Is A Metaphysical Revolution Afoot in the Natural Sciences?

My dialogue with Mahon McCann

In this conversation, Mahon McCann invited me to reflect on what he referred to as a metaphysical revolution in natural science—gesturing toward the shift I and others have been tracking across disciplines including physics, biology, and cognitive science, where the old mechanistic, substance-based ontology seems increasingly inadequate to account for what’s actually being discovered and needing to be theorized. Mahon framed the discussion around the broader zeitgeist, noting how many of the guests I’ve been in dialogue with recently—like Michael Levin in biology or Ruth Kastner in physics—are pointing to a deep need for new metaphysical frameworks, ones that leave room for formal and final causation and that do not ignore or explain away the conscious agency of scientists.

I began by acknowledging a possible selection bias—I tend to be contacted by scientists who are already seeking philosophical support for paradigm-challenging ideas—but I still think there’s something real happening: a broad metaphysical shift, particularly in physics and now increasingly in biology. Physics, in a sense, already went through a revolution a century ago with relativity and quantum theories. What we’re seeing now is a growing philosophical maturation of that revolution—physicists are more open to theology, to questions of consciousness, to metaphysical pluralism.

Biology, interestingly, has lagged behind somewhat. I noted how much of 20th-century biology was dominated by gene-centric, reductionistic models, trying to explain life in terms of a mechanistic physical base, even though that mechanistic model had already broken down in physics. But thinkers like Levin are now pointing out that cells and organisms don’t just passively follow genetic algorithms—they act with creative agency and purpose, even intelligence. Levin himself talks about "Platonic morphospace" as a domain from which cells ingress form—a phrase that opens the door to a reintroduction of formal and final causality into science.

We discussed how this trend also shows up in cognitive science, particularly in the study of attention. Attention, as has been noted, is tied to relevance—which itself is a value-laden, normative category. So even here, scientific inquiry runs headlong into questions of value and purpose. I emphasized that for Kant—and for many thinkers in his wake—life is unintelligible without some concept of purposiveness. In fact, for Kant, organisms only show up for us as living things because we apprehend them as goal-directed. That’s the regulative idea we use to define life. He didn’t think we could have genuine knowledge of organisms in the way we can explain mechanical systems, because organisms seem to instantiate ideas, and Kant didn't think ideas could be real outside the human mind.

That’s where German Idealism takes over, pushing past Kant’s epistemological limits. Thinkers like Schelling, Hegel, and Goethe followed the breadcrumbs that Kant left in the Critique of Judgment—particularly the notion of intellectual intuition and the possibility of an archetypal intellect—and developed a more organic metaphysics. I argued that this lineage allows us to think about life not just descriptively but cosmologically. Self-organizing living beings are the crack in the Kantian phenomenal/noumenal firewall, opening up an approach to the study of form and purpose as operative in nature itself, not just in the human subject.

This led us into a discussion about Plato, particularly the role of the Forms and the Good. Whereas Kant internalizes the source of intelligibility into the human mind, Plato saw Forms—and especially the Good—as ontologically real. For Plato, the Forms aren’t simply names or generalizations from particulars; they’re real universals with causal efficacy. The Good, in particular, is what makes truth and knowledge possible—it’s the source of intelligibility itself. In Kant, by contrast, the categories of understanding are what shape our experience, but they don’t touch the “thing-in-itself.” He’s still Platonic in structure, but without the ladder from appearance to reality. I described Kant’s move as squeezing the Platonic cosmos into the human mind.

We explored how modern science’s nominalism—its refusal to attribute reality to universals—has limited our ability to make sense of the kinds of wholeness and goal-directedness we now observe in biological systems. This connects to the broader loss of metaphysical grounding: if truth is reduced to correspondence or coherence alone, without any deeper participatory engagement, science begins to undermine its own foundations. That’s what happens, for example, in Donald Hoffman’s work, where evolutionary theory leads to a radical skepticism about the possibility of knowing reality at all.

Against that backdrop, I introduced the idea of truth as participation—a concept I’ve been developing as a way to retrieve and update the classical and process-relational view. Rather than seeing truth as merely a matter of correct representation (correspondence) or internal consistency (coherence), truth as participation demands a kind of transformation in the knower. It’s an event of disclosure—aletheia—in which the knower and the known become co-constitutive. It’s not that we just discover truth; we are changed by it.

This view of truth brings together science, ethics, and even spirituality. It reintroduces the importance of virtue epistemology, where the character of the knower matters. I drew on Goethe here, noting how his method of “delicate empiricism” required a loving, empathetic attunement to the phenomenon. Such a moral disposition actually reveals more of the world than the detached stance of mechanistic objectivity. In this participatory mode, we as human beings are not exceptions to the cosmos—we are microcosmoi. And studying ourselves can give us insight into the larger patterns of nature.

We also touched on predictive processing and the free energy principle, noting how these frameworks—though often interpreted in a reductive or skeptical way—can support a return to the microcosm/macrocosm paradigm. If organisms are generative models of their environments, one could just as well say that organisms are how the environment models itself. This inversion supports a process-relational view of cognition and life, where both efficient and final causes are needed. The point is not to jettison efficient causality but to balance it with final causality, acknowledging that living systems are pulled by values and ideal lures as much as pushed by given conditions.

Later in the conversation, we explored Plato’s Timaeus and its notion of divine and necessary causes. I argued that Plato’s conception of necessity (anankē) is more akin to chance or wildness than to modern mechanical necessity. The receptacle, or khōra, is not just passive matter but a vibratory matrix with its own unruliness—a form of formlessness. Plato’s cosmology here is much more evolutionary than Aristotle’s static cosmos. In fact, Whitehead, in reading the Timaeus, emphasized that form acts not as a deterministic cause but as an invitational lure. The organism draws on possible forms to actualize itself—it is not stamped by them, but participates in their realization.

I explained that in Whitehead’s metaphysics, the forms (or “eternal objects”) are housed in the primordial nature of God, and are offered as lures, not imposed as determining causes. The agent is the actual occasion of experience, not the form itself. But that doesn’t mean the forms lack ontological reality—they are necessary for definiteness, making it possible for science to recognize generality in the processes of nature. The Good, or God, in this view functions like a final cause, drawing the world toward beauty and intensity of experience. But crucially, Whitehead’s God also includes a consequent nature, allowing for the real evolutionary process of novelty and suffering to be integrated and divinely felt.

In closing, I was asked how I would characterize this participatory notion of truth. I emphasized that truth requires something of us—not just cognitive assent but existential risk. It’s not static information waiting to be found, but something that changes us, and in turn, is co-created by us. Truth and trust share an etymological root, and I suggested that truth reveals itself only to those who are trustworthy—who have cultivated the virtues necessary for revelation. In this way, truth becomes more than a property of propositions; it becomes a relationship, a moral and spiritual practice, a path of transformation.