in its recognition of a vast array of natural kind functions, is the
master science; physics is a subspecies of biology. Aristotle would totally
reject René Descartes'—and modern molecular biology's—acceptance of
the other paradigm, where biology is a subspecies of physics—he cor-
rectly realized that such a way of thinking ultimately ends up trivializing
the world we know directly through experience.
Telos is thus a fundamental metaphysical category for seeing the
world, based in biology and an attempt to understand living things, and
growing out of a commonsense worldview. It encapsulates a worldview
we should realize has been largely rejected by modern science, ever since
Benedict de Spinoza's blistering—and unfair—attack on teleology. But it
has been rejected, not disproven. For what could disprove the claim that
it is better or more reasonable in an explanatory sense to look at the
world, particularly the world of living things, in terms of functions,
purposes (conscious and nonconscious), and telos than to look at it
as a mechanical assemblage of dead particles? Similarly, of course, one
cannot disprove the opposite claim—namely, that talk of functions and
organismic sorts are better abandoned in favor of physicochemical
explanations operative at the molecular level. In the end, metaphysical
worldviews are not empirically disproven, for they in fact partly deter-
mine what counts as an empirical disproof. Molecular biology does not
disprove
talking of “why” questions (Why does the adrenal gland secrete
