The Revitalizing Biophilosophy conference series is an initiative dedicated to building biophilosophy into a transdisciplinary international movement. The first of two planned conferences, titled Revitalizing Biophilosophy, will be held online on July 10–11, 2025. This virtual gathering will bring together a diverse range of scholars to explore biophilosophy’s historical foundations, contemporary developments, and future possibilities. The second conference, to be held in Summer 2026, will be a hybrid online and in-person track as part of the International Whitehead Conference at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
The 2025 conference will serve as an essential step toward consolidating a global biophilosophical movement. Our main aim is to provide an alternative both to the prevailing reductionist tendencies of contemporary biology, which restricts the study of life to materialistic, mechanistic, and narrowly computational frameworks, and to the mainstream Anglo-American philosophy of biology, which supports these tendencies through its mostly implicit acceptance of the prevailing scientific materialism. Instead, Revitalizing Biophilosophy will highlight perspectives that take life’s intrinsic creativity, agency, interiority, and value seriously.
Conference Recordings
Revitalizing Biophilosophy
Day 1
Day 2
The Need for a Revitalization of Biophilosophy
Biophilosophy is not a new field. Throughout the 20th century, numerous thinkers in Europe, North America, and beyond developed frameworks that diverged from the materialist and mechanistic assumptions of mainstream biology. These include George Canguilhem, Hans Jonas, Jakob von Uexküll, Gilbert Simondon, Adolf Portmann, Raymond Ruyer, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and many others. Their contributions remain underappreciated in dominant discourse yet offer essential insights into the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical dimensions of life.
Beyond Western traditions, non-Western approaches—Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, and Indigenous conceptions of life—provide profound impulses for thinking about evolution, biological organization and the living world in general on the basis of new ethical and ontological assumptions. These perspectives share affinities with process-relational approaches to biology, emphasizing interdependence, dynamic emergence, and the participatory nature of life. Our goal is to facilitate dialogue across these traditions, forging a truly Global Biophilosophy.
Conference Themes
These two conferences aim to address three central questions:
What is Biophilosophy?
Mapping the field and clarifying its relationship to other traditions, including process philosophy, phenomenology, biosemiotics, feminist philosophy, and historical-epistemological approaches.
Key Biophilosophical Concepts
Exploring ideas such as organism theory, ontogeny, organismic memory, organismic interiority, feminist approaches, and alternative models of evolution and development.
How Does Biophilosophy Differ from Mainstream Philosophy of Biology?
Expanding the metaphysical, epistemological, and methodological frameworks beyond the constraints of scientific materialism.
We intend for this first conference to create a foundation upon which the 2026 hybrid online/in-person conference can build. The second conference, which will take place at the International Whitehead Conference, will explore both theoretical and practical dimensions of biophilosophy, including its implications for environmental ethics, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and the future of biological sciences.
Building a Long-Term Movement
Beyond these two conferences, our long-term vision is to establish an International Biophilosophical Society that fosters collaboration among scholars and scientists dedicated to rethinking life’s meaning and significance. We also plan to launch a Biophilosophy Book Series to publish works that engage in this renewed biophilosophical inquiry. The proceedings of these conferences will form the basis of a comprehensive anthology, to be published by a reputable academic press.
We invite all those interested in the future of biophilosophy to join us in this effort. By bridging insights from diverse philosophical traditions and the life sciences, we aim to create a more expansive, integrative, and ethically responsible approach to understanding life in all its complexity.
Schedule
Conference Speakers
Prof. John “Jack” Bagby
California Institute of Integral Studies, USA
John Robert Bagby is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. His research spans the history of philosophy and contemporary metaphysics, focusing on issues of consciousness, nature, and the philosophy of music. Bagby received training in ancient Greek philosophy and phenomenology at Boston College. Drawing insight from thinkers like Plato, Spinoza, Merleau-Ponty, and Henri Bergson, he engages with contemporary process thought, the interplay between science and philosophy, and how concepts of mind and cosmos have evolved from antiquity to present.
