Rise of the Agents

3 October 2023

Rise of the Agents

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 […]

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New Issue(2023): Naturalism – Challenges and New Perspectives 

29 September 2023

New Issue(2023): Naturalism – Challenges and New Perspectives 

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 […]

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New Paper (2023): A. Gambarotto, Teleology and Mechanism: A Dialectical Approach

25 April 2023

New Paper (2023): A. Gambarotto, Teleology and Mechanism: A Dialectical Approach

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 […]

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NEW PAPER (2023), A. Nahas, C.B. Sachs: What’s at stake in the debate over naturalizing teleology? An overlooked metatheoretical debate

25 April 2023

NEW PAPER (2023), A. Nahas, C.B. Sachs: What’s at stake in the debate over naturalizing teleology? An overlooked metatheoretical debate

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 […]

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From Philosophy to Neuroscience and Back Again. An Interview with Terrence Deacon. Part II

1 February 2023

From Philosophy to Neuroscience and Back Again. An Interview with Terrence Deacon. Part II

From the Symbolic Species to Incomplete Nature Auguste Nahas  So it’s only in your first book, The Symbolic Species, that you came back to Peirce.  Terrence Deacon Yes. I was thinking about the evolutionary origins of human language. It was very clear to me that you just couldn’t talk about ‘pre-language’. Animals aren’t speaking in […]

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From Philosophy to Neuroscience and Back Again. An Interview with Terrence Deacon. Part I

17 January 2023

From Philosophy to Neuroscience and Back Again. An Interview with Terrence Deacon. Part I

Undergraduate & Graduate Days: Peirce, Cybernetics, Neuroscience Terrence Deacon is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches the co-evolution of language and the human brain. His recent work has touched on diverse questions at the intersection of philosophy and biology, such as the nature of complexity and the place […]

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New Paper (2022), A. Gambarotto, M. Mossio, Enactivism and the Hegelian Stance on Intrinsic Purposiveness

8 December 2022

New Paper (2022), A. Gambarotto, M. Mossio, Enactivism and the Hegelian Stance on Intrinsic Purposiveness

Published open access in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Abstract: We characterize Hegel’s stance on biological purposiveness as consisting in a twofold move, which conceives organisms as intrinsically purposive natural systems and focuses on their behavioral and cognitive abilities. We submit that a Hegelian stance is at play in enactivism, the branch of the contemporary […]

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