The Philosophy of Adaptivity

27 March 2025

The Philosophy of Adaptivity

At the core of life is adaptivity, the organismal process of adjusting to ever-changing conditions. But despite its centrality, adaptivity is a surprisingly lonely concept. Its most immediate lexical relatives are parts of entirely distinct evolutionary conversations: ‘adapting’ immediately evokes thoughts of natural selection, ‘adaptive’ (typically paired with ‘maladaptive’) is used in normative evaluations of […]

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New Special Issue (2025): “Teleology for the twenty-first century”

11 March 2025

New Special Issue (2025): “Teleology for the twenty-first century”

This new special issue of Synthese challenges the widespread neglect of teleology in analytic philosophy, demonstrating its ongoing relevance across multiple domains. While often dismissed due to its historical associations with Aristotelianism and pre-Darwinian thought, teleological explanations remain indispensable in understanding biological functions, human agency, social institutions, and even aspects of epistemology and ethics. The […]

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Paper (2024) : Biological agency: a concept without a research program

8 January 2025

Paper (2024) : Biological agency: a concept without a research program

By James DiFrisco & Richard Gawne. Published in Journal of Evolutionary Biology Abstract: This paper evaluates recent work purporting to show that the “agency” of organisms is an important phenomenon for evolutionary biology to study. Biological agency is understood as the capacity for goal-directed, self-determining activity—a capacity that is present in all organisms irrespective of […]

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Paper (2024): Naturalizing relevance realization: Naturalizing relevance realization: why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computationalPaper (2024): Naturalizing relevance realization:

3 December 2024

Paper (2024): Naturalizing relevance realization: Naturalizing relevance realization: why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computationalPaper (2024): Naturalizing relevance realization:

Published open access in Frontiers in Phychology Abstract: The way organismic agents come to know the world, and the way algorithms solve problems, are fundamentally different. The most sensible course of action for an organism does not simply follow from logical rules of inference. Before it can even use such rules, the organism must tackle […]

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Teleology in Biology: Bergson and evolutionary theory

12 November 2024

Teleology in Biology: Bergson and evolutionary theory

Tahar, Mathilde (2024). Du finalisme en biologie. Bergson et la théorie de l’évolution. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. As Ernst Mayr wrote, “no other ideology has influenced biology more profoundly than teleological thinking” (Mayr 1992, 117). This approach, which interprets phenomena based on their finality (telos), has permeated the history of biology since Aristotle. It […]

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Recognizing Animal Agency in Environmental Conservation 

11 November 2024

Recognizing Animal Agency in Environmental Conservation 

with Marc Bekoff and Matthew Hayek About the even Current approaches in environmental conservation do not sufficiently recognize the agency of wild animals, meaningfully affecting the outcomes of conservation interventions. In this conversation, the authors of two recent articles on this topic will discuss how understanding individual differences in animal personalities and behaviors can transform […]

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New Paper (2024): Eating and Cognition in Two Animals without Neurons: Sponges and Trichoplax

17 June 2024

New Paper (2024): Eating and Cognition in Two Animals without Neurons: Sponges and Trichoplax

Published open-access in Biological Theory as part of the upcoming special issue on Ladislav Kováč and the Origins of Cognitive Biology. Abstract: Eating is a fundamental behavior in which all organisms must engage in order to procure the material and energy from their environment that they need to maintain themselves. Since controlling eating requires procuring, […]

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New Paper (2024): Organizational teleology 2.0: Grounding biological purposiveness in regulatory control

28 May 2024

New Paper (2024): Organizational teleology 2.0: Grounding biological purposiveness in regulatory control

Published open-access in Ratio. Abstract: This paper critically revises the organisational account of teleology, which argues that living systems are first and foremost oriented towards a goal: maintaining their own conditions of existence. It points out some limitations of this account, mainly in the capability to account for the richness and complexity of biological systems […]

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New Paper (2023): Piaget’s Paradox: Adaptation, Evolution, and Agency

8 May 2024

New Paper (2023): Piaget’s Paradox: Adaptation, Evolution, and Agency

In this paper, published open access in Human Development, Denis Walsh addresses Piaget’s theory of equilibration and its significance in overcoming the Modern Synthesis, as an object theory, for an agent theory of evolution. Abstract: Piaget’s Behaviour and Evolution (1976) sought to reconcile the view that organismal adaptiveness – in the form of equilibration – could contribute […]

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Could All Life Be Agential?”

2 May 2024

Could All Life Be Agential?”

In 1892, Ernst Haeckel introduced the term biopsychism to express the view that all and only living beings are sentient. For Haeckel, this position was to be distinguished both from zoopsychism, the belief that all and only animals are sentient, and his preferred panpsychism, the belief that all and only matter is sentient (Haeckel 1892: […]

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