Search
Search Results
-
The Microbiome Function in a Host Organism: A Medical Puzzle or an Essential Ecological Environment?
The dual role of microbial communities as either beneficial/functional or harmful/pathogenic involves two issues concerning causality in physiology...
-
Unknotting reciprocal causation between organism and environment
In recent years, biologists and philosophers of science have argued that evolutionary theory should incorporate more seriously the idea of...
-
Biology and Pragmatism: The Organism-Environment Bond
This review essay provides an analysis of the context and content of Trevor Pearce’s Pragmatism’s Evolution . The work highlights the bond between...
-
From the harmony to the tension: Helmuth Plessner and Kurt Goldstein’s readings of Jakob von Uexküll
This paper investigates the reception and discussion of Jakob von Uexküll’s biological theory by two German thinkers of his time, Helmuth Plessner...
-
An enactive-developmental systems framing of cognizing systems
Organisms live not as discrete entities on which an independent environment acts, but as members of a reproductive lineage in an ongoing series of...
-
The Interpreting Organism
Literary formalism attributed meaning to the interactions of devices in the text itself, rejecting extra-textual influences, such as author...
-
The dark side of niche construction
Niche construction denotes the alteration, destruction, or creation of environmental features through the activities of an organism, modifying the...
-
The Multi-Causal Basis of Developmental Potential Construction
In this article we analyse the issue of what accounts for developmental potential, i.e., the possible phenotypes a develo** organism can manifest...
-
What Counts as an Immune Response? On the Role of Abiotic Stress in Immunology
In the postgenomic era, interactions between organism and environment are central in disciplines such as epigenetics, medical physiology, and...
-
Do heritable immune responses extend physiological individuality?
Immunology and its philosophy are a primary source for thinking about biological individuality. Through its discriminatory function, the immune...
-
Sentience as a System Property: Learning Complexity and the Evolution of Consciousness
Veit suggests that the challenge of coordinating movement in multicellular organisms led to the evolution of a prioritizing value system, which...
-
What is a Complex System, After All?
The study of complex systems, although an interdisciplinary endeavor, is considered as an integrating part of physical sciences. Contrary to the...
-
Does the Immune System Have a Function?
Functional ascription in biology is contentious, particularly when it takes a teleological form, that is, when the question being raised is the...
-
Vulnerabilities of the Patent System
Under prevalent patent systems around the world, patenting of inventions related to advances in quantum computing, synthetic biology, and artificial...
-
Metabolism in Crisis? A New Interplay Between Physiology and Ecology
This chapter investigates the hybrid relationships between metabolism, broadly and a-historically understood as the set of processes through which...
-
Organisms Need Mechanisms; Mechanisms Need Organisms
According to new mechanists, mechanisms explain how specific biological phenomena are produced. New mechanists have had little to say about how...
-
Making sense of doing science: on some pragmatic motifs guiding the enactive approach to science
In this article, I will explore the enactive approach to science and the pragmatic motifs that guide it. In particular, in the first half of the...
-
Biological Autonomy
The nature of biological autonomy and the choice of an appropriate framework for understanding it are subjects of ongoing debates in philosophy of...
-
Neuropragmatism, the cybernetic revolution, and feeling at home in the world
In recent work, Mark Johnson has argued that a scientifically updated version of John Dewey’s pragmatism affords human beings the opportunity to feel...
-
Sorting sex, controlling sex: Masui Kiyoshi’s chicken research and experimental system, 1915–1950
Masui Kiyoshi (1887–1981), a prominent Japanese geneticist, is best known for inventing the sex-sorting method of chicks and his contributions to...
