The role of fiction in biology from Descartes to Kant
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Abstract
This paper briefly shows how, in biology, there was a shift from the rationalist mechanicism of the 17th century (centered on the ideas of Descartes) to the empiricism of the 18th century (based on the Newtonian paradigm), which, in attempting to free this science from the Cartesian “fable,” ended up creating its own “fictions.” If, on the one hand, rationalist mechanism seems to fail in its effort to deduce organic forms from a priori principles and models, on the other hand, empiricism leads, in this context, to the most improbable theories supposedly based on the observation of phenomena. At the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, Kant states that biology cannot escape “fictions”, but their use must be legitimized by the critique.
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