Ateles Entelecheia: A Brief History of Biophilosophy and the Metaphysics of Absence, Virtuality, and the Incompleteness of Life
I will present a minor reading of the history of Biophilosophy in figures leading up to Henri Bergson and his French Spiritualist colleagues. Looking at Aristotle, early stoicism, Plotinus, Leibniz, and then the French spiritualists, I’ll show that Biophilosophy must be both the philosophical engagement with life—engaged with life-sciences and the phenomenology of life—as well as a study of the life of philosophy—philosophy as a way of life. Taking the study of consciousness as a phenomenon of life, Biophilosophy must not merely account for its conditionality in living activity, but make philosophy itself a living, innovative, yet incomplete, activity of life.
Prof. Terrence W. Deacon
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Terrence W. Deacon has held faculty positions at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, Boston University, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he is Distinguished Professor emeritus of Anthropology and Cognitive and Brain Sciences. His laboratory research has focused on comparative and developmental neuroanatomy to study the mechanisms that determine brain structure and evolution. He has published over 100 scientific articles and two books: The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain (1997) and Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2011). He is currently working on a new book tentatively titled Falling Up: How Inverse Darwinism Catalyzes Evolution.
Simulated Intelligence: Machines Don’t Think—Brains Don’t Compute
“Artificial Intelligence” is actually Simulated Intelligence. Computer simulations of air flow over an airplane wing can produce incredibly precise predictions of the real-world consequences of different wing designs. Yet there is no air, no wing, no friction, no pressure, etc., intrinsic to the simulation. Similarly, for generative LLMs; there is no meaning, no significance, no purpose intrinsic to these simulations. We create simulations because they are usually better at making appropriate predictions than are persons. But there is no flight and no thought taking place in these respective simulations. Intelligence involves simulation, but indirectly, via simulating the physicality of simulating.
Prof. Tim Elmo Feiten
Pennsylvania State University, USA
Tim Elmo Feiten is an interdisciplinary philosopher of science with a focus on the sciences of life, mind, and artificial intelligence. He uses the lens of embodied cognition to develop new readings of Jakob von Uexküll and Max Stirner, and to ask questions about art, science, technology, and society. Other research projects deal with public engagement with science, democratizing AI research, the status of LLMs, and methodological issues with computational modeling in the humanities and social sciences.
What if Uexküll Was Right? Facing the Ethnical and Metaphysical Implications of Umwelt
Jakob Johann von Uexküll’s admirers have almost all agreed on one point: denying Uexküll’s view that each human individual inhabits its own private Umwelt and can never access the Umwelten of other subjects. This position has been variously decried as solipsist, idealist, or relativist and criticized for its alleged ethical and metaphysical implications. I address the problem of the privacy of Umwelt by outlining two kinds of response: a straight and a skeptical solution. I argue that straight solutions are unlikely to succeed and suggest that the ethical and metaphysical outcomes of a skeptical solution are nothing to be afraid of.
Prof. Timothy Jackson
University of Melbourne, Australia
Timothy Jackson is an evolutionary toxinologist, pharmacologist, and biologist, and a philosopher of science. He currently co-leads the Australian Venom Research Unit at the University of Melbourne. His research interests sprawl from the usage of toxin-producing systems as models for diversification to the development of a speculative ontology grounded in evolutionary (i.e. complex systems) science.
Life Is Technical: Chemical Ecology, Vital Animism, and the Genesis Of Technicity
What is the relevance of a neglected cadre of mid-to-late 20th Century French philosophers to contemporary philosophy of biology? What is their relationship to “vitalism”? Why is consideration of chemical ecology key to understanding everything from the nature of the biological to the genesis of the technical? After discussing the “vitalisms” of Georges Canguilhem and Raymond Ruyer, this talk will focus on the bio-logic Gilbert Simondon, developed in his general theories of individuation and the genesis of technicity. Via an account of the usage of toxins as tools by non-human organisms, it will conclude with an analysis of toxins and other exochemicals through the lens of Félix Guattari’s “machinic heterogenesis”.
Dr. Katherine Peil Kauffman
USA
Katherine Peil Kauffman is the founding director of EFS International, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering “emotional wisdom.” Her work addresses the physical substrates and biological functions that undergird emotional behaviors, personal feelings, and emotion-driven social interactions. Kauffman reframes emotion as an ancient “self-regulatory” sensori-motor guidance system hardwired within every living embodiment; one delivering vital information and an evolutionary logic that have remained opaque to science. A former affiliate of Northeastern University and Harvard Divinity School, she speaks internationally on the role of emotional sentience in human development, cognition and decision-making, emphasizing implications for public health, moral reasoning, and natural spirituality.
