Between Mechanical and Teleological Explanations of Life. Towards a New Image of Nature

It is certainly true that in early modern thought the emergence of a new science changed the image of the universe in a mechanistic way. It must be considered, though, that most of the main protagonists of this revolution (Kepler, Newton, Leibniz, ‘biologists’ like Leeuwenhoek, Hartsoeker, Hooke, Malpighi, Redi, etc.) still continued to consider the importance and the utility of a finalistic explanation of natural phenomena. Concepts like “function”, “self-organization” and “organism” have roots in early modern thought, and not only from a linguistic and semantic point of view. They were the basis of an epistemology in which different kinds of categories are closely related. Aim of the workshop was to take into account the relevance of the mechanical explanation of natural phenomena and at the same time to highlight the polarization between the mechanical and the finalistic explanation. One of its specific aims was therefore to analyze and to develop this kind of dialectic between “teleology” and "mechanism", with particular reference to the changes in the concepts of “living being” and “artefact”.