THE MOST INESCAPABLE PERSPECTIVE: REVALUING ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN BIOLOGY AND NATURAL SCIENCES

Recent philosophical approaches to living organisms share a two-sided concern. On one side, the objectifying attitude of the reductionist-physicalist approach to organisms is put into question, as it eliminates the key dimension of life as a lived experience involving organism agency and purposes. On the other side, attempts to introduce, through phenomenological approaches, an experiential dimension within the current framework of biological sciences are generally seen as entailing some kind of anthropomorphism hardly compatible with scientific programs. This paper aims to contribute to the debate driven by the above theoretical tension, by proposing that the persistent talk about purpose, function, sense-making, choice, interpretation and communication in biology, far from being a merely heuristic tool, reflects a profound and unescapable plexus of pre-conditions of biological understanding rooted in our own experience of aliveness. Valorizing such a mode of narration and comprehension of life phenomena as an index of their ontological status, instead of discarding it as an anthropomorphic surrogate of true scientific knowledge, has the potential to drive the scientific endeavor towards a fuller understanding of nature and man’s place in it. In support of this proposal, I will draw both from recent discussions on the attempts and possible approaches to introduce a renewed conception of natural ends in biological sciences, and from the relatively understudied view of life and nature developed by Robert Spaemann on a decades-long path of thought, arguing that a fundamental anthropomorphic stance is an indispensable pre-condition not only of biology but of the whole scientific enterprise.