The Nature of Life

The nature of life used to concern philosophers—think of Aristotle and Kant—but most philosophers ignore the issue today, perhaps because it seems too "scientific". At the same time, most biologists also ignore the issue, perhaps because it seems too "philosophical". But this intellectual context has just been changed by the advent of the new interdisciplinary field of artificial life. Using the resources of both philosophy and artificial life, I will try to revive the question of the nature of life and defend a certain answer to it.