Lecture Series and Reading Group: History & Philosophy of the Life Science

Talks will be online via zoom. Please register for each talk individually. If you want to get regular updates via E-Mail about this event or if you want to take this lecture series/reading group as part of your studies, please write to Jan.Baedke@rub.de

Program of the Lecture Series and Reading Group

19.10.26 4PM CET - Reading Group Meeting
23.11.2026 4PM CET - Federica Bocchi (University of Calgary): Evidence Synthesis & Data Justice in Biodiversity Science
30.11.2026 4PM CET - Reading Group Meeting
07.12.2026 4PM CET - Yota Batsaki (Harvard University): TBA
14.12.2026 4PM CET - Ross Brooks: The Return of the Queer Organism
14.01.2027 6PM CET (Thurs not Monday!) - Dorit Brixius (TU Dresden): Fibre Research and Identity under National Socialism: The Case of the Botanist Gertrud Tobler-Wolff (1877–1948)
18.01.2027 4PM CET - Reading Group Meeting

Past Talks

29.06.2026 - Silvia De Cesare (Utrecht University) – Organic Progress and Evolutionary Theory
25.06.2026 - Andreas Weber (University of Twente) – A Crocodile from Borneo: Digital Futures, Material Presents and Colonial Pasts
15.06.2026 - Samantha Muka (Stevens Institute of Technology) – Ecosystem or Organism: Defining Coral Reefs in Modern Conservation Biology
11.05.2026 - Gry Oftedal (University of Oslo) – Explaining Self-Assembly in Living Systems: Beyond Mechanisms
30.04.2026 - Alejandra Petino Zappala (Ruhr-University Bochum) – Canalization, Stabilizing Selection and Evolution: A Case of Conceptual Gatekeeping in 20th Century Evolutionary Biology?
20.04.2026 - Banu Subramaniam (University of Massachusetts Amherst) – Migrant Ecologies: Plant Worlds and the Afterlives of Empire
19.01.2026 - Libby O’Neil (Mississippi State University ) – The Organism and the System: Boundary Crossings in 20th Century Science
08.12.2025 - Rebecca Sear (Brunel University London) – 21st century eugenics, scientific racism and the role of academia in promoting political ideology
27.11.2025 - Charbel El-Hani (Federal University of Bahia) – Learning from Partial Overlaps Between Knowledge Systems
24.11.2025 - Chris Shambaugh (University of Oregon) – What is Dialectical Biology?
27.10.2025 - César Marín (Universidad Santo Tomás) – Understanding plant holobionts through complexity science
13.10.2025 - Celso Neto (University of Exeter) – Race Reification and Population Descriptors in Human Genomics
30.06.2025 - Havi Carel (University of Bristol) – Epistemic Injustice in Health Care: Vulnerabilisation, Institutional Opacity, and Pathophobia
23.06.2025 - Daniel Whistler (University of London) – Agnes Arber on the Dangers of Morphological Method
05.06.2025 - Manja Kisner (Radboud University) – Kant’s Organicism and the Development of Philosophical Physiology in the Early 19th Century
02.06.2025 - Stella Sandford (Kingston University) – “Promiscuous Realism” and Plant Individuality: Reflections on John Dupré’s Philosophy of Biology
19.05.2025 - Elis Jones (TU Munich) – What is Normal? Shifting Baselines in Biology
12.05.2025 - Aline Potiron (Utrecht University) – Microbiome foundations and faultlines through the lens of history and philosophy
07.04.2025 - Phila M. Msimang (University of Stellenbosch) – Should We Use Racial and Ethnic Classifications in Medicine?
27.01.2025 - Donald L. Opitz (DePaul University) – ‘The Giving Tree’: Arboreal Agency in Environmental Histories
13.01.2025 - Igor Branchi (Center for Behavioral Sciences and Mental Health, Rome) – Brain, Behavior and Context: Who Leads and Who Follows
16.12.2024 - Lisa Onaga (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) – Cocoon Cultures : Disentangling Silk and Biology in Japan
18.11.2024 - Lisa Gannett (Saint Mary’s University) – Are Socially Constructed Populations a Problem for Human Genetics and Genomics?
31.10.2024 - Ann-Christin Fischer (Ruhr-University Bochum) – Understanding Research Quality: Lessons Learned From HIV Denialism
