Dialectical Systems

Extending the evolutionary synthesis isn’t enough

Rasmus Haukedal's new book calls for a truly dialectical biology: from autopoiesis to sympoiesis, from efficient causes to enablement, and an innovative take on plasticity, canalisation & habit.

dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Enactivizing dialectics: from individual to social normativity and back - Topoi This paper examines the relation between embodiment and sociality within the enactive approach, highlighting the continuity between biological autonomy and social normativity. The central claim is tha...

Enaction meets dialectics!

New paper out on how sensorimotor agency scales up to social normativity

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Materiality isn’t a backdrop to cognition, but one of its central conditions

The upcoming workshop “Habits, Tools, and Material Environments” examines how cognition is socially distributed, ecologically embedded, and enacted through material engagement

dialecticalsystems.eu/events/works...

40 years after The Dialectical Biologist, Richard Lewontin’s legacy still challenges how we think about life

A new report revisits his intertwining of philosophy, biology, and Marxism—and how organisms are subjects of their own evolution

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/contribution...

Very nice upcoming workshop at the Center for Philosophical Psychology (University of Antwerp) on how radical embodiment unfolds in complex, “wild” real-world environments.

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/events/works...

Marx as a philosophical biologist?

Chris Shambaugh on young Marx's account of organismal agency, its relation to human life to the critique of capitalism.

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

➡️New article out⬅️

@leonardobich.bsky.social and @lauramenatti.bsky.social
argue that health is not about balance or stability, but about adapting and transforming in response to changing circumstances — the capacity for adaptive change.

link.springer.com/journal/13752

New Paper (2025): Modelling the prebiotic origins of regulation and agency in evolving protocell ecologies - Dialectical Systems How could the first living systems learn to regulate themselves before the emergence of genes? In their new paper, Ben Shirt-Ediss, Arián Ferrero-Fernández, Daniele De Martino, Leonardo Bich, Álvaro M...

How did regulation and agency arise before genes?

Shirt-Ediss et al. model evolving protocell ecologies with the Araudia platform—showing how simple metabolic systems can “learn” to adapt to changing environments

dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

How does life emerge from nonlife?

New special issue of the Royal Transactions brings together leading thinkers on the origins of life—where chemistry meets information, and evolution unfolds through the “adjacent possible.”

dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

📖 New Book Out

Alvaro Moreno & Juli Peretó explore the major transitions in biological agency—from origins of life to metazoans—showing how agency drives the evolution of biological complexity

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin

A hybrid conference bringing together voices old and new to revisit how The Dialectical Biologist still resonates, and reinvigorates, contemporary biology

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/events/diale...

Dialectics meets the enactive approach!

Join us for Dialectics and the Embodied Mind

📍 Univ. of Luxembourg | Sept 22–23

dialecticalsystems.eu/events/inter...

Inspiring work by Denis Walsh on organism/ environment dialectic, along side @jonothingeb.bsky.social and Stuart Newman ! #ISHPSSB2025 is such a treat !

YouTube video by Originals Originals | Ezequiel Di Paolo: Linguistic Bodies and Sensorimotor Agency

Since its beginnings, the enactive approach has shown how autonomy is scaffolded across biological, sensorimotor, and social dimensions.

This new video interview with Ezequiel Di Paolo tells the story in an accessible way:

youtube.com/watch?v=y4Dz...

An enactive account of labor - Mind & Society This paper aims to build a theoretical bridge between the Marxist and enactive traditions by focusing on the concept of labor. While labor represents a central component of human experience, it remain...

Integrating dialectical insights into cognitive science has driven advances in the enactive approach. This new paper opens a dialogue between enaction and Marxism, highlighting labor as a form of an ecological and distributed cognition

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New edition of Principles of Biological Autonomy - Dialectical Systems Today, we celebrate the new publication of Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979) by MIT Press, now accompanied by a new critical apparatus by Ezequiel Di Paolo and Evan Thompson.Varela’s ideas cont...

Today we celebrate the new edition of Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979) from MIT Press, with a new critical apparatus by Ezequiel Di Paolo & Evan Thompson, reconnecting Varela's legacy in cognitive science to his theoretical biology

dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Embodied & enactive approaches aren’t just about individual cognition — they’re about society.

