Celine Lechaux
Freie Universität Berlin
The world is a messy place. Models of different kind, developed in different practices, attempt to approximate it through different lenses. Normally, our understanding of causation is informed by physics and its underlying conception of the world as being something made up by things. But in the Philosophy of Biology, recently, a significant shift has taken place, regarding how to approach what constitutes the living world in the first place: from Thing Ontology to Process Ontology (Meincke 2023; Dupré 2021), where the fundamental level is not understood as one of things or substances, but rather of processes, for which change constitutes a necessity. If things are in reality processes, at least in the living part of the world, we may need a different understanding of how to explain them in the first place. Organisms are kept alive by a range of different processes developing on different levels, while remaining deeply connected as a whole.
Anjum and Mumford (2018) introduce causal dispositionalism, aiming to describe how processes within organisms can be understood regarding their dynamic nature. Dispositions are taken to mutually activate and are embedded in a chain of processually unfolding dispositions. These produce new powers from which new processes are activated.
Now, what seems to fall short of an explanation, is not the lower level of causally aligned, merged dispositions modelled by causal dispositionalism, but how they bring about the whole organism. The processes stay in a mechanistic, yet dynamic, relation to one another, but their embeddedness in other processes on different levels, enabling the unfolding, is not taken into account.
What I argue is, that a theory of causation in biology must engage with the intertwinement of processes, their unfolding, as well as how they keep alive the organism, enabled by their metaphysical condition as processes, in the first place. The metaphysical necessity of change, articulated in processes, allows the intertwinement of processes developing in the way causal dispositionalism describes, while these very processes are enabled by processes developing on a different level. By grounding biological explanation in a metaphysics of processes, the gap between processes unfolding in some endless chain and the whole organism kept alive by these very processes, could be bridged.
Chair: Lucas Timmerman
Time: 03 September, 14:00 – 14:30
Location: SR 1.005
SOPhiA 2026 