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Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca / ddddd
ArtefaCToS, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023), 2.ª Época, 5-25
ArtefaCToS. Revista de estudios de la ciencia y la tecnología
eISSN: 1989-3612
Vol. 12, No. 1 (2023), 2.ª Época, 5-25
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14201/art2023121525
Introducción a la sección monográca / Introduction to the Monographic Section
What is the Philosophy of Organismal Biology?
¿Qué es la losofía de la biología organismal?
Alejandro FÁBREGAS-TEJEDA
Department of Philosophy I, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany;
Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI),
Klosterneuburg, Austria
Alejandro.FabregasTejeda@rub.de
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1797-5467
Mariano MARTÍN-VILLUENDAS
Departamento de Filosofía, Lógica y Estética. Universidad de Salamanca, España
Instituto Universitario de Estudios de la Ciencia y la Tecnología, Salamanca,
España
marianomv@usal.es
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6814-7346
1. Introduction. What is the philosophy of organismal biology? What are its
contours and what justies this designation?
According to a growing number of historians and philosophers of biology, in
recent years we have witnessed a “return of the organism” as a fundamental analyt-
ical, epistemic, and ontological category through which to approach and rethink
some of the major theoretical discussions and empirical investigations that have
articulated the eld (see, for example, Huneman, 2010; Nicholson, 2014; Walsh,
2015; Fábregas-Tejeda and Vergara-Silva, 2018a; Baedke, 2019; McLoone, 2020;
Gambarotto and Nahas, 2022). Within the multiple disciplines and areas of re-
search that structure biological practice, organisms have begun to be considered
as causally ecacious, active ontogenetic units whose conceptualization cannot
be approached solely through the isolated study of the activities and properties of
their parts (e.g., their genes or cells). Gone seems to be the idea that organisms are
mere “bags of genes” or simple passive vehicles whose only evolutionary function
is to ensure the replication and propagation of certain alleles over generations (for
illustrative examples of this trend, see Fisher, 1936; Trivers, 1971; Wilson, 1975,
p. 3; Dawkins, 1976, p. 82; for a historical reappraisal of the heuristic power and
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epistemic limits of this view of evolution, see Ågren, 2021). Biologists and philos-
ophers alike have argued, in marked opposition to the genetic program metaphor
(see recent critiques in Martín-Villuendas, 2021a; McKenna et al., 2022; see also
Moss, 2003), that organisms are in close interdependent relationship with their
environments throughout development. is has led to the conclusion that or-
ganisms must play a crucial and active role in determining their ontogenetic and
evolutionary trajectories by responding to, integrating, and modifying signals from
their surroundings and by marshalling a diversity of developmental resources and
scaolds (Griths and Stotz, 2013, pp. 134-140; Stotz, 2017; Chiu and Gilbert,
2015).
In line with these considerations, multiple authors have proposed under-
standing developing organisms as agents constitutively open to environmental
inuences, recognizing the important role that plasticity and exibility play in
their material congurations, responses, and actions (see, for example, Sultan,
2015; Newman, 2022; Gilroy and Trewavas, 2022). is has paved the way
for a substantial reconceptualization of the processes that structure organismal
development, as well as the potential role that the latter could play in determin-
ing the tempo and direction of evolutionary processes. Instead of conceptualizing
development through an internalist view, where selected genetic variation does
all the work in explaining the unfolding of phenotypes, it has been proposed to
recognize development as a constructive process (Laland et al., 2015): organisms
have the capacity to shape their own developmental trajectories by responding
to, modifying, and altering their internal and external states (for discussion, see
Fábregas-Tejeda and Vergara-Silva, 2018b). is constructive view, which rejects
a linear, bijective relationship between genotype and phenotype, has called into
question two of the fundamental principles on which evolutionary biology has
been founded over the last decades: (i) the idea that genetic change always causes
and precedes phenotypic change; and (ii) the conception that variation subtend-
ing the evolutionary process is isotropic. Studies in epigenetics and evolutionary
developmental biology (particularly in its ‘devo-evo’ branch) have shown how
the organism is able to impose biases on the generation of phenotypic varia-
tion, either by modifying the connections and regulation established between
the components that structure ontogenetic processes (see Gehart and Kirschner
2007, 2010) or by integrating environmental signals through epigenetic regu-
latory mechanisms (for examples, see Young and Badyaev, 2010; Herrera and
Bazaga, 2012; for discussion, see Brun-Usan et al., 2022). In accordance with
these musings, studies framed by niche construction theory have shown that
organisms are capable of exerting substantive changes in their environments,
being able to bias, accordingly, their own selective pressures, as well as those of
their conspecics and those of other organisms from dierent species with which
they are linked by sustained ecological interactions (Odling-Smee et al., 2003;
Schwab et al., 2019; for discussion, see Baedke et al., 2021; Fábregas-Tejeda and
Baedke, 2023). Some authors have even argued that studying organisms in their
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environmental and ontogenetic contexts, foregrounding their agential activities,
could help bridge some of the explanatory gaps left by traditional evolutionary
perspectives (Sultan et al., 2021).
