Samir Okasha's Philosophy

Metascience, 2019

Review of Samir Okasha, Agents and Goals in Evolution

Choice Reviews Online, 2001

Biosemiotics, 2021

Denis Noble has produced a succinct analysis of the 'Illusions of the Modern Synthesis'. At the heart of the matter is the place of agency in organisms. This paper examines the nature of conscious agent action in organisms, and the role of affects in shaping agent choice. It examines the dual role these have in shaping evolution, and in the social worlds of scientists that shape evolutionary theory. Its central claim follows Noble, that agency is central to the structure of organisms, and raises careful consideration for the role animal agency and affective evaluations in biology, and in biologists.

Philosophy of Science, 2008

Darwin's Evolving Legacy. Jorge Martínez Contreras & Aura Ponce de León (eds.), 2011

Free will can be defined, albeit imprecisely, as a property possessed by agents which allows them to make choices, that is, to modify their future voluntarily by choosing from a number of alternatives that they recognize. This would mean that, retrospectively, one could say that they could have acted differently if they had wanted to. Now, whatever agency and free will are, there is something we do know or at least we believe we know about these concepts: they are properties or human faculties that are products of natural selection, be it because they have an adaptive value or because they are collateral products (by-products) of other human traits, traits that are adaptive in order to assure the survival of the species. I will not attempt in this paper to address the question of what agency is, nor whether it really exists or whether it is an illusion. My question is why the experience of agency exists and what kind of adaptive function it has, or in which ways it became a collateral product of other adaptive functions, making it one of the most intense, clear and permanent experiences in human beings. My main thesis is that the experience of agency is the product of the overlapping of certain cognitive functions that have adaptive value, especially social intelligence, metarepresentation, simulation, episodic memory, language, extended consciousness and deliberation

2016

Agency, the capacity to act for a goal or purpose guided by norms, is central to our understanding of the capacities and activities of organisms including human beings. However, its distinctive purposive and normative character has proven difficult to integrate with the scientific understanding of organisms as natural physical entities. The challenge is to show both that agency has a place in the natural causal order of the world as described by natural science (naturalism), and that its distinctive purposive and normative character plays an indispensable role in our understanding of natural phenomena (teleology). The standard approaches, however, either locate agency in the natural causal order of the world but fail to vindicate its distinctive purposive and normative character, or vice versa. My goal is to avoid this dichotomy and instead offer a complete unifying account of natural agency. In the first part of the thesis I address the methodology of naturalism. First, I argue tha...

We outline an alternative to both scientific and liberal naturalism which attempts to reconcile Sellars' apparently conflicting commitments to the scientific accountability of human nature and the autonomy of the space of reasons. Scientific naturalism holds that agency and associated concepts are a mechanical product of the realm of laws, while liberal naturalism contends that the autonomy of the space of reason requires that we leave nature behind. The third way we present follows in the footsteps of German Idealism, which attempted to overcome the Kantian chasm between nature and agency, and is thus dubbed 'post-Kantian.' We point to an overlooked group of scholars in the naturalism debate who, along with recent work in biology and cognitive science, offer a path to overcome the reductive tendencies of empiricism while avoiding the dichotomy of logical spaces. We then bring together these different streams of research, by foregrounding and expanding on what they share: the idea of organisms as living agents and that of a continuity without identity between life and mind. We qualify this as a bottom-up transformative approach to rational agency, which grounds cognition in the intrinsically purposive nature of organisms, while emphasizing the distinction between biological agency and full-fledged mindedness.

Biological theory, 2024

(1980), theorists and philosophers of biology grapple with how to expand the franchise of human agency to include some or all living organisms within a naturalist framework. On the side of the former, all matter is deemed to have agentive status and questions of normativity have been largely sidelined if not eliminated. On the side of the latter, normativity is taken to be an irreducible aspect of organismic agency even if how to reconcile this with naturalism is a work in progress. For all intents and purposes, dialogue between these two frameworks has been nonexistent. Living beings have perennially been seen as existing as agents acting on behalf of their own continued existence and well-being. For Aristotle the living being is thus its own final cause (or telos) and in its natural self-purposiveness constitutes the most fundamental "substance" or "primary ousia" in a nature that ontologically is invested with immanent purposiveness (Moss 2017). For Kant, writing under very different ontological/metaphysical assumptions, recognition of the self-purposiveness of "organized beings" was also an unavoidable, albeit subjective, judgment of human reason (Kant[1790]2000). Kant offered natural science a "methodology of teleology" that would enable "objective science" 1 Readers may be interested in my discussion of this trend in Moss (2017).

In this paper, I explore the concept of agency in philosophy of biology. I try to characterize minimal agency and sketch out its evolution into more complex capacities, such as decisionmaking and free will.