Intuiting Life Seminar Series

Above is a playlist including four sessions from the “Intuiting Life” seminar series hosted by the Cobb Institute Science Advisory Committee. Click on the hamburger menu icon in the top right corner of the video to see the playlist.

The series featured the authors of a new book, Process-Philosophical Perspectives on Biology: Intuiting Life (2023), co-edited by Spyridon Koutroufinis and Arthur Araujo.

Here’s the book description:

Many life scientists implicitly assume a materialistic metaphysics that is based on the worldview of the 19th century. This sort of reductionistic metaphysics does not do justice to the complexity of biological phenomena, leaving many features of living processes unexplained. The authors of this book explore the viability of process metaphysics to advance our understanding of fundamental biological concepts such as organism, ontogeny, agency, teleology, environment, and normativity. Based on the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead and other process thinkers, the authors ascribe subjective interiority to all living beings, from unicellular organisms to the most complex animals. This book highlights the uniqueness and intrinsic value of living beings. It presents a new approach to essential dimensions of the phenomenon of life with the aim of opening up new horizons in the thinking of philosophers, philosophers of biology, life scientists, and environmentalists.

The first video is an introduction to the book and the series, featuring Spyridon Koutroufinis and myself. The first seminar session features Spyridon and Federico Giorgi. The second seminar session features Philip Tryon, Johanna Häusler, and Nathaniel Barrett. The third seminar session features Spyridon and myself again discussing our chapters.

You can learn more about each of the participants here.

If you’re interested in my talk in particular, based on a chapter titled “On the Place of Life in the Cosmos: Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism and Contemporary Theoretical Biology,” I’ve timestamped it here (40 mins into session 3):