Keyword: agency

21 & 22 October 2022 In this colloquium, we celebrate the 75th birthdays of Giuseppe Longo and Ana Soto. We have chosento show their distinct trajectories and then how they intersect while working on the foundations oftheoretical knowledge with a biology focus. In this respect, both Giuseppe Longo and Ana Sotomaintain a close relationship with […]

Frontiers in Psychology is inviting Research articles, Systematic reviews, Methods, Perspectives, Case reports, Conceptual analyses, and Empirical studies to their forthcoming special issue. Abstract Submission Deadline 24 January 2023Manuscript Submission Deadline 23 May 2023 For more information, see the CFA.

Published open access in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Abstract: We characterize Hegel’s stance on biological purposiveness as consisting in a twofold move, which conceives organisms as intrinsically purposive natural systems and focuses on their behavioral and cognitive abilities. We submit that a Hegelian stance is at play in enactivism, the branch of the contemporary […]

Published open access in Frontiers in Physiology Abstract: Artificial intelligence has made tremendous advances since its inception about seventy years ago. Self-driving cars, programs beating experts at complex games, and smart robots capable of assisting people that need care are just some among the successful examples of machine intelligence. This kind of progress might entice […]

An Interview with Jannie Hofmeyr in Three Parts What is life? This is a question biologists have almost forgotten to ask. Apart from a few lonely souls who occupy themselves with astrobiology or the origin of life, we no longer seem to wonder about life itself. Maybe we have lost the forest for the trees? […]

Published on Entropy 24(4): 472. Abstract: The idea of agent causation—that a system such as a living organism can be a cause of things in the world—is often seen as mysterious and deemed to be at odds with the physicalist thesis that is now commonly embraced in science and philosophy. Instead, the causal power of […]

In the first part I have claimed that dialectical thinking is part and parcel of the enactive approach. I will now try to substantiate this claim. In the 1991 book The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch draw on developmental and evolutionary biology to prepare the reader for the idea of embodied action as a […]

Spontaneous Generations, an interdisciplinary journal published by the graduate students of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, invites contributions to its 12th volume, entitled “Levels of Agency: From Bacteria to Gaia”.  As of now, confirmed contributors include Alan Love, Anne-Sophie Meincke, Denis Walsh, Glenda Satne, and David […]