Organismic Teleology and Agency Beyond Systems Theories: A Process-Metaphysical Perspective

This chapter investigates two central biological concepts: teleological end-state directedness and agency. Its aim is to point out some key difficulties in how these concepts are understood in contemporary biology and philosophy of biology, and to show how a process-metaphysical approach to organisms can help us overcome these problems. To this purpose, we analyse the understanding of teleology and agency in contemporary biological systems theories. We focus in particular on the concept of mechanism, which plays an important role both in these theories and in modern biology and philosophy of biology. This examination shows that, first of all, mechanistic thinking ultimately reduces teleological explanations to merely a useful way of speaking that has no ontological relevance, and second, that the ability of organisms to autonomously and profoundly transform their material structure exceeds the explanatory power of mechanistic explanations. As an alternative, I propose a process-philosophical understanding of organismic end-state directedness and agency that is based on the central metaphysical and bio-philosophical concepts and ideas introduced by Alfred N. Whitehead and Henri Bergson.