The Tao of Emotional Sentience
The new science of emotion is presented, utilizing the Eastern metaphor of The Tao as placeholder for the deterministic “machinery” of the universe, the biophysical process of reality construction, but one honoring the participating, observing, “agent” as an essential component within the creative machinery. Emotional sentience is associated with the cyclic, transformative, dynamic, never-ending flow of active information between two ontologically real domains of Res Potentia and Res Extensa, integrated and realized at their overlapping interface by the resident agent. Akin to Whitehead, emotion is reframed as a vital informational and communicative component as patterns of potentia become actual events.
Prof. Spyridon A. Koutroufinis
Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Spyridon A. Koutroufinis is a Privatdozent (Associate Professor by habilitation) at the Technical University of Berlin’s Institute of Philosophy. His primary areas of expertise are biophilosophy, process philosophy, and the theory of self-organization of complex dynamical systems. Koutroufinis investigates the philosophical underpinnings of biological form and process, drawing on ideas from systems theory (critically) and process thought (positively) to understand life’s organization. He has authored and edited numerous works in these areas, aiming to develop a process- oriented ontology for the theory of the organism.
Organisms Determine Their Own Individual Essence: On the Central Ontological Difference between Living Beings and Inorganic Self-Organizing Dynamic Systems.
Our mathematical formalisms and abstract mechanisms for describing the dynamics of natural entities of all kinds are based on the implicit assumption that the essence of these entities is fixed. Starting with the concept of the individual essence of a particular organism, I claim that every organism possesses a processual individual essence. More precisely, I argue that every living entity is constantly redefining its own individual essence. This idea is an ideal means of emphasizing the organismic mode of being and the unbridgeable ontological distance between it and the most complex imaginable inorganic, self-organizing dynamic system.
Prof. Kalevi Kull
University of Tartu, Estonia
Kalevi Kull is Professor of Biosemiotics at the University of Tartu in Estonia. A leading figure in biosemiotics, he investigates the semiotic processes in living systems – how organisms produce and interpret signs. His background spans field ecology and theoretical biology, and since 1997 he has served as a professor in Tartu’s Department of Semiotics. Kull’s work covers biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, and theoretical biology, examining how meaning-making and communication occur in organisms and ecosystems. He has also been President of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies since 2015.
The Biosemiotic Leap into Life’s Freedom
Biosemiotics is the study of prelinguistic meaning-making throughout the entire realm of living. If living systems are those capable of meaning-making, biosemiotics is biology. As it occurs, the most interesting problems studied earlier in philosophy converge in biosemiotics: the preconditions of free choice, indeterminacy, freedom itself, the origin of logic and contradiction as such, but also of representation, categorization, anticipation, emergence, autonomy, agency, knowing, value, and moreover, the aesthetic. I’ll focus in my talk on the conditions of free choice and the origin of umwelt as understood in semiotic biology. It is important that the explanation is not based on evolution or survival conditions.
Prof. Michael Levin
Tufts University, USA
Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, an associate faculty at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, and the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed publications across developmental biology, computer science, and philosophy of mind. His group works to understand information processing and problem-solving across scales, in a range of naturally evolved, synthetically engineered, and hybrid living systems. Dr. Levin’s work spans from fundamental conceptual frameworks to applications in birth defects, regeneration, and cancer.
Beyond Mechanism and Organicism: The Spectrum of Diverse Intelligence
I will use the lens of the field of diverse intelligence to sketch a vision of a spectrum of agency that encompasses the systems referred to as “machines” and “life”. I argue that organicists do not push far enough, giving in to reductive computationalism in accepting the existence of dead matter or machines that only do what their materials and algorithms dictate. Even minimal systems are not well encompassed by their algorithms any more than minds are fully encompassed by the domain of biochemistry. Both evolved and engineered systems serve as interfaces to rich, agential patterns of a Platonic space.
