Kate Nave

Kate (Kathryn) Nave is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on developing a realist account of agency, grounded in the uniquely metabolic existence of living systems, and upon critiquing the machine concept of the mind in light of this distinctive material instability. Her current interests are 1) investigating how this organicist account of normativity could supply an alternative framework for the identification of functions in cognitive neuroscience and 2) Looking at how constructivist accounts of normativity that draw upon Hegel, Aristotle, and Kant might be integrated into the scientific framework of organicist biology.  
 
Her first book, an extended critique of the free energy principle entitled, A Drive to Survive: the Free Energy Principle and The Meaning of Life is forthcoming with MIT Press in late 2024/early 2025. Outside of academia, she has worked as a science and technology journalist for publications including WIRED Magazine, The Economist, The Guardian, GQ and the Institute of Public Policy Research.

Posts by Kate Nave

Life beyond the free energy principle: how to survive without invariance

28 February 2024

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