Continuing to listen to David Levering Lewis's riveting biography of Du Bois. In today's chapter, Lewis suggested that Du Bois combined the voices of Sojourner Truth and Schopenhauer and I have not been able to think straight since. #DuBois #sojournertruth #blackhistory #schopenhauer #philsky

VIRALITY VITALITY brings deconstruction to the life sciences, showing how viruses unsettle the very concept of “life.” Drawing on Jacques Derrida, Jonathan Basile explores the unstable borders between virus and organism, self and other. #ACLA2026 #ReadUP tinyurl.com/c3h7j9uy

Welcome to the social media page of the International Philosophy of Biology Circle (IPBC) 🌐 Our aim is to foster an interdisciplinary forum for dialogue on the theoretical, conceptual, historical, and ethical dimensions of the life sciences. Visit our website to learn more: www.phil-bio-circle.org

📣 UK Kant Society: Andrew Cooper Essay Prize 2026 The UK Kant Society has announced a newly-named early career essay prize, in honour of the society's late executive committee member and friend, Andrew Cooper. The prize is £500. Deadline: 30 June 2026 More details 👇 bshp.org.uk/news/uk-kant...

Music resembles language in the sense that it is a temporal sequence of articulated sounds which are more than just sounds. They say something, often something human. The better the music, the more forcefully they say it. | Adorno

The title of this excellent article from Patrick Savage is spot on. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

RIP Éliane Radigue, visionary composer of electro-acoustic music, tape music, and drone

That we cannot tell what the human is does not establish a particularly majestic anthropology: it vetoes any anthropology. | Adorno

An epic Lot Radio debut from a good friend! #dissolve #ice

Excited to learn that Jessica Riskin has a timely reappraisal of Lamarck coming out soon.

We're happy to announce our 12th ROTO Workshop: "Diversity in Motion". It will be held on March 26-27 in Bochum. Please register here: rotoworkshop2026.wixsite.com/diversity/co... and tell us if you'll participate in person or online. Registration and participation is free and everybody is welcome!

I want to know what’s true about nature. It’s not that I do the politics and therefore I lay it on Nature. I have to be sure that Nature really allows that. | Lewontin

The interaction of natural bodies—both dead and living—comprises harmony as well as strife, struggle as well as co-operation. | Engels

Why should we read Henri Bergson's "Creative Evolution" today? There is more than just one reason, see my extended book review, just published in Mind: academic.oup.com/mind/advance... #Bergson #philosophy #philbio #ProcessPhilosophy #biology #science #HenriBergson

Super excited for this collection of writings on underground music in the late twentieth century from @reversediorama.bsky.social

If you were to press me to follow the example of the Ancients and make a list of the cardinal virtues, I would probably respond cryptically by saying that I could think of nothing except for modesty. | Adorno

Wonderful book offering a “critical theory of erotic love and friendship,” which criticizes the romantic ideologies of our present, and defends the erotic bond as a source of refuge and resistance

(Here’s a direct link to this important essay: www.noemamag.com/the-mytholog...

Registration is open for this event 16-17 March @royalsociety.org with programme (titles and abstracts) available online: royalsociety.org/science-even.... In person and online.

Progress is a noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational, intractable idea that must be replaced if we wish to understand the patterns of history. | Gould

My own review of @quinnslobodian.com's Hayek's Bastards, exploring the influence of neoliberalism, and its racist and nationalist strains, on evolutionary theory and the life sciences: olrsupplement.com/2025/05/19/g...

happy holidays from the Oregon coast

With the end of this year, Stuart Newman will step down from his role as Editor-in-Chief. We sincerely thank Stuart for his outstanding 10 years of service and dedication to Biological Theory! Read Stuart's Farewell Editorial: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

“You will be haunted by three spirits.”