14.10.2024 - Matt Haber (University of Utah) – Process Ontology and the Recursive Account of Individuality
15.07.2024 - Ben Woodard (ICI Berlin): Stephen Jay Gould Against the World: On the Persistence of Eugenics and its Aesthetics
24.06.2024 - David Ludwig (Wageningen University): Transdisciplinary philosophy of biology: Engaging biocultural diversity and socio-ecological crises
03.06.2024 - Kevin Elliott (Michigan State University): Alleviating Epistemic Injustice through Scholarship on Values and Science
27.05.2024 - Antonine Nicoglou (University of Tours): Plasticity in the life sciences: genealogy of a concept to clarify its use in contemporary biology
06.05.2024 - Qiuran Wang (Ruhr University Bochum/University of Padova): Plants on the Move: Empirical Evidence of Motor Cognition in Pea Plants
25.04.2024 - Alberto Monterde Fuertes (University of San Sebastian): The Normativity of Engaged and Relevant Philosophy of Science
15.04.2024 - Laurent Loison (Centre national de la recherche scientifique): The dissolution of the organism within the Modern Synthesis: From canalization (Waddington) to genetic homeostasis (Lerner) and genetic revolution (Mayr)
12.02.2024 - Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis (University of Florida): Botany and the Evolutionary Synthesis: Why Plants Still Matter
29.01.2024 - Sofia Belardinelli (University of Naples Federico II): Ambivalent interconnectedness: An interdisciplinary perspective on the relationship between humans and non-human nature
27.11.2023 - Charles Pence (UCLouvain): Digitally Charting the Field of Cultural Evolution
16.11.2023 - Alkistis Elliott Graves (Bielefeld University): Prediction in the wild
06.11.2023 - Rachael Brown (Australian National University): Is there a respectable broader notion of the Major Transitions?
30.10.2023 - Sophie Juliane Veigl (University Vienna): Testosterone epistemologies: In search of epistemic systems through knowledge practices
16.10.2023 - Yasmin Haddad (Dalhousie University): The Unbearable Lightness of Intervening: A Realist Metaphysics for Manipulability Theories of Causation
03.07.2023 - Joan Steigerwald (York University): Experiments in Philosophy of Biology at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
19.06.2023 - Roberta Raffaetà (Ca‘ Foscari University of Venice): Thinking the organism through the microbiome
15.06.2023 - Tatjana Buklijas (University of Auckland): The concept of generation in biomedicine post-1945
05.06.2023 - Laura Nuño de la Rosa (Complutense University of Madrid): Reproducing agency: how to integrate reproductive goals in agential perspectives of evolution
15.05.2023 - Laura Menatti (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research): Medicine, healthcare and the environment: from the salutogenic approach towards the salutogenic environments
08.05.2023 - Richard Gawne (Tufts University) & James DiFrisco (The Francis Crick Institute): Biological agency: the perils of discarding mechanistic methods in favor of psychologism
17.04.2023 - Pim Edelaar (Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla): How a „small“ behaviour may influence a large theory: Revisiting the Darwinian requirements for adaptive evolution to understand the evolutionary consequences of matching habitat choice
13.03.2023 - Manuel Heras-Escribano (University of Granada) & Cristian Saborido (UNED Madrid): Affordances and organizational functions: Toward a situated organizational approach
30.01.2023 - Sean A. Valles (Michigan State University): Reassessing the dangers of adopting a holistic definition of health
09.01.2022 - Ehab Abouheif (McGill University): Ants, eco-evo-devo, and the evolution of biological complexity
24.11.2022 - Nicolaas Rupke (Washington and Lee University): Why Darwinism was a Brexit Theory of Evolution
28.11.2022 - Blake Matthews (Eawag, ETH Zürich): Feedback between ecological and evolutionary processes