is reconsideration of the potential role that organisms might play in im-
proving our understanding of evolutionary processes has been driven by con-
ceptual and empirical contributions from a diversity of disciplines and areas of
study: evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-Devo; Arthur, 2004, chapter 7;
Casanueva, 2014; Petino Zappala and Barberis, 2018; Müller, 2021; Nuño de la
Rosa and Villegas, 2022), niche construction theory (Odling-Smee et al., 2003;
Barahona et al., 2021; Aaby and Desmond, 2021), epigenetics (Baedke, 2018;
Veigl, 2022), phenotypic plasticity research (West-Eberhard, 2003), microbi-
ome and holobiont research (Skillings, 2016; Baedke et al., 2020a; Triviño and
Suárez, 2020; Suárez and Stencel, 2020), immunology (Pradeu, 2010; Zach and
Greslehner, 2023), the study of extra-genetic inheritance (Jablonka and Lamb,
2018; Bonduriansky and Day, 2020; Martín-Villuendas, 2021b), the contextual
and social examination of organismal behavior (Gomez-Marin and Ghazanfar,
2019; Kohn, 2019), the debate surrounding the so-called ‘Extended Evolution-
ary Synthesis’ (Laland et al. , 2015; Baedke et al., 2020b), cancer research in
systemic contexts (Soto and Sonnenschein, 2021), and developmental systems
theory (Oyama, 2000; Andrade, 2017), among other converging strands of the-
orization.
e advances made in these elds have brought the ‘organism’ concept back
into the focus of analysis as an explanatory category in its own right. at is, as
a legitimate explanandum that cannot be subsumed entirely under a molecu-
lar-genetic perspective, and as part of the explanantia of many other biological
phenomena. is epistemic undertaking demands that philosophers, historians
and biologists alike face the challenging task of redening the semantic contours
that structure this concept on the basis of the results revealed by the dierent
disciplines and areas of research alluded to above. In general, reections traversed
by this concept promise to oer new tools through which to rethink various
debates that articulate biology and the philosophy of biology in the 21st century
(see, among others, Ruiz-Mirazo et al., 2000; Bateson, 2005; Pepper and Her-
ron, 2008; Nicholson, 2014; as an antecedent, see, for example, Wake, 1984).
