In the last ten years awareness has grown among evolutionary biologists and philosophers of biology that living things are agents—natural purposive systems—and their agency makes a substantive contribution to the dynamics of evolution. But agent is a contested category. There is little agreement on, or understanding of, what agency is. My project provides a comprehensive metaphysics for agency, drawing on the agential conception of organisms.

Over the last twelve years, I have been developing the ‘ecological approach’ to agency. It is now one of the two most prominent theoretical approaches to natural agency. Until now, the ecological approach has specifically addressed theoretical issues in evolutionary theory. But it has broader implications. The current project extends the ecological account to the metaphysics of agency in general. Ecological agency can help answer our two guiding questions: (i) what must the natural world be like to have agents in it? and; (ii) what is the natural world like on account of having agents in it?.

The particularly issues investigated will be: agency and normativity; agency; life-mind continuity; perspectivism and the opacity of the normative; naturalized metaethics.