The question of specific properties of life compared to nonliving things accompanied biology throughout its history. At times this question generated major controversies with largely diverging opinions. Basically, mechanistic thinkers, who tried to understand organismic functions in terms of nonliving machines, were opposed by those who tried to describe specific properties or even special forces being active within living entities. As this question included the human body, these controversies always have been of special relevance to our self-image and also touched (...) practical issues of medicine. During the second half of the twentieth century, it seemed to be resolved that organisms are explainable basically as physicochemical machines. Especially from the perspective of molecular biology, it seemed to be clear that organisms need to be explained solely by the chemical functions of their component parts, although some resistance to this view never ceased. This research program has been working quite successfully, so that science today knows a lot about the physiological and chemical processes within organisms. However, again new doubts arise questioning whether the mere continuation of this analytical approach will finally generate a fundamental understanding of living entities. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the quest for a new synthesis actually comes from analytical empiricists themselves. The hypothesis of the present paper is that empirical research has been developed far enough today, that it reveals by itself the materials and the prerequisites to understand more of the specific properties of life. Without recourse to mysterious forces, it is possible to generate answers to this age-old question, just using recent, empirically generated knowledge. This view does not contradict the results of reductionistic research, but rather grants them meaning within the context of organismic systems and also may increase their practical usefulness. Although several of these properties have been discussed before, different authors usually concentrated on a single one or some of them. The paper describes ten specific properties of living entities as they can be deduced from contemporary science. The aim is to demonstrate that the results of empirical research show both the necessity as well as the possibility of the development of a new conception of life to build a coherent understanding of organismic functions. (shrink)

Although life and questions connected with its definition among traditional philosophical topics, at the beginning of the twenty-first century and after roughly two and a half thousand years of philosophical tradition no satisfactory definition of life is at one’s disposal. Though difficulties bond up with life definition don´t accompany philosophy alone, but also almost all fields touched by this topic. Causes of this state of affairs can be viewed as a combination of several complementary connected facts. Those facts are in (...) the text stated as reasons against the possibility of creating universal definition of life and apply here one by one to the origin of life a postulated boarder line between life and nonlife, evolution of life and its variedness, multiplicity of definitions of life and still going discoveries of new organisms, philosophical tradition and lack of clarity of concepts, evolution of life as a historical process, critique of definitions of life from the point of view of „sample one“ and reflection of the concept life by conceptual analysis. Particular sources are about to be analyzed from the point of philosophy of biology with care for philosophical tradition, to questions linked with life and its selected definitions, to actual findings and explorations focused on life and possible contribution of philosophy to the endeavor of finding definition of life as such. Ground of proposed text is naturalism, physicalism and reductionism. (shrink)

I argue that Darwinian evolutionary theory has a rhetorical dimension and that rhetorical criticism plays a role in how evolutionary science acquires knowledge. I define what I mean by rhetoric by considering Darwin’s Origin. I use the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis to show how rhetoric conceived as situated and addressed argumentation enters into evolutionary theorizing. Finally, I argue that rhetorical criticism helps judge the success, limits, and failures of these theories.