Fermin Fulda

The view that organisms are agents—and that organismal agency is fundamental to explaining biological phenomena—has become a central topic in the philosophy of biology. Unlike standard causal-mechanical approaches, however, the concept of agency carries distinct teleological and normative implications that must be naturalized to be scientifically legitimate. But what exactly does naturalism require? And what counts as an adequate naturalization? I propose two desiderata: causal-location and explanatory indispensability, and compare two naturalistic accounts of agency—the organizational or constitutive account (OA) (Moreno & Mossio, 2015) and the ecological or dynamical account (EA) (Walsh, 2015). I argue that while OA satisfies causal-location at the cost of explanatory adequacy, EA achieves explanatory adequacy while remaining silent on causal-location. This leads to a dilemma between causal reductionism (OA) and teleological primitivism (EA), rooted in differing criteria for what naturalism requires. I distinguish two increasingly demanding grades of scientific naturalism: scientific emergentism and scientific essentialism, and argue that the dilemma arises from OA’s commitment to the latter and EA’s to the former. I conclude by showing how the emergentist criterion can resolve the dilemma by integrating OA and EA into a two-stage strategy that satisfies both desiderata.