Departamento de Filosofía I (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and IHPST Université Paris 1-Sorbonne), 13, rue du Four, 75006 Paris, France.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2010;32(2-3):289-315.
Despite the radical importance of embryology in the development of organicism, developmental biology remains philosophically underexplored as a theoretical and empirical resource to clarify the nature of organisms. This paper discusses how embryology can help develop the organisational definition of the organism as a differentiated, functionally integrated, and autonomous system. I distinguish two conceptions of development in the organisational tradition that yield two different conceptions of the organism: the life-history view claims that organisms can be considered as such during their whole ontogeny; the constitutive view distinguishes two periods in the life history, a period of generation and a period of self-maintenance of a constitutive organisation. Arguing in favour of the constitutive view, it will be claimed that the organisational criteria for the definition of organism (i.e., differentiation, functional integration, and autonomy) can only be applied to the developmental system when it has entered the period of self-maintenance of a constitutive organisation. Under the light of current research in developmental biology, it is possible to make explicit how organisms come to be as organisms. To this end, I explore key ontogenetic events that help us clarify the core aspects of animal organisation and allow us to identify the developmental stage that marks the ontological transition between an organism in potency and an organism in actuality. The structure of this ontogenetic unfolding parallels the conceptual structure of the very notion of organism; the generation of the being of a particular organism parallels its definition.
尽管胚胎学在有机主义的发展中具有根本性的重要性，但发育生物学作为一个理论和经验资源，在澄清生物体的本质方面仍然在哲学上没有得到充分探索。本文讨论了胚胎学如何帮助发展生物体的组织定义，即作为一个分化的、功能整合的、自主的系统。我区分了组织传统中的两种发展观念，这两种观念产生了两种不同的生物体概念：生命史观点认为，生物体可以在整个个体发生过程中被视为生物体；构成观点则区分了生命史的两个时期，即一个世代发生的时期和一个构成组织自我维持的时期。赞成构成观点，就必须承认，生物体定义的组织标准（即分化、功能整合和自主性）只能在发育系统进入构成组织自我维持的时期时才能应用。根据当前发育生物学的研究，可以明确生物体是如何成为生物体的。为此，我探讨了关键的个体发生事件，这些事件有助于我们澄清动物组织的核心方面，并使我们能够确定标志着潜在生物体和实际生物体之间本体论转变的发育阶段。这种个体发生展开的结构与生物体概念的概念结构平行；特定生物体的存在的产生与它的定义平行。
