Are we still cartesians? On the idea of life

Abstract

The question that drives us does not seek, in Heideggerian sense, the thoughtless forgetfulness of one historical development, but it only wants to delimit the state of the art concerning the Cartesian world’s view. For this purpose, however, it does not go beyond the epistemic horizon of the Philosophy of Biology because this paper will focus on the diagnosis of the “identity crisis” of Biology, whose experimental success should not camouflage its “epistemological depression”. Indeed, it is about a science that, between physics and metaphysics, has not yet found its theoretical space. Eventually, it is possible to trace that difficulty back to the modern age and its philosophical roots. Thus, it is necessary an evaluation of the paradigm shift that Descartes has introduced into the order of knowledge, according to which the goal of rational investigation becomes the dominion of nature.