Keyword: biological autonomy

From October 10–12, at the University of Toronto, a workshop marked 40 years since the publication of The Dialectical Biologist (1985) by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. The book, a collection of their earlier papers, aimed to present a coherent vision of how Marxian dialectics can inform biological theory. It stands alongside other critical works, […]

In this new book, Alvaro Moreno and Juli Peretó look at the major transitions in the history of biological agency, from the origins of life to the complexity of Metazoans, and its role in the complexification of biological organization in the history of life. Available open-access here. About this book This open access book exposes […]

Already in the early 2000s, Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson emphasized that the notion of autonomy should be understood as scaffolded along multiple, entangled, and overlapping dimensions—namely, biological regulation, sensorimotor coupling, and social interaction. Since then, various developments of the autonomy framework have sought to articulate this multidimensionality. The enactive approach, particularly the version proposed […]

Today, we celebrate the new publication of Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979) by MIT Press, now accompanied by a new critical apparatus by Ezequiel Di Paolo and Evan Thompson.Varela’s ideas continue to shape cognitive science through the ongoing development of the enactive approach, which today encompasses accounts of various aspects of cognition and is becoming […]

Published open access in Philosophy of Science. Abstract: In this paper I offer a model-theoretic interpretation of Autonomy Theory as defended by Moreno, Mossio, Montévil, and Bich. I address accusations that Autonomy Theory is excessively liberal, such as those made by Garson (2017), arguing that these misunderstand the role of strategic abstractions and generalizations in […]

Published as part of The Routledge Handbook of Causality and Causal Methods and available open access here. Abstract: In order to carry out many scientific practices, say, doing measurements, building explanations, planning interventions, it is necessary to identify which causal systems will be measured, explained or intervened upon. Accordingly, it is important in biological research […]

Author: Leonardo Bich Date of publication: 04 December 2024 Publisher: Cambridge University Press The PDF version of this book is available here. Summary Living systems are complex systems made of components that tend to degrade, but nonetheless they maintain themselves far from equilibrium. This requires living systems to extract energy and materials from the environment […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]