As a practicing life scientist, Descartes must have a theory of what it means to be a living being. In this paper, I provide an account of what his theoretical conception of living bodies must be. I then show that this conception might well run afoul of his rejection of final causal explanations in natural philosophy. Nonetheless, I show how Descartes might have made use of such explanations as merely hypothetical, even though he explicitly blocks this move. I conclude by suggesting that there is no reason for him to have blocked the use of hypothetical final causes in this way.
CITATION STYLE
Detlefsen, K. (2016). Descartes on the Theory of Life and Methodology in the Life Sciences. In History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences (Vol. 14, pp. 141–171). Springer Science and Business Media B.V. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7353-9_7
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