Prof. Paul-Antoine Miquel
Université Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès, France
Paul-Antoine Miquel is a Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès (Toulouse II) in France. He works in the philosophy of biology and French philosophical traditions, engaging with thinkers like Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Georges Canguilhem. His research examines concepts such as biological individuation and adaptability, exploring how living systems generate norms and meaning beyond purely mechanistic explanations. Miquel’s contributions help bridge French metaphysical thought with contemporary biology.
Adaptability and Cognition in Biological Systems: A Philosophical Modelling
In his doctoral thesis, “L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique”, Simondon formulates three key philosophical claims. First, in complex physical or biological systems, individuation is not merely a property of an individual, rather, individuality always results from an individuation process. Second, a biological individuated system has a distinctive feature: it acts on its own stage. Third, there must be some non-trivial recursive procedure through which a physical individuated system can switch into a biological one. In this talk, we propose a philosophical model to further develop this conceptual scheme. This will allow us to characterize biological individuation as a second-order organisation, and to connect it with the two concepts of heteronomy and adaptability.
Prof. Alan Rodrigues
The Rockefeller University, USA
Alan Rodrigues is a Research Assistant Professor at The Rockefeller University, where he co-directs the Laboratory of Morphogenesis alongside Dr. Amy Shyer. Rodrigues is a life scientist who studies how organ structures self-organize during embryogenesis as well as disease. His research takes a holistic, biophysical approach to morphogenesis: he investigates how emergent properties arise at the level of cellular collectives and how these properties enable epigenetic processes capable of producing ordered tissue patterns and organ architecture. His work has revealed new ways of thinking about how tissue form emerges and has reconceived the role that genes play in this process.
Living Thinking Worthy for the Study of Life: Transcending Past-Bound Consciousness
Living systems are undeniably complex. Unfortunately, much of mainstream biological science involves a reductive focus on singular causes (e.g. genes) and a use of machine ontologies to grasp organic phenomena. Indeed most of contemporary biology and biomedicine has been reduced to the study of applied genetics and biochemistry, with little consideration as to what makes living systems fundamentally distinct from the non-living. In this presentation, I will explore how the current malaise in the biological sciences may stem from a limitation, not from external tools, but rather from the inner consciousness of scientists themselves. I will discuss the notion of thinking based on “past-bound consciousness” and what it could entail for scientists to develop a consciousness that is truly living and therefore creative.
Prof. Deboleena Roy
Emory University, USA
Deboleena Roy is Vice Dean of Faculty and Dean of the Sciences for Emory College of Arts and Sciences. She is Professor of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Roy received her PhD in reproductive neuroendocrinology and molecular biology and is the author of Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab. She has taken on a number of academic leadership roles and is dedicated to building trust and transparency in higher education.
Bodies, Biophilosophies, and Feminist Resistance through Art
Art as a mode of feminist resistance allows us to question essentialist norms, particularly through our ability to create projects that frame and envision bodies and matter in terms of movement, change, intensities, and becoming. As a feminist biologist and science studies scholar collaborating with an artist who works with moving image, sound, light, glass, chemical and microbial processes, this paper considers carefully a biophilosophy of becoming that can contribute to our understanding of the body and serve as an act of resistance at a moment where our bodies, biologies, and sexes have seemingly been taken from ourselves, and are beinghyper-essentialized. This biophilosophy aims to reformulate our understanding of the body as a site of resistance and as a dynamic interaction between organisms and elements by drawing upon the qualities of changefulness and nonhuman becomings; kinship and hylozoism; and univocity and immanence.
