Keyword: organism

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

21 & 22 October 2022 In this colloquium, we celebrate the 75th birthdays of Giuseppe Longo and Ana Soto. We have chosento show their distinct trajectories and then how they intersect while working on the foundations oftheoretical knowledge with a biology focus. In this respect, both Giuseppe Longo and Ana Sotomaintain a close relationship with […]

In an unpublished manuscript datable to 1956-1957, La vision comme modèle de la connaissance[1] (Vision as a model of knowledge), the philosopher of medicine and biology Georges Canguilhem referred to specific biological-adaptive mechanisms compensating for some human vision anomalies, particularly hemianopic anomalies. In individuals in whom it tends to occur, hemianopsia (or hemianopia) involves the loss of one half of a […]

The question of the place of mind in nature is one of the oldest and deepest questions in philosophy and the sciences. If the physical sciences to tell us ‘what nature is’, what happens to mental phenomena: thoughts, beliefs, desires, emotions, memories, and ideals? For centuries, philosophers, theologians, and scientists argued about what a “science […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

An Interview with Jannie Hofmeyr in Three Parts What is life? This is a question biologists have almost forgotten to ask. Apart from a few lonely souls who occupy themselves with astrobiology or the origin of life, we no longer seem to wonder about life itself. Maybe we have lost the forest for the trees? […]

In the first part I have claimed that dialectical thinking is part and parcel of the enactive approach. I will now try to substantiate this claim. In the 1991 book The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch draw on developmental and evolutionary biology to prepare the reader for the idea of embodied action as a […]

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 […]