e theoretical centrality of the ‘organism’ concept has even transcended the
frontiers of scientic debates, permeating and involving disciplines such as phi-
losophy. Philosophers of biology have begun to pay attention to organisms and to
the study of organisms as productive loci of analysis in relation to other epistemic
and ontological problems of the life sciences. For example, in recent years there
have been many philosophical discussions on the concept of organism and the
importance of organismal organization and regulative control (see, e.g., Nuño
de la Rosa, 2010; Soto et al., 2016; Shields, 2017; Bich and Bechtel, 2022; for
discussion on the complex historical itineraries of the concept of organism, see
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Wolfe, 2010; Cheung, 2014). In the same vein, the question of what, if any-
thing, dierentiates an organism from a machine has resurfaced (e.g., Nicholson,
2013; Esposito, 2019; Bongard and Levin, 2021). On the other hand, philos-
ophers have scrutinized the processes through which organisms sculpt, select,
and adapt to various aspects of their environments, and how natural scientists
approach studying these phenomena (see, for example, Trappes et al., 2021;
Aaby and Ramsey, 2022). Similarly, the relationship between organism and en-
vironment, arguably one of the most important bonds investigated within biolo-
gy, has become important for philosophical disquisitions. Various scholars have
attempted to address the conceptual problems underlying the idea of reciprocal
causation between organisms and environments (see, for example, Baedke et
al., 2021; Baedke and Buklijas, 2022; Pontarotti et al., 2022; Prieto and Fábre-
gas-Tejeda, 2022; Saborido and Heras-Escribano, 2023) and its possible theo-
retical extensions in domains such as human health (e.g., through the notion
of ‘adaptivity’; see Menatti et al, 2022) or the study of cognition as a biological
phenomenon that is widely distributed and needs to be understood beyond com-
putational-representational frameworks (see, e.g., Corris, 2020; Feiten, 2020;
Sims, 2021). In elds such as behavioral ecology, intra-populational variation at
the organismic (and not just genetic) level has been given increased attention,
especially the ecological and phenotypic singularities of token organisms that
have important consequences for evolutionary paths (for a philosophical analysis
of these developments, see Trappes, 2022). In general, the uniqueness of token
organisms and the temporal dimensions of ontogenetic processes are becoming
fertile topics of inquiry that open unexplored questions for philosophers of biol-
ogy interested in the controversy over what constitutes ‘biological individuality’
(see Kaiser and Trappes, 2021). Additionally, important philosophical papers
have been put into circulation that contribute to organism-centered evolution-
ary perspectives, from explorations of the evolution of pregnancy in eutherians
(Nuño de la Rosa et al., 2021) to the scholarly discussion of possible intersec-
tions between Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis
and the idea of ‘natural drift’ to account for some evolutionary dynamics (see
Raimondi, 2021; Mpodozis, 2022; Etxeberria and Cortés-García, 2022). is
renewed interest in whole organisms, in how they develop and interact with their
environments in ecologically and evolutionarily meaningful ways, in how they
are studied and conceptualized by scientists, and in how they t into the broader
theoretical edice of biology and other neighboring sciences such as medicine
and biomedicine, calls for novel and penetrating philosophical analyses that ad-
dress these problems from a variety of angles.
We propose to adopt the label ‘philosophy of organismal biology’ to refer to
this heterogeneous, though partially overlapping, set of debates currently taking
place within the broad disciplinary orientation of the philosophy of biology (see,
for example, recent treatments of the scope of the latter in Pradeu, 2017; Prieto,
2021; contrast this with the overview of the discipline outlined in Ruse, 1989).
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Despite their close link with advances made in the various branches that make
up biological research, these discussions have often been addressed in parallel
and independently in the philosophical literature (for instance, discussions con-
cerning ‘biological individuality’ in contrast to ‘organismality,’ the distinction
between organisms and machines, the metaphysics of symbiosis and holobionts,
arguments highlighting the role of organisms as agents in ecology and evolution,
controversies about the boundaries between ‘development’ and ‘reproduction,’
the organism-environment relationship or discussions concerning levels of or-
ganization, cancer research in organismic and not exclusively molecular contexts,
extended immunology, ecological epigenetics, evolutionary and variational dis-
positions of organisms, developmental scaolding, phenotypic plasticity, etc.).
