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 Biological Theory

17 April 2024

New Biological Theory

New issue of biological theory with a thematic section on biological agency, including paper by Louis Virenque & Matteo Mossio on agency in biological autonomy, Andrew Pickering on agency in Science Studies, Samir Okasha on agency and evolution, and a commentary essay by Lenny Moss. All essays available in open-access here.

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New paper (2023): Ecosystem health and malfunctions: an organisational perspective

2 April 2024

New paper (2023): Ecosystem health and malfunctions: an organisational perspective

Published open-access in Biology and Philosophy Abstract: A recent idea of “ecosystem health” was introduced in the 1970s and 1980s to draws attention to the fact that ecosystems can become ill because of a reduction of properties such as primary productivity, functions and diversity of interactions among system components. Starting from the 1990s, this idea […]

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Workshop: Self-organization, Autonomy and the Bounds of the Self

13 March 2024

Workshop: Self-organization, Autonomy and the Bounds of the Self

Workshop on biological autonomy and the question of organismal agency at the Université Paris I. More information and the link to follow remotely available on the conference website. Program Lundi 18 mars 2024 9h00-9h15 : Ouverture du workshop/opening session : Florian Moullard (Bordeaux-Montaigne, SPH; Paris 1, IHPST) et Louis Virenque (CNRS, IHPST, Paris I),The Problem for Defining Agency. 9h15-10h45 : Anna Ciaunica (Université […]

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

28 February 2024

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

Since emerging onto the stage as ‘a theory of cortical responses’ in 2005[1], Karl Friston’s free energy principle has undergone numerous costume changes. In its most modest dress, it appears as nothing more than a tautological truism[2]: in its most eye-catching ensemble it is “an existential dyad from which everything of interest about life and […]

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Call for applications: Seventh European Advanced School in the Philosophy of the Life Sciences (EASPLS): “Explanation and Evidence in Biology and Medicine”

20 February 2024

Call for applications:  Seventh European Advanced School in the Philosophy of the Life Sciences (EASPLS): “Explanation and Evidence in Biology and Medicine”

The event will take place at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition in Klosterneuburg (Austria) on September 9th-12th. The summer school is organized by Leonardo Bich, Lucie Laplane and Matteo Mossio and is is mainly intended for young scholars, including PhD students and early post-doctoral researchers, who are engaged in the study of […]

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New Book (2023): Organization in Biology

22 November 2023

New Book (2023): Organization in Biology

Published open access by Springer From the editor’s introduction: For most of the twentieth century, biology forgot or largely neglected organization. By this term, I mean a certain mode of interaction among the parts of a system, which is by hypothesis distinctively realized by biological systems. While a systemic trend is progressively pervading various biological […]

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New Issue (2023): Autopoiesis: Foundations of Life, Cognition, and Emergence of Self/Other

6 October 2023

New Issue (2023): Autopoiesis: Foundations of Life, Cognition, and Emergence of Self/Other

This new issue of BioSystems is entirely dedicated to explore the contemporary variations on the theme of autopoiesis, how the concept has been received, modified, implemented and operationalized from its original formulation in the early 1980s. Fifty years after the birth of autopoiesis theory, by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, the rich […]

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Workshop: Agency & Life (Syros, July 4-5)

22 June 2023

Workshop: Agency & Life (Syros, July 4-5)

We are glad to announce this workshop on the notion of organismal agency, which will take place in hybrid form at the University of the Aegean, Syros, Greece. Those who wish to attend the workshop online please contact Argyris Arnellos at arar@aegean.gr before the 3rd of July. Please be aware that times indicated below correspond […]

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