Christopher J. Austin

Some things happen of necessity, others merely happen to occur – but are there things that happen to occur, but should not have? The latter constitute mistakes and, prima facie, they are everywhere – from our setting the wrong cutlery at the dinner table to young turtles crawling in the wrong direction to the safety of the sea. As obvious and ubiquitous as they may seem, the question of whether mistakes are real is not an unfounded one. For inherent in the nature of mistakes is the core concept of normativity , as mistakes imply the existence of states of affairs that are supposed to occur, but which unfortunately do not. Whether normativity is a feature of the ontological fabric of our world, rather than an epistemological by-product of the heuristic framework we use to comprehend its denizens and their activities, is a question at the centre of a long-standing debate in the philosophy of science. In this paper, we will ask: what must the world be like if mistakes are really out there ? In answering that question, we will highlight some central aspects of the nature of mistakes that any ontological foundation which purports to include them must somehow accommodate. After showing that even the most promising ontological framework that might do so – namely, a powers ontology – is seemingly not up to the task, we will propose a novel refocusing of the analysis of the nature of mistakes, one centred on the metaphysics of causal feedback and the concept of organismal flourishing.

Common sense tells us that biological systems are goal-directed, and yet the concept remains philosophically problematic. We propose a novel characterization of goal-directed activities as a basis for hypothesizing about and investigating explanatory mechanisms. We focus on survival goals such as providing adequate nutrition to body tissues, highlighting two key features—normativity and action. These are closely linked inasmuch as goal-directed actions must meet normative requirements such as that they occur when required and not at other times. We illustrate how goal-directed actions are initiated and terminated not by environmental features and goals themselves, but by markers for them. For example, timely blood clotting is the essential response to injury, but platelet activation, required for clotting, is initiated not by the injury itself but by a short sequence of amino acids (GPO) that provides a reliable marker for it. We then make the case that the operation of markers is a prerequisite for common biological phenomena such as mistake-proneness and mimicry. We go on to identify properties of markers in general, including those that are genetically determined and those that can be acquired through associative learning. Both provide the basis for matching actions to changing environments and hence adaptive goal-directedness. We describe how goal-directed activities such as bird nest construction and birdsong learning, completed in anticipation of actions in the environment, have to be evaluated and practiced against a standard of correctness. This characterization of goal-directedness is sufficiently detailed to provide a basis for the scientific study of mechanisms.

The making of mistakes by organisms and other living systems is a theoretically and empirically unifying feature of biological investigation. Mistake theory is a rigorous and experimentally productive way of understanding this widespread phenomenon. It does, however, run up against the long-standing “functions” debate in philosophy of biology. Against the objection that mistakes are just a kind of malfunction, and that without a position on functions there can be no theory of mistakes, we reply that this is to misunderstand the theory. In this paper we set out the basic concepts of mistake theory and then argue that mistakes are a distinctive phenomenon in their own right, not just a kind of malfunction. Moreover, the functions debate is, to a large degree, independent of the concept of biological mistakes we outline. In particular, although the popular selected effects theory may retain its place within a more pluralistic conception of biological function, there is also need for a more forward-looking approach, where a robust concept of normativity can be an important driver of future experimental work.

Powers are properties defined bywhat they do. The focus of the large majority of the powers literature has been mainly put on explicating the (multifaceted) results of the production of a power in certain (multifaceted) initial conditions: but all this causal complexity is bound to be—and, in fact, it has proved to be—quite difficult to handle. In this paper we take a different approach by focusing on the veryactivityof producing those multifaceted manifestations themselves. In this paper, we propose an original account of what the essence of a power consists in which stems from a radical reconceptualisation of power-causation according to which counterfactuals are to be explained away by powers, and not vice-versa. We call this approach thedynamical operator accountof powers. According to this account, the causal role of powers consists in their ensuring that the ontological transition from a stimulus S to a manifestation M happens. Powers thus have a dynamical essence which consists in the fundamental activity of generating the counterfactuals typically associated with them. We show that if one conceptualises this functional activity as the metaphysical fulcrum around which counterfactual-based causation revolves, one is granted not only an improved methodology to individuate powers but also a better understanding of their knowability, modality and directedness.

