Keyword: organism

From October 10–12, at the University of Toronto, a workshop marked 40 years since the publication of The Dialectical Biologist (1985) by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. The book, a collection of their earlier papers, aimed to present a coherent vision of how Marxian dialectics can inform biological theory. It stands alongside other critical works, […]

In this paper, Chris Shambaugh presents a coherent view of Marx as the author of an integrated philosophical biology. He argues that between 1842 and 1844, Marx developed a structured and original account of organic, animal, and human life—an account that ultimately grounds the normative force of his early critique of capitalism. For Marx, life-activity […]

Leo Bich and Laura Menatti hey argue that life is not primarily about preserving equilibrium but about adapting and transforming in response to changing circumstances. Building on recent philosophical and biological work, they propose a shift from understanding health as stability to seeing it as the capacity for adaptive change — a dynamic process that […]

In this new book, Alvaro Moreno and Juli Peretó look at the major transitions in the history of biological agency, from the origins of life to the complexity of Metazoans, and its role in the complexification of biological organization in the history of life. Available open-access here. About this book This open access book exposes […]

Description from the event page: Hybrid Event – To obtain the Zoom information, click on the “Register” button above or use the link at the bottom of the page Forty years have passed since Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin published The Dialectical Biologist in 1985. At the time the publication was generally met with puzzlement […]

At the core of life is adaptivity, the organismal process of adjusting to ever-changing conditions. But despite its centrality, adaptivity is a surprisingly lonely concept. Its most immediate lexical relatives are parts of entirely distinct evolutionary conversations: ‘adapting’ immediately evokes thoughts of natural selection, ‘adaptive’ (typically paired with ‘maladaptive’) is used in normative evaluations of […]

Michael Barnett, Lena Meister and Paul B. Rainey provide evidence of a selective mechanism acting on bacteria that increases their evolvability.  Abstract: Can the capacity to evolve be selected by natural selection for greater ability to evolve? Barnett et al. designed experiments in which lineages of bacteria cycled between two selective environments (see the Perspective by […]

This new special issue of Synthese challenges the widespread neglect of teleology in analytic philosophy, demonstrating its ongoing relevance across multiple domains. While often dismissed due to its historical associations with Aristotelianism and pre-Darwinian thought, teleological explanations remain indispensable in understanding biological functions, human agency, social institutions, and even aspects of epistemology and ethics. The […]

Published open access in Philosophy of Science. Abstract: In this paper I offer a model-theoretic interpretation of Autonomy Theory as defended by Moreno, Mossio, Montévil, and Bich. I address accusations that Autonomy Theory is excessively liberal, such as those made by Garson (2017), arguing that these misunderstand the role of strategic abstractions and generalizations in […]

Published as part of The Routledge Handbook of Causality and Causal Methods and available open access here. Abstract: In order to carry out many scientific practices, say, doing measurements, building explanations, planning interventions, it is necessary to identify which causal systems will be measured, explained or intervened upon. Accordingly, it is important in biological research […]