Keyword: dialectics

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 […]

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: […]

We are pleased to announce the call for abstract for this Conference, on the relation between the Marxian tradition and the left-Sellarsian Pittsburgh School, to be held at University College London. Thee conference aims to build a dialogical space between Marxism and the Pittsburgh School in this conference and thus extend this call for papers. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]