Keyword: ecosystems

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 […]

Issue 11 of Sponeaneous Generations the Journal of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. It includes essays by Ezequiel Di Paolo, Alan Love, Dan Brooks, Jan Baedke, Tobias Uller, Mathilde Tahar and others. All essays available open access here.

31 January 2023: deadline for all submission formats https://site.pheedloop.com/event/ISHPSSB2023/home

Published in Ecological Complexity Abstract: The interest in understanding the climate-life system that has fostered the Gaia hypothesis (GH) has resulted in multiple explanatory theories, making its status unclear and controversial. This work seeks to bring some clarity to the debates surrounding the GH with the aim to make it amenable to scientific scrutiny. We discuss what […]

How can the meeting between a philosopher of science and an ecologist contribute to the advancement in an area of ​​Ecology? Do we have anything to gain from this dialogue? And if the answer is “yes”, who wins in this story? It was in the search for a solution to existing problems in a certain […]

Published in Azimuth, preprint available here. Abstract: How biology should figure in Anthropocene studies, hitherto stemming from Earth sciences and a broad constellation of human and social sciences, is still an unsettled issue among scholars. Here, we contribute with a historiographically-informed perspective on the specific role that ‘biological theory’ has played in past rounds of […]

The first session of the of the IAS research seminar 2022/2023 will take place next Thursday, October 20th, at 4pm. To connect remotely please register by writing to: andrea.gambarotto@ehu.eus Biological Autonomy and Gaian Systems Sergio Rubin Georges Lemaître Centre for Earth and Climate Research, Earth and Life Institute, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium In this presentation it […]

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 […]

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 […]

Today we have the pleasure to inaugurate Dialectical Systems, a forum where scholars and the general public interested in biology, cognitive science, ecology and philosophy of science can engage in a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue. The forum’s name is inspired by the landmark book The Dialectical Biologist (1985), in which Levins and Lewontin put forward an […]