1st Edition
The Riddle of Organismal Agency New Historical and Philosophical Reflections
The Riddle of Organismal Agency brings together historians, philosophers and scientists for an interdisciplinary re-assessment of one of the long-standing problems in the scientific understanding of life.
Marshalling insights from diverse sciences including physiology, comparative psychology, developmental biology, and evolutionary biology, the book provides an up-to-date survey of approaches to non-human organisms as agents, capable of performing activities serving their own goals such as surviving or reproducing, and whose doings in the world are thus to be explained teleologically. From an Integrated History and Philosophy of Science perspective, the book contributes to a better conceptual and theoretical understanding of organismal agency, advancing some suggestions on how to study it empirically and how to frame it in relation to wider scientific and philosophical traditions. It also provides new historical entry points for examining the deployment, trajectories and challenges of agential views of organisms in the history of biology and philosophy.
This book will be of interest to philosophers of biology; historians of science; biologists interested in analysing the active roles of organisms in development, ecological interactions, and evolution; philosophers and practitioners of the cognitive sciences; and philosophers and historians of philosophy working on purposiveness and teleology.
1 Organismal Agency: A Persistent Riddle in the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda, Jan Baedke, Guido I. Prieto and Gregory Radick
Part I: Trajectories of Organismal Agency in the History of the Life Sciences and Philosophy
2 The Problem of “Organismal Agency” in the History of the Life Sciences
Maurizio Esposito
3 Charting Contrasting Stances on Organismal Purposiveness and Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Biology
Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda
4 Plant Agency: A Short History from Kant to Plant Psychology, then to Holism, and Back Again
Jan Baedke
5 Behavior, Purpose and Teleology Revisited: Locating Cybernetic Teleology in Twentieth-Century Holism
Auguste Nahas
Part II: Evolutionary Perspectives on Agency
6 The Baldwin Effect and the Potentialities for Thoughtful Darwinism around 1900
Gregory Radick
7 The Higher Order Norm of Reaction: Biological Agency and Adaptive Phenotypic Response
Denis M. Walsh and Sonia E. Sultan
8 A Critique of the Agential Stance in Development and Evolution
Henry D. Potter and Kevin J. Mitchell
Part III: Behaviour, Scientific Practice, and Self-Individuation
9 In Defense of the Whole: Behavioral Novelty as a Reflection of Organismal Agency
Gregory M. Kohn
10 Chimpanzees as “Resisters” or “Collaborators”: Animal Agency in Biomedical and Psychology Experiments at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the Yale Laboratories for Primate Biology in the US (1903–1930)
Marion Thomas
11 Self-Individuation, Environment, and Agency: Comparing Plessner and Autopoietic Enactivism
Francesca Michelini
Part IV: Theoretical and Metaphysical Frameworks for Organismal Agency
12 Agency as Internal Control
Gunnar Babcock and Daniel W. McShea
13 How Autonomy Theory Naturalizes Agency, and Why It Matters
Louis Virenque
14 Organismal Agency as a (Partly Psychological) Capacity
Bendik Hellem Aaby
Biography
Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. He obtained a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum and was a Writing-Up Fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research. His research concentrates on the history and philosophy of biology, with a specific emphasis on how organism-environment interactions are construed in evolutionary biology and ecology.
Jan Baedke is Professor at the Department of Philosophy I, Ruhr University Bochum. His research is characterized by an integrated approach to the history and philosophy of the life sciences, with a focus on evolutionary biology and microbiology. He is author of Above the Gene, Beyond Biology: Toward a Philosophy of Epigenetics (2018) and PI of the German Research Foundation-funded research group “ROTO” (The Return of the Organism in the Bio-sciences: Theoretical, Historical, and Social Dimensions).
Guido I. Prieto is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Individualization in Changing Environments research association (InChangE), Faculty of Biology, Bielefeld University. A biologist by training and self-taught scientific illustrator, he obtained a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum. His research focuses on the philosophical elucidation of the concepts of ‘organism’ and ‘biological individual’ and their roles within and outside biology. He is also interested in the philosophy and practice of visual representations in the sciences.
Gregory Radick is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. His books include Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology (2023), The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (2007), and, as co-editor, The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (2003; 2nd edition 2009). He has served as President of the British Society for the History of Science and the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology.
