William Bechtel
Professor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego

"Autonomy and Accommodation"

Abstract: The mechanistic perspective that has been developed in the past decade remains too closely tied to the Cartesian tradition of mechanism to be adequate for the phenomena of biology. Unlike ordinary physical mechanisms, including those humans make, biological mechanisms face special demands. The 19th century vitalists understood these well, and this underlay their
repudiation of the mechanism of their day. A mechanism that is adequate to biology must address these demands faced by living systems. This paper proposes some amendments to the current conception of mechanism that are required to render mechanism biologially adequate.