e common denominator of all these philosophical debates (plural in their ap-
proaches and methods, from classical conceptual analysis and the philosophy
of explanation, passing through the metaphysics of biology and including the
inspection of concrete scientic practices) has been, we believe, in one way or
another, their anchoring in the concept of ‘organism,’ as well as the existing rela-
tionship between all the phenomena of study previously referred to with salient
organismal contexts that are scientically investigated through experimental in-
terventions, the construction of models with dierent degrees of idealization and
abstraction, and the renewed recognition of the importance of having theories
able to frame these phenomena and that seek to explain them. us, the phi-
losophy of organismal biology intersects in various ways with the philosophy of
Evo-Devo, the philosophy of ecology, the philosophy of immunology and mul-
tispecies studies, the philosophy of medicine and biomedicine, the philosophy
of the cognitive sciences, the philosophy of developmental biology, the philoso-
phy of cancer research, and the philosophy of evolutionary biology. is overlap
notwithstanding, the philosophy of organismal biology is not interchangeably
synonymous with these, nor is it completely subsumable to any of them, since
under these diverse headings many other topics are investigated that are not
directly related to organisms as integrated units of analysis. Moreover, none of
these orientations in a unitary manner can grasp the breadth and scope of the
questions raised by placing organisms at the forefront of the present-day biolog-
ical arena. We consider that the appellation ‘philosophy of organismal biology’
allows us to account for the patent family resemblance that underlies the various
debates already reviewed.
We should emphasize that debates with organisms as their focal points have
a long pedigree in the history and philosophy of biology, especially in the rst
decades of the twentieth century in multiple corners of the globe where holistic
and organicist positions thrived (see, as a sample of recent historiographical re-
search on this period, Haraway, 1976; Etxeberria and Umerez, 2006; Umerez,
2013; Nicholson and Gawne, 2014, 2015; Esposito, 2016, 2017; Peterson,
2016; Rieppel, 2016; Shields, 2017; Brooks, 2019; Herring and Radick, 2019;
Sprenger, 2019; chapters in Michelini and Köchy, 2019; Fábregas-Tejeda et
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al., 2021; Fábregas-Tejeda and Vergara-Silva, 2022; chapters in Donohue and
Wolfe, 2023). It is no coincidence that the organism concept has been referred
to by some authors as ‘biology’s phoenix,’ given that its importance has waxed
and waned throughout various periods of its history (see Benson, 1989). In be-
coming aware of this rich history of scientic and philosophical appraisals of
organisms, we propose the name ‘philosophy of organismal biology’ rather than
‘philosophy of organismic biology’ because we believe that the emerging congu-
ration of the former has more similarities with discussions that took place within
organicist biology at the beginning of the last century (which primarily focused
on the analysis of organisms as integrated and organized units).1 In contrast,
‘organismic biology’ nowadays refers to an institutional classication scheme,
mainly driven and exported from US-American universities (see Milam, 2010),
which encompasses various disciplines (e.g., systematics, morphology, zoology,
botany, mycology, ecology, paleobiology, and evolutionary population biology)
that, although deal with organisms as raw material in their everyday practices, do
not necessarily emphasize them as central epistemic or ontological units, or ask
how their constitution and agential activities impact the construction of models
and theories in biology. In this sense, we cannot ignore the fact that the notion
of ‘organismic biology’ was a banner adopted by authors such as Ernst Mayr
and eodosius Dobzhansky in 1960s to demarcate and legitimize their natu-
ralistic orientations in the face of the unstoppable inux of molecular biologists
that were lling the universities of the United States, and not, as its prima facie
name might suggest, to emphasize the importance of organisms as central units
of biology or agents of evolution and development (for a reconstruction of the
historical details of this conict, see Beatty, 1990, 1994; Milam, 2010).2
1 At the same time, we choose not to christen this approach under the label ‘philosophy of
organicist biology,’ as not all philosophers who could currently be framed as participants, in one
sense or another, in the collective discussion on ‘philosophy of organismal biology’ necessarily
uphold and revive the theoretical and epistemic-ontological principles of organicism qua
movement in biological science of the interwar period (for a discussion of these, see Nicholson
and Gawne, 2015; Baedke, 2019; Baedke and Fábregas-Tejeda, 2023). In that sense, to limit the
considerations and reections made to organicist biology would be akin to narrowing their scope
and theoretical focus. Organismal biology, we judge, is broader than organicist biology.
2 ere is a general sense, which will not be alien to practicing scientists, according to which it can
be said that, distinctively, biology (sensu lato) is the science that studies organisms from dierent
perspectives and at dierent levels of organization; however, that generic assertion (which has
also been popular within the philosophy of science, see, for example, Strong, 1980) does not
capture the nuances that we want to recover in designating the space of an ‘organismal biology.’
