Naturalistic Understanding of Life

Abstract

If objects that are alive could be reduced to(or be explained as)objects that are made of matter, then in principle there would be no problem to understand life. But neither logical nor physical analysis didn't work well for reducing the living phenomena until C. Darwin. The theory of natural selection successfully rejected the non-physicalist theories of life, which depend on the explanans like an élan vital or an entelechy.
However, different from the reductions among the physical theories, this naturalistic program is not so simple. Naturalistic explanation of biological phenomena has to overcome several problems. For instance, the two characteristics of life, the end and the vital force, have to be reduced to the results of evolutionary changes by natural selection just as Newton did in physics. On the other hand, the direct results of natural selection, that is, adaptations, have to be interpreted historically. Here we have additional new characters of scientific explanation. The evolutionary explanation is causal, but at the same time it is historical and adaptive.
Organisms have adaptive properties as well as physical properties. Phenomenal properties, a subclass of the class of adaptive properties, are also explained as dispositional properties. Here adaptive properties are real, even though there are no objects except physical ones.
To understand living things as the historical products, we have to use several concepts such as supervenience, multiple realizability and particularly information. And in fact during the last half of the 20^th century and even now, many philosophers of biology, corroborating with biologists, have been clarifying the evolutionary properties of life in terms of these concepts.