Organismal Agency

Jana Švorcová, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and History of Sciences of the Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague. She teaches theoretical and evolutionary biology. Her research focuses on non-mechanistic approaches to the living within the philosophy of biology, nongenetic evolutionary variation and inheritance, as well as organismal agency.

• Chapter 1. Knowing what an organism is.- Chapter 2. Aristotle: Life as Self-Creation.- Chapter 3. Aristotle and Functional Bauplans.- Chapter 4. Immanuel Kant: Mechanism, Teleology, Organism, and the Powers of Our Mind.- Chapter 5. Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature.- Chapter 6. Organismic Teleology and Agency beyond Systems Theories: A Process-Metaphysical Perspective.- Chapter 7. The becoming of identity: A process-ontological view on the relational co-existence of biological beings.- Chapter 8. (Bio)semiosis as life-specific form of agency.- Chapter 9. Plastic ontogenesis: Memory, closure, and habitual teleology in development.- Chapter 10. Ontogenesis, Organisation, and Organismal Agency.- Chapter 11. Biological modularity and the origins of agency.- Chapter 12. Agential patterns in development and evolution: Towards an anti-entropic approach to the divergence of altricial and precocial mammals.- Chapter 13. Organisms as agents in zoosemiotic perspective: The case of Umwelt reversion.- Chapter 14. Agency and Appearance: Reading the Face of Life.