Keyword: holism

Biology studies organisms. This seems to be a truism. But is this assumption really correct? Some scientists and philosophers hold that it is not. Developmental biologist Brian Goodwin, for example, states:   “Organisms have disappeared as fundamental entities, as basic unities, from contemporary biology because they have no real status as centres of causal agency. […]

We publish here a preview of the this forthcoming volume. The pdf version of the introduction, including table of contents, is available here. The book will be available Open Access starting January 2023. Vitalism has spent most of the twentieth century being perhaps the most misunderstood and reviled philosophy of life, with organicism being a […]

What is an ‘organism’? A state of matter, or a particular type of living being chosen as an experimental object, like the fruit fly or the zebrafish, which are ‘model organisms’? Organisms are real, in a trivial sense, since flies and fish and thylacines or Tasmanian tigers are (or were, in the latter case) as […]

Published on Entropy 24(4): 472. Abstract: The idea of agent causation—that a system such as a living organism can be a cause of things in the world—is often seen as mysterious and deemed to be at odds with the physicalist thesis that is now commonly embraced in science and philosophy. Instead, the causal power of […]