A new Mind & Society special issue brings enactivism into conversation with ethics, social theory & political philosophy.

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Pictures of Varela’s Biological Autonomy book

Really excited to read the reprint of Varela’s Biological Autonomy annotated by @evanthompson.bsky.social. I really want to offer a special topics course focusing on it in an upcoming semester.

Leveraging participatory sense-making and public engagement with science for AI democratization Our paper explores new potentials for productive dialogue between public engagement with science (PEWS) and radical embodied cognitive science (RECS).…

Collin Lucken & Elmo Feiten use the enactive concept of participatory sense-making to ground public science engagement, showing how core ideas from embodied cognition can scale beyond motor coordination to illuminate social cognition in practice

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c...

Henry Potter and @wiringthebrain.bsky.social challenge reductive views in neuroscience by introducing richer, temporally extended notions of causality and arguing to re-center cognition and the organism as genuine causal agents in behavior

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The audio recording of our fantastic event with Kevin J. Mitchell and Anil Seth, FREE AGENTS: Did Evolution Give Us Free Will?, is now up on our website and Youtube Channel. Go take a listen now!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVr-...

@wiringthebrain.bsky.social @anilseth.bsky.social

The media circus on the slightly modified wolf mixed with the nonsensical hype of de-extinction only highlights the need to greatly shift how we talk about genes and genetic "information" in popular discourse. Oyama's groundbreaking book and Lewontin's prescient forward should be a starting point.

Information and data will never deliver creativity | Hanne De Jaegher

Information and data will never deliver creativity
— Life, information, and the search for meaning

New piece over at @iai.tv

In which I quote Colwyn Trevarthen and David Bowie.

iai.tv/articles/inf...

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c....

𝗕𝗲𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗺: 𝗲𝘅𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲
Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon: Join our discussion with @wiringthebrain.bsky.social
Apr 11 at noon EST USA time.
Here's the paper to get the discussion going:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Everyone welcome but register ->

The Philosophy of Adaptivity - Dialectical Systems At the core of life is adaptivity, the organismal process of adjusting to ever-changing conditions. But despite its centrality, adaptivity is a surprisingly lonely concept. Its most immediate lexical ...

Adaptivity is central to life, yet conceptually homeless. While adaptation is tied to selection, adaptivity is an ongoing organismal process—rooted in metabolism, not just evolutionary causation

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/contribution...

Happy to share that our SI in Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society B was accepted 😎

Hybrid Agencies - Crossing Borders between Biological and Artificial Worlds

Co-Edited with Shaun Gallagher and Takashi Ikegami

We have a fantastic line up of contributions coming up soon !

Can natural selection shape the ability to evolve?

New study shows bacteria evolving mutations that speed up adaptation—suggesting mutations are not purely random but can be biased toward adaptive outcomes

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Towards Comparative Philosophy of Science (Special Issue of the Journal for General Philosophy of Science) CALL FOR PAPERS: Towards Comparative Philosophy of Science (Special Issue of the Journal for General Philosophy of Science) Guest editors: Simon Lohse (Nijmegen) & Karim Bschir (St....

CFP: Towards Comparative Philosophy of Science (Journal for General Philosophy of Science)

Call for papers on comparative philosophy of science is out,, ed;: Simon Lohse and Karim Bschir. Submissions until 31 March 2025.

philevents.org/event/show/1...

Teleology for the twenty-first century: editorial introduction - Synthese Synthese -

Is teleology really obsolete? This special issue explores how goal-directedness remains crucial in biology, mind, and society—despite its exile from analytic philosophy.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#Philosophy #Teleology

New book: Hegel and Heidegger on Time - Dialectical Systems By Ioannis Trisokkas. Published open-access by Cambridge University Press. Summary: This Element discusses Heidegger’s early (1924–1931) reading and critique of Hegel, which revolve around the topic o...

A new study delves into Heidegger’s early critique of Hegel, analysing their divergent views on time and ontology. By examining their distinct conceptions of temporality, the work clarifies the essential differences between their philosophical systems.

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...