Intersezioni. Questioni biologiche di rilevanza filosofica

For many years, the debate on the relationship between science and philosophy has been centred on the idea, that can be traced back to Hume, that only science deals with meaningful problems, as only scientific hypotheses are testable, i.e. can be subjected to verification or falsification. This doctrine has been revived this century by Wittgenstein's "Tractatus" and by philosophers of the Wien Circle. According to the latter, philosophical issues are either completely devoid of sense or, at most, manifestations of emotions. Although science philosophers such as Popper, Lakatos and Feyerabend would not completely agree with this idea, this view is still the predominant one among scientists, even those who are not involved in the philosophy of science. This book sets out to present the case that this separation between science and philosophy is unwarranted. The big philosophical problems have been thought to be as the same nature of the scientific ones at least up to the Eighteen century. In the England of Darwin, biology, physics and cosmology were seen as scientific problems which were relevant not only to philosophy but also to theology. In the present book the author suggests that there is only one rational way to access objective knowledge, and that this is by the scientific method. This method is broadly defined as a way to investigate the world outside and inside us by a continuous feedback with the external reality. As is widely recognised, the scientific method allows for any kind of hypothesis to be made with the only requirement being that they must start from and return to experience. It is argued that philosophical issues can be addressed in the same way. The classical themes, such as our origin, our destiny or the meaning of our life must be tackled by starting with the data of experience and constructing hypotheses in agreement with it. According to this view, philosophy is defined as the set of scientific propositions which are relevant to the classical problems mentioned above, which have been the focus of philosophy and theology for centuries, indeed from the beginning of the culture of modern man. In constructing the case for his argument, the author reviews data from biological science, which is his main field of professional interest, and shows how many biological propositions have relevance to the old fundamental philosophical problems. The first chapter is devoted to a brief review of the relationship between science and philosophy throughout history, how the foundations of knowledge evolved, and a presentation of scientific methodology, which alone can bring us near to the truth. The fact that knowledge evolved from the selection by nature of appropriate responses in small animals to the environment is the main reason for which our brain can at least partially match reality. This could be the solution to the old problem of the correspondence between our thought and the world, the basis of what Leibniz called "pre-established Harmony". We have some access to reality because reality itself fabricated our brain and our perception faculties, which our interaction with the external word depends on. Chapters 2 to 8 examine different biological fields, directly showing how they interact with our Weltanschauung, i.e. that they provide us with a lot of data and ideas on which we can build our outlook on the world. Briefly, chapter 2 deals with the current description of the basic life phenomena at the cellular level, which can satisfactorily be described at the molecular level according to chemical and physical laws. Chapter 3 concentrates on the concept of evolution as a unifying theory which permeates all investigation of the living: this includes the appearance of the genus Homo in the last million years. Ch