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An account of this type of ‘agency’, ‘activity’, ‘substance-causality’ or ‘spontaneity’ in terms of a prior abstract notion of cause and a particular kind of prior state or event is thus I think impossible. 5. Summary of Results Reached So Far A number of abstract categories—that of a concrete individual; of a thing’s being a part of something; of order or organization; of one thing’s following another in a process; of a thing’s doing something— are all together determined or specified, or thrown into a higher gear, to yield the concepts: organism; organ, ‘part’ or ‘member’; vital order or organ-ization; life-process; and vital operation.

M. Nussbaum and A. Rorty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), pp. 185–193. 36 The R e p re se n tation of Life tion of a pine needle. It reflects the complicated organization of many different kinds of atoms into molecules and of molecules into complex structures. ” It is worth enquiring, though, how the intended notion of organization is supposed to work. Is it meant to cover the organization of parts in an animal, of parts in a car, of words on a page, of people in a factory, of molecules in a crystal? If the notion is so abstract, then I think we can have little reason to think that there is any one consistent measure of more-and-less in respect of it.

She seems to allow that the properties she retails are neither collectively sufficient nor severally necessary for the ‘system’ that bears them to count as alive; are they meant to illustrate a system of ‘family resemblances’? And are we doing metaphysics or epistemology? She calls the properties “signs” of life, and speaks of how “we recognize a system as being alive”; but the inner tendency of such a list is surely toward a real definition, a metaphysical analysis, a teaching about ‘what life consists in’—in any case, something on the order of criteria, not symptoms.