Abstract
The Introduction has pointed out that the distinguishing criterion between what is an artefact and what is not does not lie in the distinction between the inert or the inanimate (the abiotic or the exbiotic) on the one hand, and the living or animate (the biotic) on the other. It may turn out that living organisms are just as susceptible to being transformed into artefacts as non-living matter. As the long history of domestication of plants and animals shows, it is not a misnomer to call the products of domestication ‘biotic artefacts’. But in order to see why it is not so, particularly today, one must first examine the notion of artefact itself.
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Notes
Alternative definitions are: ‘a device consisting of two or more resistant, relatively constrained parts that may serve to transmit and modify force and motion in order to do work’ (Alexander Cowie in New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 1975, 11, 231)
or ‘a device for transforming or transferring energy’ (George H. Martin, Kinematics and Dynamics of Machines, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969, 3). (These definitions are cited by Mitcham, 1994, p. 327.)
Maturana, Varela and Uribe published an earlier version in English entitled ‘Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems’ in Biosystems, 5 (1974) 187–96.
Francisco J. Varela published Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979).
This was followed by Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1980). A nontechnical presentation is found in Maturana and Varela (1988), especially in chapter 2. This popularised version has influenced significantly a strain of environmental thinking. Warwick Fox (1990, pp. 165–76) introduced the concept ‘autopoiesis’ to environmental philosophy. See Eckersley (1992, pp. 60–1, 70–1) for a direct endorsement, and Gare (1995, p. 129) for an oblique endorsement. But see Plumwood (1993, p. 210) for a more critical response. Freya Mathews, while saying that her ‘idea of self-realizability matches up, in essential respects, with Maturana’s notion of autopoiesis’, nevertheless recognises that hers ‘differs from Maturana’s in the following fundamental respect … [Where] Maturana considers that autopoiesis dissolves the apparent telos of living systems, I see the capacity for self-realization, understood in systems-theoretical terms, as definitive of telos’ ( 1991, p. 173 ).
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© 2005 KeeKok Lee
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Lee, K. (2005). Living Organisms: Their Philosophical Transformation from Natural to Artefactual Beings. In: Philosophy and Revolutions in Genetics. Renewing Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599024_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599024_2
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