There has been a burst of work in the last couple of decades on mechanistic explanation, as an alternative to the traditional covering-law model of scientific explanation. That work makes some interesting claims about mechanistic explanations rendering phenomena ‘intelligible’, but does not develop this idea in great depth. There has also been a growth of interest in giving an account of scientific understanding, as a complement to an account of explanation, specifically addressing a three-place relationship between explanation, world, and the (...) scientific community. The aim of this paper is to use the contextual theory of scientific understanding to build an account of understanding phenomena using mechanistic explanations. This account will be developed and illustrated by examining the mechanisms of supernovae, which will allow synthesis of treatment of the life sciences and social sciences on the one hand, where many accounts of mechanisms were originally developed, and treatment of physics on the other hand, where the contextual theory drew its original inspiration. (shrink)

At various points in his work on physiology and medicine, Descartes refers to a “principle of life.” The exact term changes—sometimes, it is the “principle of movement and life”, sometimes the “principle underlying all [the] functions” of the body —but the message seems consistent: the phenomena of living bodies are the product of a single, underlying principle. That principle is generally taken to be cardiac heat.1 The literature has, quite reasonably, taken this message at face value. Thus, Shapiro: “Descartes insists (...) again and again that the human body is properly to be described as a machine whose workings are […] driven by the heat in the heart that... (shrink)

I argue that Descartes is not a reductionist about life, but dissolves or eliminates the category entirely. This is surprising both because he repeatedly refers to the life of humans, animals, and plants and because he appears to rely on the category of life to construct his physiology and medicine. Various attempts have been made in the scholarship to attribute a principled concept of life to Descartes. Most recently, Detlefsen has argued that Descartes “is a reductionist with respect to explanation (...) of life phenomena but not an eliminativist with respect to life itself”. I show that all these attempts either result in arbitrariness or force Descartes's wider philosophical project into incoherence. I argue that Descartes's ontological commitments make a principled concept of life impossible, that he does not need such a concept, and that his project ends up more coherent without one. (shrink)