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Metaphysics can be understood as a discipline whose object is the intelligible entities, but it is also an interpretation of nature, which is its real beginning as Plato ́s «second sailing». Nietzsche ́s inversion of Platonism has in the critique of finalism one of its main points. The opposition apparent/true world, from this perspective, can be explained in terms of the absence or presence of teleology in the interpretation of nature, but in Nietzsche ́s view finalism belongs to the apparent and not to the real world. Leaving aside his critique and the genealogy that he attributes to Platonism, his interpretation of Plato ́s philosophy in this point in accurate, because Plato tried to deliver with his theory of ideas a conception of the real causes of becoming, based on the categories of finality and unity, just what he called his «second sailing», as an alternative to the theory of nature proposed by Presocratic philosophy.

One century and half after the publication of Darwin’s Origin, Owen’s notion of homology, which implies that two organs or features under comparison can be recognized as “the same” continues to dominate current approaches to the problem of homology. Eventually, the idea that characters can “remain themselves” throughout an indefinite although obviously finite number of possible alternative states that follow one another in the course of evolution is probably based on an idealistic interpretation of how organisms evolve. If the existence of body features that are “the same” is taken as given, then the existence of homologues can be explained according to one of the following lines: (i) in terms of universal laws of form, perhaps reformulated in the language of process structuralism, or (ii) as the product of common ancestry, or (iii) in terms of proximal causes responsible for the emergence of conserved developmental modules. However, reading the history of life through the lens of evolution, it appears very problematic to describe organisms in terms of characters that, since they first showed up as evolutionary novelties, eventually remain as essentially unchanging building blocks among which we can predicate or negate homology. All traits are better interpreted as complex and ever-changing intersections of an indeterminate number of features, and of the processes shaping them in ontogeny and in phylogeny. As a consequence, a factorial or combinatorial approach to homology is suggested.

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