Abstract

Finality places us at the intersection of biology and philosophy. We begin from the questioning of Jacques Monod in Le Hasard et la nécessité. Teleonomy is recognized as an essential characteristic of living beings; but it is the product of chance and necessity. It should however be reinserted into a more expansive context, to the extent of the anthropic principle that has emerged from contemporary cosmology. In opposition to this, we envisage the anti-finalist conception of the positive sciences, from the «Appendix» to the first part of Spinoza's Ethics to the «postulate of objectivity» of Neopositivism, likewise formulated by Monod. In order to go beyond this aporia, a realist critique is necessary: we consider here the contribution of Maréchal on the finality of intelligence, completed by that of Scheuer on the metaphysics that is «immanent per modum formae to scientific knowledge» and finally the justification of the induction and the metaphysical interpretation of the sensible proposed by Isaye. A critical interaction unfolds between science and philosophy, which enables us to reformulate in a new manner the question of finality in nature