According to contemporary ‘process ontology’, organisms are best conceptualised as spatio-temporally extended entities whose mereological composition is fundamentally contingent and whose essence consists in changeability. In contrast to the Aristotelian precepts of classical ‘substance ontology’, from the four-dimensional perspective of this framework, the identity of an organism is grounded not in certain collections of privileged properties, or features which it could not fail to possess, but in the succession of diachronic relations by which it persists, or ‘perdures’ as one entity over time. In this paper, I offer a novel defence of substance ontology by arguing that the coherency and plausibility of the radical reconceptualisation of organisms proffered by process ontology ultimately depends upon its making use of the ‘substantial’ principles it purports to replace.

This book offers a novel defence of a highly contested philosophical position: biological natural kind essentialism. This theory is routinely and explicitly rejected for its purported inability to be explicated in the context of contemporary biological science, and its supposed incompatibility with the process and progress of evolution by natural selection. Christopher J. Austin challenges these objections, and in conjunction with contemporary scientific advancements within the field of evolutionary-developmental biology, the book utilises a contemporary neo-Aristotelian metaphysics of "dispositional properties", or causal powers, to provide a theory of essentialism centred on the developmental architecture of organisms and its role in the evolutionary process. By defending a novel theory of Aristotelian biological natural kind essentialism, Essence in the Age of Evolution represents the fresh and exciting union of cutting-edge philosophical insight and scientific knowledge.

Although they are continually compositionally reconstituted and reconfigured, organisms nonetheless persist as ontologically unified beings over time—but in virtue of what? A common answer is: in virtue of their continued possession of the capacity for morphological invariance which persists through, and in spite of, their mereological alteration. While we acknowledge that organisms’ capacity for the “stability of form”—homeostasis—is an important aspect of their diachronic unity, we argue that this capacity is derived from, and grounded in a more primitive one—namely, the homeodynamic capacity for the “specified variation of form”. In introducing a novel type of causal power—a ‘structural power’—we claim that it is the persistence of their dynamic potential to produce a specified series of structurally adaptive morphologies which grounds organisms’ privileged status as metaphysically “one over many” over time.

The biological sciences have always proven a fertile ground for philosophical analysis, one from which has grown a rich tradition stemming from Aristotle and flowering with Darwin. And although contemporary philosophy is increasingly becoming conceptually entwined with the study of the empirical sciences with the data of the latter now being regularly utilised in the establishment and defence of the frameworks of the former, a practice especially prominent in the philosophy of physics, the development of that tradition hasn’t received the wider attention it so thoroughly deserves. This review will briefly introduce some recent significant topics of debate within the philosophy of biology, focusing on those whose metaphysical themes (in everything from composition to causation) are likely to be of wide-reaching, cross-disciplinary interest. In a post-Darwinian age, one of the most important and well-known changes in our philosophical thought about the biological world has been the paradigm shift wherein attention turned away from sharply and eternally defined natural kinds and so, away from individuals as a central theoretical focus, and towards vaguely bounded and contingently stable species, with populations taking the theoretical fore ( Hull 1965; Mayr 1994; Sober 1980). In this shift, an organism’s developmental architecture and its role in trait-building was de-emphasised in favour of analysing instead the correlational statistical trends between population traits and their corresponding genomic profiles. However, this shift also brought a renewed focus on another, more finely grained class of individuals known as homologues – modular organismal sub-systems responsible for the building of a particular trait that are present throughout successive generations of organism groups which exhibit broad morphological similarity among their various (intra- and inter-species) instances over traceable lineages of modification history ( Scotland 2010). A prime exemplar is the tetrapod limb: examining the limbs of everything from bat wings to human arms seemingly reveals the existence of a single archetypal individual whose morphologically distinct instances are ordered by relations of successive variation in distinct groups of organisms over evolutionary time-scales. However, the contemporary effort to better understand these ‘evolutionary individuals’ has raised an important philosophical question, one which reflects the aforementioned paradigm shift: do these individuals carve at the ontological joints of the evolutionary landscape, or are they merely heuristic abstractions constructed from it? Deciding between these two perspectives – the developmental and phylogenetic, respectively – is the focus of the debate on the nature of homologues.