My latest paper, The Case for Pluralism About Teleological Explanation, is now available @philscijournal.bsky.social! #philsci #HPbio #HPS

great Gould footnote on teleophobia in modern evolutionary orthodoxy

h/t @yavannakemi.bsky.social

Next Monday, we welcome @cshambaugh.bsky.social from the University of Oregon in our ROTO Lecture Series who will talk about dialectical biology. Just register via the link and join the talk and discussion at 4pm (CET): rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture... #HPBio #PhilSci #HistSci

🚨new publication🚨 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀 𝗮𝘀 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗜𝗻𝗷𝘂𝗿𝘆 in: Understanding Social Struggles: Relating Recognition Theories and Epistemic Injustice (eds. H. Hänel and F. Schuppert), Transcript. pp. 49-64. 2025. Open Access: philpapers.org/archive/BLUC...

Organisms are not billiard balls, struck in deterministic fashion by the cue of natural selection, and rolling to optimal positions on life’s table. They influence their own destiny in interesting, complex, and comprehensible ways. | Gould

Defining non-human #ToolUse remains contested, complicating scientific generalization & inspiring the concept of “tooling.” Our new 📄 @philscijournal.bsky.social proposes a synthetic framework to advance research on 🔧 use & tooling 👇 www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #philsci #cogsci #evosky #HPbio

Just began working on organizing the blog & converting to shareable PDFs, & it’s going to be a big project! For life reasons, it’s going to be harder for me to keep going now, so any support would be crazy appreciated! & thanks for reading & sharing Substudies! open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

Two new open-access articles from Andrea Gambarotto and collaborators: Enactivizing dialectics: from individual to social normativity and back (w/ Thomas van Es): link.springer.com/article/10.1... Habit: a Hegelian-enactive dialogue (w/ Ezequiel A. Di Paolo): link.springer.com/article/10.1...

OTD in 1880, Charles Darwin published The Power of Movement in Plants. D believed that plants are active agents in the world: “A radicle may be compared with a burrowing animal such as a mole, which wishes to penetrate perpendicularly down into the ground.” 🧪🌱🐋 #philsci #HistSTM 🦋🦫

To assume one basis for life and a different basis for science is as a matter of course a lie. | Marx

Marx as a philosophical biologist? Chris Shambaugh on young Marx's account of organismal agency, its relation to human life to the critique of capitalism. www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Author’s bio in a J.B.S. Haldane children’s book: “He thinks a lot of the magicians in old days were only doing, or trying to do, what scientists and engineers do now, and that science can be more exciting than magic ever was.”

Reading a Julius Schaxel article via @jamescrane.bsky.social translation. It’s so inspiring seeing a Marxist scientist reading and integrating science and philosophy like this. Anticipated evo-devo before its formalization! It’s also interesting how he’s still ahead of time w/ some philbio topics!

It’s here! My first physical copy of my book, out next month. @uchicagopress.bsky.social have a lovely traditional of sending the first copy straight from their offices in branded wrapping paper.

ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/race... Another generous review of my book!

working on a translation of Julius Schaxel’s “Das biologische Individuum” (1930) on the natural-historical emergence of ‘the individual’ & the possibility of thinking its concept—by distinguishing it from individuality & dissolving the individual back into its constituent relations & movements!

Amazing to have Elliott Sober delivering his keynote "Richard Lewontin - Biologist, Philosopher, and Marxist" at the Dialectical Biology Today Conference! 🌱🐋 @ihpst-uoft.bsky.social

My little book on Schrödinger's famous classic 'What Is Life?' is out! Offering the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of the book's origins, reception, impact, and legacy, it uncovers Schrödinger's motivations in writing it, and shows how it has shaped our current understanding of the cell

I'm very much looking forward to the BPC conference tomorrow and on Friday at @ruhr-uni-bochum.de! Everyone is welcome to attend and you can also watch the stream on zoom. I will give a talk at 4pm about early 20th century concepts of plant agency (featuring Arber, Ungerer and Francé). 🌿

Recently discovered this critical glossary of key terms in evolutionary biology, which was edited by Keller and Lloyd, and inspired by Raymond Williams. Great resource

This is a terrific new paper on Marx's naturalism. I highly recommend it!

The euphoria that has accompanied our ability, finally, to give a complete and unambiguous description of the allelic composition of a natural population for some arbitrarily chosen piece of the genome has hindered us from seeing that the problem of epigenesis has not been eliminated. | Lewontin