In particular, at the juncture we live at the onset of the 21st century and regardless of what may
have been the ethos of this science in the past, not all biology today is de facto organismal (think,
for instance, of bioinformatics or omics approaches that only work with molecular preparations
and extracts, such as metagenomics), since organismal contexts can easily be obviated or taken
for granted (which is in fact often the case in experimental laboratories). Even the practice of
traditional organismic biology, especially those disciplines that continue the valuable legacies
of natural history, has been overtaken by these new developments (for a problematization, see
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In sum, there is both a meta-philosophical justication (i.e., bringing togeth-
er and juxtaposing a set of related discussions that are being waged in parallel
by several communities of scholars and that could be enriched by this grouping
movement and invitation to collaboration) and a historiographical-sociological
one (i.e., the historical background of related scientic-philosophical discussions
that took place in the interwar organicist movement and the coeval coexistence
of ‘organismic biology’ in university contexts) to recognize ‘philosophy of or-
ganismal biology’ as a distinct sector within the connes of the philosophy of
biology.3
is special issue of ArtefaCToS. Revista de Estudios sobre la Ciencia y la Tec-
nología seeks to take the rst steps towards this recognition and, at the same time,
to advance some seminal discussions related to organisms and their place in the
life sciences. In these pages, the philosophy of organismal biology is conceived
from a broad perspective that takes into account its ontogenetic, ecological and
evolutionary dimensions, as well as its interfaces with other disciplines of scien-
tic relevance such as medicine and biomedicine. With this initiative, we sought
(1) to establish bridges and connections between the various debates that poten-
tially structure the current philosophy of organismal biology, and (2) to publish
contributions, mainly by authors from Ibero-America, that delve into some of
its sub-themes, thus helping to further our understanding of this eld of inquiry.
In order to fulll these objectives, we have collected seven contributions from
some of the main active contributors to the debates that articulate what we have
decided to call here ‘philosophy of organismal biology.’
2. e special issue “Philosophy of Organismal Biology: From Ontogeny to
Ecology and Evolution”
In his article, Guido I. Prieto oers a systematization of dierent perspec-
tives available on the distinction between ‘organisms’ and other ‘biological
individuals,’ identifying eight ways in which the two terms have been juxta-
posed in the philosophical literature (some advocating for the elimination of
one of the two designata, others arguing for full equivalence between them
and, nally, others that draw out a specic dierence that makes organisms a
Shanker and Guttal, 2021).
3 As far as our knowledge goes, the only published mentions of the expression ‘philosophy of
organismal biology’ can be found in Maienschein (2009, ix) and Fulda (2017, p. 70), although
in both cases this notion is used in passing and without further substantive explication. Both
omissions are fully justied within the frameworks of the specic problems addressed in their
respective texts. For example, in the second case, the philosopher Fermín Fulda does not devote
much commentary to the idea of ‘philosophy of organismal biology’ because the theoretical
target that concerns him in that piece is the putative link between cognition and the agency of
organisms such as bacteria (and not the meta-philosophical distinction of a research area that can
be circumscribed within the philosophy of biology).
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special kind of biological individuals). Prieto argues that this whole range of
positions faces conceptual challenges in delimiting the organism from other
biological individuals, from imprecision to conceptual narrowness and the risk
of eliminativism, and suggests some promising ideas on how to move forward
with the debate.
From the standpoint of inductive metaphysics, Javier Suárez approaches the
problem of biological individuality by focusing his analysis on one of the most
controversial case studies of recent times: the conglomerates formed by individ-
uals of multiple symbiotic species. To this end, he points out the limitations of a
shared whole-dependent ontology and advocates the adoption of a part-depend-
ent ontology. Suárez argues that the relations of biological dependence between
the parts of a set can be asymmetric without this compromising the attribution
of individuality of the conglomerate.
