Full Description
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.
Contents
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
