Henrik Hörmann
Universität Bielefeld
In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the topic of organismal agency. In this talk, I want to draw out some of the implications agency may have on the historical contingency of evolutionary processes. In other words, how does the organism as “active subject” (Lewontin 1983) shape what happens when we “replay life’s tape” (Gould 1989)?
I will work out for relevant accounts of agency how they bear on the question of historical contingency. I do so by considering the conception of “choices” figuring implicitly in each of the accounts.
Under common cybernetic analyses of agency as goal-directedness, the persistence and plasticity (Nagel 1979) of agential behavior allow agents to reliably reach certain end-states. In this framework, agency is a tool to deal with the contingencies of the environment, rather than creating new ones. On the other hand, some recent approaches take agency to be relevant to our explanations precisely because it generates novel or unpredictable behavior (e.g., Tahar 2023). Between the two, ecological approaches (Walsh 2015; Fulda 2017) attempt to integrate goal-directedness and an active, creative role for organisms. This results in a complicated relation to contingency.
I will go on to argue that there are good reasons to expect agency, ceteris paribus, to increase the contingency of outcomes, building on the notions of creativity and autonomy. This has potential implications for our choice of suitable theories of organismal agency, though it may still be reasonable to allow for some variety in our demands on contingency.
Chair: Clement Mayambala
Time: September 13th, 15:20-15:50
Location: SR 1.003
SOPhiA 2026 