The Riddle of Organismal Agency brings together historians, philosophers, and scientists for an interdisciplinary re-assessment of one of the long-standing problems in the scientific understanding of life.

Marshalling insights from diverse sciences including physiology, comparative psychology, developmental biology, and evolutionary biology, the book provides an up-to-date survey of approaches to non-human organisms as agents, capable of performing activities serving their own goals such as surviving or reproducing, and whose doings in the world are thus to be explained teleologically. From an Integrated History and Philosophy of Science perspective, the book contributes to a better conceptual and theoretical understanding of organismal agency, advancing some suggestions on how to study it empirically and how to frame it in relation to wider scientific and philosophical traditions. It also provides new historical entry points for examining the deployment, trajectories, and challenges of agential views of organisms in the history of biology and philosophy.

This book will be of interest to philosophers of biology; historians of science; biologists interested in analysing the active roles of organisms in development, ecological interactions, and evolution; philosophers and practitioners of the cognitive sciences; and philosophers and historians of philosophy working on purposiveness and teleology.

Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. He obtained a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum and was a Writing-Up Fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research. His research concentrates on the history and philosophy of biology, with a specific emphasis on how organism–environment interactions are construed in evolutionary biology and ecology.

Jan Baedke is Professor at the Department of Philosophy I, Ruhr University Bochum. His research is characterised by an integrated approach to the history and philosophy of the life sciences, with a focus on evolutionary biology and microbiology. He is the author of Above the Gene, Beyond Biology: Toward a Philosophy of Epigenetics (2018) and PI of the German Research Foundation-funded research group “ROTO” (The Return of the Organism in the Bio-sciences: Theoretical, Historical, and Social Dimensions).

Guido I. Prieto is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Individualisation in Changing Environments research association (InChangE), Department of Philosophy, Bielefeld University. A biologist by training and self-taught scientific illustrator, he obtained a PhD in Philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum. His research focuses on the philosophical elucidation of the concepts of “organism” and “biological individual” and their roles within and outside biology. He is also interested in the philosophy and practice of visual representations in the sciences.

Gregory Radick is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. His books include Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology (2023), The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (2007), and, as co-editor, The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (2003; 2nd edition 2009). He has served as President of the British Society for the History of Science and the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology.