One of the ideas that characterises the enactive approach to cognition is that life and mind are deeply continuous, which means that both phenomena share the same basic set of organisational and phenomenological properties. The appeal to phenomenology to address life and basic cognition is controversial. It has been argued that, because of its reliance on phenomenological categories, enactivism may implicitly subscribe to a form of anthropomorphism incompatible with the modern scientific framework. These worries are a result of a lack (...) of clarity concerning the role that phenomenology can play in relation to biology and our understanding of non-human organisms. In this paper, I examine whether phenomenology can be validly incorporated into the enactive conception of mind and life. I argue that enactivists must rely on phenomenology when addressing life and mind so that they can properly conceptualise minimal living systems as cognitive, as well as argue for an enactive conception of biology in line with their call for a non-objectivist science. To sustain these claims, I suggest that enactivism must be further phenomenologised by not only drawing from Hans Jonas’s phenomenology of the organism (as enactivists often do) but also from Edmund Husserl’s thoughts on the connection between transcendental phenomenology and biology. Additionally, phenomenology must be considered capable of providing explanatory accounts of phenomena. (shrink)

Living systems are complex systems made of components that tend to degrade, but nonetheless they maintain themselves far from equilibrium. This requires living systems to extract energy and materials from the environment and use them to build and repair their parts. They do so by regulating their activities on the basis of their internal and external conditions in ways that allow them to keep living. The philosophical and theoretical approach discussed in this book aims to explain these features of biological (...) systems by appealing to their organization. One of its distinctive features is that it addresses classical and more recent issues in philosophy of biology, from origins and definitions of life to biological teleology and functions, from an original perspective mainly focused on the living system, its physiology and behavior, rather than evolution. The book discusses and revises the conceptual foundations of this approach and presents an updated version of it. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide naturalized explanations for the goal-directedness of ecosystem development and its underlying causes within the framework of thermodynamics. While ecologists often use thermodynamic orientors to describe the directional trends of ecosystem development, they typically reject teleological interpretations, constrained by a narrow understanding of “goals” as intentional or mystical. We argue that ecosystems developing toward thermodynamic orientors through self-organization align with the naturalized definition of goal-directedness in system-property theory, demonstrating that such development can be considered goal-directed. Critically (...) analyzing ecologists’ application of Mayr’s distinction between teleomatic and teleonomic processes, we argue that ecosystem development should be considered goal-directed rather than merely end-directed and that the Mayrian path inadequately explains this goal-directedness. To address this, we integrate ecological research with behavioristic and mechanistic approaches (including teleodynamics and relational agency) to identify patterns of plasticity and persistence in ecosystem development and to explain how this goal-directedness emerges from thermodynamic interactions. Additionally, we assess field theory as a complementary externalist teleological framework. Through a comparative analysis of these approaches, we advocate for a pluralistic explanatory framework for the goal-directedness of thermodynamic ecosystem development. By demonstrating that ecosystem development within the framework of thermodynamics should be considered goal-directed and explaining its causes, this paper provides an epistemological foundation for legitimizing teleology in ecological research and extends the discourse on ecological teleology beyond functional explanations to address questions of goal-directedness. (shrink)