Parts, wholes, and the forms of life

Husserl and the new biology

John C. Mccarthy

pp. 135-156

in: Lee Hardy, Lester Embree (eds), Phenomenology of natural science, Berlin, Springer, 1992

Abstract

With the success of modern analytical biology, and in the absence of adequate reflection on the wholeness of living wholes, our understanding of living things has come to be characterized by a neglect or even a denial of biological form. This essay invokes Husserl's logic of parts and wholes, and his doctrine of categorical intuition in order to argue for a reconsideration of the place of form in biology. Rightly understood, the notion of form neither supplants analytical investigations nor does it lead into a realm of spurious abstraction. Rather, form makes our understanding of life more concrete by expressing the radiant unity constitutive of every living thing.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund