This paper presents what we call ‘Hegel's philosophy of biology’ to a target audience of both Hegel scholars and philosophers of biology. It also serves to introduce a special issue of the Hegel Bulletin entirely dedicated to a first mapping of this yet to be explored domain of Hegel studies. We submit that Hegel's philosophy of biology can be understood as a radicalization of the Kantian approach to organisms, and as prefiguring current philosophy of biology in important ways, especially with regard to the nature of biological organization, the role of teleology in biological explanation, and the relation between life and cognition.

In the chapter on Observing Reason in the Phenomenology, as well as in §368 of the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel deals with the life sciences of his time. There, he labels the methodology of its representatives, namely zoology and comparative anatomy, as external teleology. In this paper I want to show that by doing so he is actually discussing a general kind of functionalism. Thereby, I want to highlight a line of thought in Hegel's texts which represents a productive reading of external teleology contrary to a destructive reading on which scholars have mainly focussed.

In this paper I return to Hegel's dispute with Kant over the conceptual ordering of external and internal purposiveness to distinguish between two conceptions of teleology at play in the contemporary function debate. I begin by outlining the three main views in the debate (the etiological, causal role and organizational views). I argue that only the organizational view can maintain the capacity of function ascriptions both to explain the presence of a trait and to identify its contribution to a current system, for it is the only view that considers teleology as a natural cause. To establish how teleology can be considered as a natural cause, advocates of the organizational view return to Kant's analysis of internal purposiveness. However, while Kant identifies the requirements that an object must meet to satisfy the demands of teleological judgment, I suggest that he denies that we can know whether they are truly met. I argue that Hegel's philosophy of nature is better equipped to determine how internal purposiveness can be considered as a natural cause, for it grounds organization in a form of purposiveness that is more fundamental than a designer's intention.

Two concepts have polarized the philosophical debates on functions since the 1970s. One is Millikan's concept of ‘proper function’, meant to capture the aetiology of biological organs and artefacts. The other is Cummins's concept of ‘dispositional function’, designed to account for the real work that functional devices perform within a system. In this paper I locate Hegel's concept of biological function in the context of those debates. Admittedly, Hegel's concept is ‘etiological’, since in his account the existence of purposive organs is explained by appeal to their purpose, yet, against Millikan's concept, Hegel's does not presuppose the phenomenon of natural selection nor derives the function of tokens from the function of types. So, my aim is, first, to present Hegel's approach to biological functions as one neither purely etiological nor purely dispositional. It will appear rather as an example of an organizational account (as those advocated today by McLaughlin, Mossio and others), that attributes function according to present performances (unlike etiological accounts) and emphasizes the role of functional parts in their self-production within the system they belong to (unlike dispositional accounts). Finally, I briefly discuss how Hegel's concept performs against common objections to organizational accounts.

There is a broad consensus in the literature that in the section on ‘The Genus’ in the Science of Logic, Hegel argues that any living being must exist among other instances of its kind, with which it reproduces to create future generations, and out of which it was itself produced. This view is not only hard to motivate philosophically, it also seems to contradict many things Hegel says elsewhere in his system about the details of living nature, especially concerning the reality of spontaneous generation. After an examination of the secondary literature on ‘The Genus’, I offer an alternative view of this section, which I call ‘the Modal Reading’. The Modal Reading sees the language of pluralities in ‘The Genus’ as really Hegel's peculiar way of articulating certain modal features of thoughts about the living: to grasp a living individual as living, we need to distinguish not only between this individual and its environment, but also between the things this individual actually does and other possibilities which it does not actualize. The Modal Reading has a logical motivation insofar as it articulates what is needed to think of a living being as living, but it also avoids saddling Hegel with the problematic entailments he is usually read as taking on in this section. A further upshot of the Modal Reading is that approaching Hegel in this way provides us with a way to see Hegel as defending a non-nominalistic alternative to essentialist accounts of living kinds. Finding a way to read ‘The Genus’ which coheres with Hegel's views elsewhere in his system thus shows Hegel to have been an especially subtle and penetrating thinker, with continuing relevance for the philosophy of biology.

My aim in this paper is to show that and how animal organisms are appropriate subjects of normative evaluation, on Hegel's view. I contrast my reading with the interpretive positions of Sebastian Rand and Mark Alznauer. I disagree with Rand and agree with Alznauer that animal organisms are normatively evaluable for Hegel. I substantiate my disagreement with Rand, and supplement Alznauer's interpretation, by spelling out the role that the ‘generic process’ or ‘genus process [Gattungsprozess]’ plays within Hegel's account of animal organisms and their normative evaluability. In the course of my discussion, I highlight the main differences that Hegel purports to identify between animal and vegetable organisms and suggest that the upshot of those differences is that some but not all plants are normatively evaluable, by his lights. I also situate Hegel's discussion of the Gattungsprozess within the debate on biological functions in the philosophy of biology over the last few decades.