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This book explores the notion of organismal agency from the perspective of both philosophy and biology. The two sections of the book delve into parallel themes, including distinctions between organic and inorganic nature, self-organization, autonomy, self-presentation, memory, umwelt, and environmental influence. The philosophical part focuses on the influential thinkers who shaped our perception of living entities beyond mere mechanisms. It scrutinizes the concepts of organism and nature in the works of Aristotle, Kant, Schelling, and various processualists. Each chapter explores facets of their ideas that directly or indirectly foreshadowed or contributed to the formulation of the concept of agency. The biological part of the book investigates various concepts associated with agency such as experience, meaning attribution, and phenotypic plasticity, as well as reproduction, organisational constraints, modularity, development of integrated phenotypes, organismal choices, or self-representation through animal organisation. In essence, this work offers a comprehensive examination of organismal agency and its philosophical and biological foundations. Collaboratively authored by individuals from several institutions, this publication caters primarily to researchers and students working at the intersection of philosophy and biology.
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Agency in Philosophy
Introduction: Knowing What an Organism Is
Aristotle: Life as Self-Creation
Aristotle and Functional Bauplans
Immanuel Kant: Mechanism, Teleology, Organism, and the Powers of Our Mind
Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature
Organismic Teleology and Agency Beyond Systems Theories: A Process-Metaphysical Perspective
The Becoming of Identity: A Process-Ontological View on the Relational Co-existence of Biological Beings
Agency in Biology
(Bio)Semiosis as Life-Specific Form of Agency
Plastic Ontogenesis: Memory, Closure, and Habitual Teleology in Development
Ontogenesis, Organisation, and Organismal Agency
Biological Modularity and the Origins of Agency
Agential Patterns in Development and Evolution: Towards an Anti-entropic Approach to the Divergence of Altricial and Precocial Mammals
Organisms as Agents in Zoosemiotic Perspective: The Case of Umwelt Reversion
Agency and Appearance: Reading the Face of Life
Index