The increasing number of proposals to define the concept of life in biology has led some authors to consider this task useless and without sense. All sceptics base their argument on the idea that life is a natural kind with a strong metaphysical commitment. Considering this, the aim of this paper is to explore the concept of life as a non-essentialist natural kind. It is intended to highlight that complex scientific concepts are better understood from points of view that are not constrained by the rigid frameworks of essentialism and the realism/conventionalism dichotomy.

En el debate sobre la definición de vida algunos autores consideran que vida ha de entenderse como un género natural (Cleland y Chyba 2002, Diéguez 2013). Sin embargo, cuando se afirma que vida es un género natural se asumen también otras ideas vinculadas con la idea de género natural que conviene explicitar, tal y como han mostrado recientemente Bich y Green (2018) aunque de manera programática, y ese es precisamente el objetivo planteado aquí; mostrar cuáles son esas implicaciones y señalar las dificultades que surgen al adoptar el discurso sobre los géneros naturales para entender y analizar categorías científicas complejas como, por ejemplo, vida. En este trabajo extendemos esta crítica a las distintas formas de entender los géneros naturales y señalamos cuál es la principal causa de las dificultades que derivan de este planteamiento. In the contemporary philosophy of biology, some authors claim that life is better undertood as a natural kind (Cleland and Chyba 2002, Diéguez 2013). This paper questions the metaphysical commitments related to the natural kind approach in relation with the debate of defining life. The goal of this paper is to show how considering life as a natural kind carries out some difficulties and costs. Those difficulties have been partialy shown by Bich and Green (2018) concerning the essentialist view of natural kinds. In this paper we extended this criticism to other ways of understanding natural kinds and we argue that such a difficulties are due to the acceptance of an inadequate frame of reference, based on a naïve idea of naturalness and on a natural/conventional dichotomy that is not properly justified.