Contributing to recent discussions of organismal perspectives on the problem
of phenotypic trait origination (see, for example, McLoone, 2020), the article by
Cristina Villegas and Vanessa Triviño addresses the characterization of homol-
ogous traits, as well as their variational tendencies, in the organicist approach of
evolutionary developmental biology. In their contribution, Villegas and Triviño
argue that a deep understanding of the causal and explanatory role of these traits
requires metaphysical consideration. More specically, they propose a meta-
physical characterization of the variational tendencies of traits as disposition-
al properties, conceptualizing homologous traits as dispositional natural kinds.
ey conclude by highlighting the need to reorient the approach through which
existing debates in biology have traditionally been addressed. To this end, they
propose to adopt an innovative meta-scientic framework that considers new
interactions and interanimation between metaphysics and biology: metaphysics
from biology (see also Triviño, 2022).
Moving on to another subject, as the article by Alfredo Marcos shows, the
philosophy of organismal biology can also dialogue with “bio-philosophy” (see,
for example, Köchy, 2008) and with what has recently been called “continental
philosophy of biology,” under which the reections on organisms and the phe-
nomenon of the living by authors such as Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Mer-
leau-Ponty, Helmuth Plessner, Kurt Goldstein and Hans Jonas, among others,
are emphasized (see the chapters in Bianco et al. , 2023, e.g., Gandol, 2023;
see also Michelini et al., 2018). Marcos focuses on the concept of “organism” in
the work of Hans Jonas, exploring the existing connections with other areas that
structure the inuential work of this German philosopher.
In his article, James Marcum makes use of reections coming from the or-
ganicist tradition to face a problem of extraordinary practical relevance: the ar-
ticulation of a biomedical framework that allows to overcome the conceptual
and experimental limitations inherent to the currently accepted model (see also
Soto and Sonnenschein, 2018, 2021, 2023). To this end, Marcum performs
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a characterization and critical analysis of the reductionist medical model that
has predominated to the present day, dissecting the conceptual assumptions on
which it is founded. rough two case studies, hemostasis and the carcinogenic
process, Marcum exemplies the main shortcomings of this classical framework.
As an alternative, he proposes to articulate a novel biomedical framework with
organicist and holistic underpinnings: an organismal systems biology. Marcum
discusses how this new framework has the potential to solve the problems be-
queathed by the old mechanistic-reductionist framework. is is proof that the
philosophy of organismal biology constitutes an extremely fertile eld through
which to structure philosophical reections that allow us to confront pressing
problems of our present juncture.
e article by Jorge Luis Hernández-Ochoa, Melina Gastelum-Vargas,
Agustín Fuentes and Francisco Vergara-Silva shows that organismal biology can
have fruitful crossings with embodied cognitive sciences and philosophical re-
ections from conceptual frameworks such as enactivism. e authors propose
to analyze play behavior in Homo sapiens from an ontogenetic-constructivist per-
spective, a case study so far underexplored that could simultaneously enhance
our understanding of evolutionary processes and shed light on how we perceive,
inquire, know, transform and interact in the world as situated organisms. ey
focus on exploring the importance of play in the processes of cultural, selective
and ontogenetic niche construction, and in the dynamic emergence of human
cognition. Play, according to their examination, could strengthen and expand a
vast network of evolutionary and enactivist concepts in various disciplines that
draw from them.
Finally, the work of Arantza Etxeberria Agiriano, David Cortés-García and
Mikel Torres Aldave explores the evolutionary signicance of collaborative rela-
tionships between organisms. To do so, they propose an innovative conceptual
strategy that transgresses the traditional boundaries on which reection on the
concept of organism has pivoted: starting from the ideas outlined in the theo-
retical work of Pyotr Kropotkin. Combining both historical and philosophical
aspects, the authors demonstrate to what extent the ideas of intraspecies relation-
ships and altruism outlined by Kropotkin allow us to rethink crucial aspects of
the evolutionary process, including the importance of inter-organismic collabo-
rative interactions and inter-dependencies in development and in the formation
of new evolutionary individuals. To exemplify these reections, they analyze
case studies that deal with symbiosis and viviparous reproduction in eutherian
mammals.
