Presentation of the Special Issue Biological Thought of Jakob Von Uexküll

Abstract

Biology has sought from its beginnings a theoretical and interpretive framework, which allows to account for the phenomenon of life, at a general level, and of organisms at a specific level. Traditionally, the generality of the living has preoccupied philosophers, while the specificities have been the subject of empirical investigation by biologists. The fundamental problem has been to reconcile the data of empirical experience with a vision of life that operates and manifests itself in accordance with laws, the nature of which has been the subject of constant debate among biologists and philosophers. While, on the other hand, discourses have been validated that reduce biological explanations to genes that vary at random and natural selection, to the detriment of the autonomy of organisms. A perspective that throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has shown to be insufficient to explain the plastic and complex dynamics of the living world, exuberant of processes that intertwine according to patterns or regularities Jacob von Uexküll exposed by postulating a law of coherence and functional concatenation between the constituent organic parts and the organism, and between organisms and their environments.