The Riddle of Organismal Agency:
New Historical and Philosophical Reflections

The concept of ‘agency’ has played fundamental roles in the history of philosophy and the sciences.
For instance, it has been interpreted through the notions of ‘action’ and ‘intention,’ with
ramifications in long-standing disputes on determinism and free will, personhood, moral
responsibility, or the nature of causation in human affairs, among other topics. In the study of life,
the concept of agency has ignited debates on the ontological status of organisms and the activities
they undertake in the world. In particular, the observations that organisms have the ability to
actively react to environmental changes, autonomously construct and maintain their organization
and identity despite changes in material composition and form, regenerate, self-reproduce, find
shelter and food, etc., have long puzzled philosophers and scientists. How do we explain the apparent
purposiveness of organismal development and actions? Do all organisms have agency and pursue
goals of their own? What evolutionary consequences obtain from the agential activities of organisms?
How do we make sense of organismal agency and integrate it into biological theories and practices?
The aim of this workshop is to address the riddle of organismal agency through the lenses of
philosophy, history, and the biological sciences. It aims to (i) clarify the epistemological and
ontological underpinnings of organismal agency. In addition, it will (ii) contextualize the problem of
organismal agency in the history of philosophy and biology in fruitful new directions by
disentangling its interconnections and the continuities and discontinuities of former approaches.
Finally, this workshop will (iii) delve into the consequences of embracing organismal agency for the
study of development and evolution, its formal integration into biological theories, and
translatability into scientific practice.

(i) Philosophical dimensions
The current debates on organismal agency in developmental and evolutionary biology reopen a
bundle of old questions regarding the ontological and epistemological status of agency. Is agency a
capacity that belongs to the furniture of the world or a heuristic tool for scientists? Can we dispense
with it for explaining biological phenomena, or is it an inescapable outcome of our rational makeup
without which we cannot fully grasp the properties of the living? Furthermore, what is the structure
of teleological explanations and what kind of relations should they trace? In addressing these
questions, it is necessary to contextualize agency within related concepts like teleology,
purposiveness, goal-directedness, normativity, autonomy, and autopoiesis.
In addition, we ask whether agency refers mainly to organismic behavior or to development
in general. That is, does it refer to purposive behavioral responses to novel environmental stimuli
or to self-organizing and self-maintaining developmental processes? This, in turn, is related to a
fundamental question regarding the referents of the agential standpoint: Can agency be predicated
of organisms that lack rationality or even a nervous system (e.g., bacteria, plants)? Agency is usually
regarded as a property of organisms as wholes, but a comprehensive theory of the organism is
lacking. Thus, it is necessary to discuss organismal agency in the context of the ongoing debates on
biological individuality and organism-centered biology. Can agency be ascribed to biological
individuals other than organisms (e.g., populations and tissue-forming cells)? Are highly integrated
multi-species collectives (e.g., holobionts) agents? Does the organism have a ‘special kind’ of agency
different from other biological entities?

(ii) Historical dimensions
Recent trends to recognize and understand organismal agency must be understood against the
background of enduring discussions in the history of philosophy and biology. Investigations
concerning ‘agency’ have a long pedigree in the history of philosophy, from Aristotle’s inquiry on
what is a voluntary or intentional action, to the influential criticism of Hume regarding the causal
powers of agents, to the recent developments in philosophy of action or the agent-based explorations
of enactivism and embodied cognition. One central answer to the riddle of organismal purposiveness
was provided by Kant. Some historians have contended that many authors in the fields of
morphology and physiology, before and after Kant, sought to explain purposiveness as something
constitutive of living organisms and not just as a regulative maxim of the reflective power of
judgment with heuristic value for scientific research.
We want to explore the diverse trajectories of organismal agency in the history of the life
sciences and its intersections with the history of philosophy. What answers were given to the riddle
of organismal agency in the 18th and 19th centuries (e.g., in debates about vitalism and Lamarckism)?
Were these ideas linked to scientific developments? Moreover, recent historiographical work has
unearthed that several authors took seriously the idea of organismal agency in early 20th-century
biology, for example, in animal behavior, botany, and developmental physiology. In this context, we
ask: How was organismal agency construed inside organicist, holistic or neo-Kantian movements of
early 20th-century biology? What were the continuities and discontinuities of these former
frameworks that emphasized organismal agency with approaches of the second half of the 20th
century? How do we account for the renewed interest on organismal agency in contemporary biology?
How do these past debates shed light on reoccurring challenges?

(iii) Biological dimensions
Agency-talk is pervasive in biology, ranging from descriptions and explanations of behavior, the
dynamics of homeostatic physiological processes, the goal-driven trajectories of development and the
outcomes of adaptive scenarios. But in which instances is the attribution of agency warranted? Some
biologists regard most of these instances as careless wordings that should be replaced by non-agential
variants. Others consider them as harmless and even useful shortcuts. Still others argue that they are
legitimate and irreplaceable. In any case, agency is interlinked with biological practice and the
methodologies adopted by scientists. Thus, we aim to explore how agency can be studied and modeled,
and in which way it can be used to explain biological phenomena. Can agential explanations be reduced
to non-agential (e.g., selectionist) explanations? How is the environment related to agential dynamics
and which role does it play in agential explanations?
These questions are especially important in the current debates on organism-environment
interaction and the organism’s active role in evolution. In particular, philosophical reflection on agency
may shed light on theory-building and experimental research on niche construction and developmental
plasticity, and help ground organism-centered evolutionary perspectives. Likewise, it is pertinent to ask
how agency itself emerged and changed in the course of evolution. Finally, we want to inquire into how
conceptual approaches to organismal agency could inform new ways of thinking about socially relevant
topics in biomedicine (e.g., units of responsibility, and targets of interventions).

This workshop will bring together scholars from philosophy, history of science, and biology who have
expertise in diverse conceptual, theoretical, historical and methodological problems related to
organismal agency.

Organization
Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda, Guido I. Prieto & Jan Baedke
Department of Philosophy I
Ruhr University Bochum