Keyword: organism

The event will take place at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition in Klosterneuburg (Austria) on September 9th-12th. The summer school is organized by Leonardo Bich, Lucie Laplane and Matteo Mossio and is is mainly intended for young scholars, including PhD students and early post-doctoral researchers, who are engaged in the study of […]

The question of the holistic structure of an organism is a recurring theme in the philosophy of biology and has been increasingly discussed again in recent years.[2] Organisms have recently been described as complex systems[3] that autonomously create, maintain and reproduce themselves[4] while constantly interacting with their environment. Key focal points include their autopoiesis[5], autonomy[6], […]

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 […]

If you look up the characteristics of life in any standard Biology textbook, you’ll likely find some list like this: reproduction, heredity, cellular organization, growth and development, response to stimuli, adaptation through evolution, homeostasis, and metabolism. What you won’t find is agency. The fact that living organisms can do things is arguably the most important […]

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.

New issue of Topoi addressing new perspectives and challenges to philosophical naturalism. From the introductory essay: “The purpose of this special issue is to contribute to the ongoing critical discourse on naturalism at this critical junction where liberal naturalism must meet the demands of scientific naturalism in order to part ways with it. Accordingly, the […]

Published open access on BioSystems Abstract: Understanding how biological organisms are autonomous—maintain themselves far from equilibrium through their own activities—requires understanding how they regulate those activities. In multicellular animals, such control can be exercised either via endocrine signaling through the vasculature or via neurons. In C. elegans this control is exercised by a well-delineated relatively […]

We are glad to announce this workshop on the notion of organismal agency, which will take place in hybrid form at the University of the Aegean, Syros, Greece. Those who wish to attend the workshop online please contact Argyris Arnellos at arar@aegean.gr before the 3rd of July. Please be aware that times indicated below correspond […]

Published open access in Synthese Abstract. The paper proposes a dialectical approach to our understanding of the relation between teleology and mechanism. This approach is dialectical both in form and content. In form, it proposes a contemporary interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysical account of teleology. This account is grounded in a dialectical methodology, which consists in scrutinizing […]

Published open access in Synthese Abstract. Recent accounts of teleological naturalism hold that organisms are intrinsically goaldirected entities. We argue that supporters and critics of this view have ignored the ways in which it is used to address quite different problems. One problem is about biology and concerns whether an organism-centered account of teleological ascriptions […]