Prof. Matthew David Segall
California Institute of Integral Studies, USA
Matthew David Segall is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. He is a philosopher and transdisciplinary researcher whose work applies process-relational thought to contemporary science and religious studies. Segall’s research explores how Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics – which emphasizes events, relationality, and emergent evolution – can illuminate modern scientific questions in physics, biology, and consciousness studies. His most recent book is titled Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Integral Imprint, 2023). He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com
Whitehead’s Organic Empiricism
This paper expands upon Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of “organic empiricism,” articulated in his 1925 Harvard lectures, arguing that it enables us to transcend Kantian epistemological constraints by reconceiving cognition as rooted in deeper formative processes shared by all living beings. Whitehead’s theory of concrescence generalizes Kant’s transcendentalism beyond the latter’s limited focus on cognitive conditions, situating human knowing within a cosmic process of prehensive relations—experiential interactions that unite physical data with conceptual possibilities. By shifting from Kant’s anthropocentric and discursive epistemology toward a broader, “descendental” methodology, this paper seeks to ground human cognition in the same etheric, teleological forces shaping organisms. Building upon Christoph Hueck’s “Empirical Vitalism,” this approach overcomes Kant’s construal of purposiveness as a merely regulative idea, offering instead a constitutive account of living processes. Ultimately, Whitehead’s organic empiricism is shown to provide philosophical foundations for a participatory science capable of genuinely understanding living beings from within, revealing cognition as organically continuous with nature’s formative creativity.
Prof. Margrit Shildrick
Stockholm University, Sweden
Margrit Shildrick is Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Stockholm University and works mainly in the field of biophilosophy. Her projects include an extensive multidiscipilnary study of the phenomenological experience of heart transplantation; an ongoing collaboration with Queer Death Studies; excursions into bioart and its posthumanist implications; and rethinking the concept of the gift as far more than exchange. Books include Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (2002), Dangerous Discourses: Subjectivity, Sexuality and Disability (2009), and Visceral Prostheses: Somatechnics and Posthuman Embodiment (2023).
Biophilosophy and Viral Entanglements
In the urgent context of viral pandemics, the normative narrative marks the virus as a stealthy pathogen that challenges bio-immunity and can radically disrupt human vitality. Thinking through a broadly posthumanist and feminist-oriented biophilosophy grounds a shift in perspective that reconfigures our understanding of viral encounters from contamination to collaboration. In an environmental context in which human, animals, and multiple microbes are irreducibly entangled, where all life relies on otherness, the virus can be reclaimed in the mode of mutualistic benefits. I analyse both the biophilosophy of Esposito’s immunitaryparadigm and some contemporary trends in micro-biology to go beyond conventional binaries and reclaim the virus as an essential aspect of human life.
Dr. Jana Svorcova
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Jana Švorcová is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and History of Science, Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague. Her academic background bridges philosophy and evolutionary biology, with her research primarily exploring non-mechanistic perspectives in biophilosophy, non-genetic evolutionary variation and inheritance, as well as organismal agency. She teaches courses on theoretical and evolutionary biology, as well as the history of evolutionary thought. She has published books and papers on epigenetics, the role of meaning in living systems, symbiosis, and a range of other concepts, including habit, cellular agency, umwelt, and teleology, all explored from both biological and philosophical perspectives.
Organic Memory: How the Past Lives with Us
My past research has often, to various extents, focused on the concept of organic memory, first developed by 19th-century neo-Lamarckians. This idea has influenced biology, psychology, criminology, and literature, and some biologists continue to explore it today. In my presentation, I will briefly outline its history before examining its role in development, gene regulation, and transgenerational epigenetics. The key question is whether organisms can retain experiences with their environment (including interactions with other organisms), and how these experiences shape their evolution. This leads to a deeper inquiry into how memory differs from heredity and where the two overlap.
Prof. Markus Wild
University of Basel, Switzerland
Markus Wild is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Basel, a position he has held since 2013. He is known for his contributions to animal philosophy and ethics. His research addresses questions about animal minds, consciousness, and the human-animal relationship, bridging philosophy of mind with ethical considerations of non-human animals. He is the author of Tierphilosophie zur Einführung (Introduction to the Philosophy of Animals). Wild has also served on ethics commissions, indicating his engagement with applied ethics and policy.
Adolf Portmann and the Origins of Self-Presentation
A central proposition of Portmann’s work is: ‘Self-presentation [Selbstdarstellung] has to be understood as a basic fact of life on a par with self-maintenance and the preservation of the species [Selbsterhaltung].’ This idea of self-presentation in the animal kingdom goes back to the first reception of Darwin’s work on sexual selection. This idea was developed in German-speaking countries in discussions about animal play and animal constructive instincts. In this contribution, I would like to trace the development of the idea of self-representation and its relation to Portmann’s concept of interiority (Innerlichkeit).
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