KLI Colloquia are informal, public talks that are followed by extensive dissussions. Speakers are KLI fellows or visiting researchers who are interested in presenting their work to an interdisciplinary audience and discussing it in a wider research context. We offer three types of talks:
1. Current Research Talks. KLI fellows or visiting researchers present and discuss their most recent research with the KLI fellows and the Vienna scientific community.
2. Future Research Talks. Visiting researchers present and discuss future projects and ideas togehter with the KLI fellows and the Vienna scientific community.
3. Professional Developmental Talks. Experts about research grants and applications at the Austrian and European levels present career opportunities and strategies to late-PhD and post-doctoral researchers.
- The presentation language is English.
- If you are interested in presenting your current or future work at the KLI, please contact the Scientific Director or the Executive Manager.
Event Details
Topic description / abstract:
Homeostasis is a concept devised within physiology with the aim to understand living phenomena, withholding a standpoint that could be highly profitable when facing some of the current debates on the field of Philosophy of Biology, such as the dividing line between health and disease or the one around the idea of organism. But in order to achieve that, it is important to examine first the very notion of homeostasis. Nowadays, the term is vaguely used as some kind of synonym of stability in several fields, but originally it was conceived as an integrative notion to account exclusively for the peculiarities of complex living beings. Understanding how the notion of homeostasis lost that explanatory potential goes necessarily by analyzing the turns that it took during its development and examining critically their philosophical consequences. I argue that this would be a necessary first step in pursuing a much needed holistic notion that can complete current approaches on the study of living beings, and be a solid foundation for further philosophical investigations.
Biographical note:
Eva Fernandez-Labandera Tejado is a PhD student from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and works on her PhD thesis “Homeostasis, stability and regulation within a Systems Biology framework: conceptual analysis from a philosophical perspective” (supervised by Arantza Etxeberria and Alvaro Moreno).
