Dialectics, Science, and Naturalism: An Outline

8 August 2023

Dialectics, Science, and Naturalism: An Outline

Introduction The last century saw two prevailing trends between dialectics and science. On one side, Western Marxism, which was defined by Lukács rejection of Engels’ philosophy of nature; on the other, those who embraced the dialectics of nature, the dialectical materialists (Foster 2020). While the former tended to conflate science with positivism and therefore ignored […]

Read article

Dialectical thinking in the science of heredity: yesterday, today and tomorrow

8 March 2023

Dialectical thinking in the science of heredity: yesterday, today and tomorrow

Dialectical thinking has been pervasive in philosophy of developmental biology. After the paradigm of the “genetic program” (Jacob, 1970) according to which an organism is the expression of an authoritative program engraved in heredity, the late 20th and early 21st centuries have emphasized that biological systems result from a dialectical process taking place between genes […]

Read article

New Paper (2022), A. Gambarotto, M. Mossio, Enactivism and the Hegelian Stance on Intrinsic Purposiveness

8 December 2022

New Paper (2022), A. Gambarotto, M. Mossio, Enactivism and the Hegelian Stance on Intrinsic Purposiveness

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 […]

Read article

Enaction and Dialectics – Part I

6 October 2022

Enaction and Dialectics – Part I

The enactive approach is a rich perspective on the big questions of life and mind originating in the work of Francisco Varela and colleagues. [1] It is a perspective in continuous development, which makes it difficult to condense in a brief text. Enaction is a way of looking at life and mind as continuous. This […]

Read article