17.10.2022 - Fermin Fulda de la Garza (University of Toronto): Agential Autonomy and Biological Individuality
30.06.2022 - Saana Jukola (Ruhr University Bochum) & Enno Fischer (Ruhr University Bochum): Bodies of Evidence – Causation in Forensic Medicine
13.06.2022 - Charles Dupras (University of Montreal): Ethical, legal and social issues in epigenomics
02.06.2022 - Daniel J. Nicholson (George Mason University): What is Life? revisited
02.05.2022 - Stefano Canali (Politecnico di Milano) & Sabina Leonelli (University of Exeter): Reframing the Environment in Data-Intensive Health Sciences
04.04.2022 - Matthew Sims (Ruhr University Bochum): The intentionality continuum thesis: assessing goal directed behaviour in organisms across the biological board
07.03.2022 - Emily Parke (University of Auckland): Four dimensions of life
31.01.2022 - Sarah S. Richardson (Harvard University): The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects
20.01.2022 - Daniel Brooks (Ruhr University Bochum): Leveling the World: The Stratified Image of Nature’s Organization
06.12.2021 - Abraham Gibson (University of Texas at San Antonio): Global Organism: The Science and Politics of Cooperation between World Wars
23.11.2021 - Thomas Pradeu (CNRS & University of Bordeaux): Cancer in the context of the organism
15.11.2021 - Isabel Smallegange (University of Amsterdam): Evolutionary explanations of developmental plasticity in the male dimorphic bulb mite (Rhizoglyphus robini)
21.10.2021 - Grant Ramsey (KU Leuven), Cristina Villegas (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research): Evolutionary Dappling: How developmental constraints and drives can be evolutionary causes
11.10.2021 - Elselijn Kingma (Kings College London): Pregnancy and Biological Individuality
27.09.2021 - Joana Formosinho (University of Copenhagen): Visualising holobionts: Biomedical illustrations and the performance of more-than-human body imaginaries
01.07.2021 - Florian Sprenger (RUB) & Gottfried Schnödl (University Lüneburg): Holistic biology and National Socialism: The case of Jakob von Uexküll
14.06.2021 - Bartlomiej Swiatczak (University of Science and Technology of China): Struggle within: Evolution and ecology of somatic cell populations
24.06.2021 - Azita Chellappoo (RUB): Dysbiotic & dysfunctional: The (re)construction of obesity in the postgenomic age
06.05.2021 - Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda (RUB): Organismal agency on the fringes of 20th-century biological science? The cases of E.S. Russell and R.S. Lillie
19.04.2021 - Gregory Rupik (University of Toronto): Plants as Poems: Contemporary Lessons from Goethe’s Biology
29.03.2021 - Hugh Desmond (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique & University of Antwerp): Sentience and the moral argument for organismic agency
23.03.2021 - Tamar Schneider (Tel Aviv University, The Cohn Institute For History And Philosophy of Science And Ideas): The Immune Self: a stable boundary or a tentative outline?
15.03.2021 - Matteo Mossio (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique): Autonomy and biological identity
23.02.2021 - Andrea Gambarotto (Université catholique de Louvain) & Auguste Nahas (University of Toronto): The Varieties of Kantian Teleology: A Contemporary Assessment
04.02.2021 - Guido I. Prieto (Research Group ROTO, Ruhr-Universität Bochum): Neither Machines nor Processes: Organisms as Systems
19.01.2021 - Abril Saldaña-Tejeda (University of Guanajuato): ‚You are Putting my Health in Danger‘: Genes, Diets and Bioethics under COVID-19 in Mexico
14.12.2020 - Özlem Yilmaz (University of Exeter): Plant Phenomes and Individuation in Plant Biology
10.12.2020 - Marco Tamborini (Technical University of Darmstadt): The Riddle of Form in Biology and the Dynamics of Interstitial Knowledge
21.07.2020 - Scott F. Gilbert (Swarthmore College): How developmental symbiosis can open new evolutionary trajectories