Abstract
Why did Prodi, while engaged in his scientific work, begin to study and to write philosophy? In this chapter, I will attempt to answer this question. The guiding idea is that Prodi realized that, in order to truly be a scientist, one needs to reflect on what it means to be a scientist. Otherwise, the scientist loses the intrinsically ethico-political dimension of his or her work. But once Prodi stepped into the philosophical field, he could not stop, since—consistent with his belief in continuity—he realized that every philosophical problem is intimately connected with others. Prodi the scientist becomes Prodi the philosopher.
Critical thought does not begin with a suspension of the usual modalities of knowledge, thus inaugurating a new, purely human, course. Rather, it reflects more carefully on those modalities as they relate to things , therefore grounding itself in the real. Science and critical thought are therefore synonymous.
(Prodi 1974: 147)
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Notes
- 1.
For this reason, Prodi’s theory is an ontology, that is, a description of the structure of the world, based on biosemiotics: a systematic bio-ontology. Prodi’s perspective is similar to that of Buchanan (2008), although his book is never cited. According to Buchanan, “ethology emerges as the significant dimension in framing the being and becoming of the animal. The animal body is interrelated with its environment through the process of behavior, so it becomes a question of how to engage the ontological dimension of this relation” (Buchanan 2008: 5).
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Cimatti, F. (2018). Scientist Because Philosopher, Philosopher Because Scientist. In: A Biosemiotic Ontology . Biosemiotics, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97903-8_3
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