Mechanism In Biological Philosophy

My research focuses on "the new mechanisic philosophy" in pecial sciences, particularly in biology. Mechanism was one of the philosophical sources of scientific revolution in the17th century. It is an admitted fact that Newton’s classical physics has two philosophical originations, one is mechanism and the other is Plato-Pythagorean tradition. While in the two next centuries after the revolution, mechanism is not successful at all in biology and chemistry, it had positive influence in the famous debate with vitalism. More importantly, in the twentieth century, mechanism and mechanistic explanation recured again in and became one of the most common form of explanantion in modern biology and other pecial sciences. Such mechanisms are called anthropic mechanism by many philosophers, distinguished from pragmatic universal mechanisms. There are two significant values in philosophy of mechanism for science.Firstly, the famous debate between vitalism and mechanism reflects the giant gap between the understanding of freedom and human dignity in one hand and the determinism of natural world in another. This was regarded as the main source of all philosophical issues by Leibnitz and Kant. The exploration of new field in special sciences, particularly biology for mechanism philosophy surely will increase our understanding of this problem, since the mechanism in the17th century only focused on inanimate objects. Mechanism is also related with causation, since causation is an important notion in science and in concept of freedom. A kind of comparison between mechanism in classical physics and special sciences will be very helpful for understanding the differences on scientific explantion and its construction. Such an investigation will also extend our vison on scientific models, scientific inquiry, theory levels and relations between phenomena and observations. Meanwhile it will increase our understanding of the nature of life, and biology and science finally. To advance our knowledge about the severe contradictions between reductionism and anti-reductionis and the status of biology in science, it also make sense to investigate how new disciplines such as biophysics and biochemistry emerges from cross disciplinary researches. Further effort is to achieve more understanding about the gap between natural sciences and humanistic sciences and seeking for possible methodological solutions.Secondly, it is doubtful to see the failure of Logical Empiricism as the end of philosophy of science, since the Logical Empiricism is regarded only the generalization of physics. Many philosophers of special sciences unwilling to follow the Historicism take the position of Neo-positivism. After the flourish of life sciences, many philosophers take the failure of positivism as the result of law notion. It is well known, unlike physics, there is lack of law in biology and other special sciences, but take mechanistic form of explanation.Thus, the conception of mechanism and mechanistic inquiry according the context of the practices of special sciences will be the main goal of new mechanisic philosophy in my dissertation. This goal is comprised of two tasks, one is about the conception of mechanism, and the other is about the mechanistic explantion. The first question is quiet simple. It is achieved by comparison between different definitions and modified by case study from neurobiology. The second task is about the question how biologists generalize mechanistic explanation from biological phenomena, and why such a transition is possible. New questions are also answered about the nature of the difference between observations and phenomena, characters of mechanistic models, difference between pragmatic mechanism and mechanism in special sciences, reduction and determination in mechanism, and so on.According the aforementioned goals, this dissertation contains six chapters. Chapter one raise the problem, questions and methodology for the whole dissertation commit to solve, viz. how mechanism, mechanistic explantion and mechanistic inquiry really are in biology. Chapter two reviews the relationship between mechanism and the scientific revolusion, and the limits of mechanism particularly on chemistry and biology after the17th century. Chapter three focuses on conceptions of mechanism and their problems, and modified the definition of mechanism by the case conception. Chapter four engages in the characters of mechanistic explanation and the differences of the causations it contains from that of law based explanations. Chapter five inquires the construction of mechanisms and characters of the methods applied by mechanistic sciences, including methodological meaning of comparative researches in different levels. Chapter six devotes to reveal the problem in the connection between mental phenomena and neural mechanisms. Neurophenomenology as a methodological remedy for the problem will be discussed, especially on the relationship between empirical data and transcendental analysis.Conclusionally, mechanism is an important concept for special sciences especilly in modern biology. Mechanism philosophy will increase our understanding of the nature of biology and biological explanations. Mechanistic notion is a very useful tool in biological discovery, and applied as limited reduction that is always mixed with wholism in the practice of biology. Many differences are revealed between pragmatic universal mechanism and anthropic mechanism, especially on their metaphysics.The most important inovation in this dissertation is that it is the first systematic study on mechanism in special sciences among domestic doctoral dissertations.A supposed value of this dissertation is the improvement of our understanding of life sciences, inculding scientific model, explanation levels, causations, scientific revolution and scientific discovery. Such improvement will add new knowledge about the differences between classical sciences and special sciences.