Overall, the agenda of the philosophy of organismal biology points to an
extremely lively eld whose contours are just beginning to be delineated and
re-negotiated. erefore, the contributions to this special issue only constitute a
small sample of the possible philosophical discussions and thematic connections
that can be addressed within it (see the introductory section of this article). Some
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of the potential meta-scientic extensions that remain to be addressed could be:
assessing the role given to organisms within scientic explanations and theories
in the various elds that make up the contemporary research landscape in biolo-
gy and biomedicine; envisioning the need for a methodological restructuring of
modeling practices in order to more accurately reect the epistemically central
role of organisms and their activities in our understanding of the phenomena
studied (e.g., the case of model organisms; see Ankeny and Leonelli, 2021); ex-
amining the place of organismality within current debates on individuality in the
biological and biomedical sciences; discussing how organismal agency might t
into naturalist positions and debates on life-mind continuity (see Gambarotto
and Nahas, 2023); rethinking some bioethical debates, for instance, on the value
of life or the notion of ‘death,’ that arise from distinct concepts of ‘organism’
(see Rendón and Klier, 2017; Nowak and Stencel, 2022); and becoming aware
of the possible conceptual and epistemological limitations of a scientic practice
based on the organism as the central epistemic and ontological unit of biolo-
gy, thus avoiding falling into a reication regime similar to that committed by
population thinking. In short, multiple epistemological, ontological, heuristic,
methodological, pragmatic and axiological issues related to organisms as loci of
analysis in the life sciences remain to be thoroughly articulated and linked.
Furthermore, some of the possible debates that could structure the eld in
direct connection with scientic work include: the agency of organisms in de-
velopment, ecology and evolution;4 critical analyses of the variational and dispo-
sitional properties of organismal development; studies of the boundaries of or-
ganisms in the context of development, reproduction and interactions with their
environments; the relationship between ‘organisms’ and ‘holobionts’ in develop-
ment and evolution; the possibility of structuring an inclusive notion of inher-
itance that detaches from the germline condition and captures the constructive
ecological activities of organisms; the conceptualization of an idea of plasticity
that picks up the intuitions underlying the notion of ‘constructive development,’
leaving aside the traditionally adopted genocentric view based on the idea of
reaction norms; and the articulation of connections with developments in 4E
cognition, basal cognition studies, the free energy principle, and embodied ro-
botics and articial intelligence studies (for propitious contributions to build
these bridges, see, among others, Castro Garcia, 2011; Colombo and Wright,
2021; Heras-Escribano et al., 2022; Hernandez-Ochoa and Vergara-Silva, 2022;
Harrison et al., 2022).
We would like to conclude this introduction by remarking that, although the
philosophy of organismal biology constitutes a burgeoning area of academic discus-
sion within Anglo-Saxon and Ibero-American communities (as this bilingual issue
4 For example, the study of organisms as active, responsive entities to their changing environments
could have implications for how species conservation initiatives are framed (see Feiner et al.,
2021).
Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda; Mariano Martín-Villuendas
What is the Philosophy of Organismal Biology?
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of ArtefaCToS purports to show), it also manifests itself in additional philosophical
communities that perhaps have not received the consideration they should (see, for
example, Yılmaz, 2022). We hope that the contributions published here will serve
as an encouragement to consolidate in the future the philosophy of organismal bi-
ology as a valid, vivid and nurturing orientation within contemporary philosophy
of science on an international scale.
Acknowledgements
First of all, we would like to thank Obdulia María Torres González for the
positive reception to publish this special in ArtefaCToS. e technical and edito-
rial support of Esther Palacios and Irene González was also invaluable through-
out the process. In addition, we would like to thank the authors who sent their
valuable contributions. We also extend our gratitude to all the academic peers
who served as reviewers of the articles in this special issue: their work should
not go unnoticed either. AFT thanks the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG;
project no. BA 5808/2-1) and the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and
Cognition Research (KLI) for nancial support to edit this special issue and to
conduct the research associated with this and other projects. MMV would like to
thank the Consejería de Educación de la Junta de Castilla y León (Spain) and the
European Social Fund for the nancial support to carry out his doctoral thesis
project, which this special issue is part of. Both authors contributed equally to
the writing of this introduction and the editing of this special issue.
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