Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio, Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical and
Theoretical Enquiry, History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences,
vol. 12, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2015 (hardcover ISBN
978-94-017-9836-5, eBook ISBN 978-94-017-9837-2). Crossref gives only the
year, so published: carries the year, as the first of January.
The brief’s citation (2015, Springer) is correct. On open access: the book is not open access at the publisher. Unpaywall lists it as green open access through the authors’ HAL deposit (hal-01151449, CC BY-NC 4.0), which HAL catalogues as the book’s “Introduction” with the file Book_Autonomy_web.pdf. I could not open that file (see the status note), so I cannot say whether it is the whole book or the introduction alone.
Key takeaways
Registered from the publisher’s description and the chapter list, not a reading. What follows is what those sources say.
- The publisher’s description (as deposited in HAL), in part: “Since Darwin, Biology has been framed on the idea of evolution by natural selection … This book argues that contemporary biology should progress towards and revolve around an even more fundamental idea, that of autonomy. Biological autonomy describes living organisms as organised systems, which are able to self-produce and self-maintain as integrated entities, to establish their own goals and norms, and to promote the conditions of their existence through their interactions with the environment.”
- Chapters (Crossref’s chapter records, with pages): 1 Constraints and Organisational Closure (1–38); 2 Biological Emergence and Inter-level Causation (39–61); 3 Teleology, Normativity and Functionality (63–87); 4 Agency (89–109); 5 Evolution: The Historical Dimension of Autonomy (111–139); 6 Organisms and Levels of Autonomy (141–165); 7 Cognition (167–193); 8 Opening Conclusions (195–200). An introduction precedes chapter 1.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, for the philosophy that tries to mark living, teleological systems off from merely dissipative ones. No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice. The Anthology of the SOTA does not hold it: a grep of its literature.d for “Mossio” and the title found nothing.
Deferred because it was not read. This record files a book from its
publisher’s description and contents when no lawful text can be read, and
does not rebuild a book from what others say about it. Here a lawful text
exists and was out of my reach, so this is the first book in the batch a
human reader could promote.
What the record already says about it, at second hand:
- Nahas & Sachs (LIT-192, NOTE-094) treat the organizational approach, closure of constraints (Montévil & Mossio 2015), as one of the accounts whose demarcation from dissipative structures is disputed. They report that closure faces the candle-flame problem, and that whether closure is a model or an ontological claim is “in urgent need of elaboration”. Chapter 1 is where the book states closure. Chapter 3 is where it should answer whether closure grounds intrinsic teleology and so marks a flame off from a cell.
- Wilson & Barker (LIT-168) cite the book in their §6.3 on autonomous agency (NOTE-094). Baedke (LIT-167, NOTE-148) argues that closure (“persister”) criteria are too permissive, taking in colonies and ecosystems. Chapter 6, on organisms and levels of autonomy, is where that objection should be met.
- Bruckner (LIT-120, NOTE-093) uses a looser autopoiesis. NOTE-093 proposes checking his self-maintaining car “Tessler”, bacteria and a candle flame against closure of constraints. This book is where that check would be made.
Where it would bear, once read: it is the main organizational candidate for a principled line between living and merely dissipative systems. Against it stand Perunov, Marsland & England (LIT-518), who deny a line, and Friston (LIT-526), who draws one with Markov blankets. Deacon’s teleodynamics (LIT-529) is its rival in the same debate.
Priority for a reading: high for the demarcation question, chapters 1, 3 and 6 first.
Access when seeded:
- Crossref records for the book and its eight chapters (titles, pages, ISBNs; the license fields are Springer’s text-and-data-mining terms, not an open licence).
- Unpaywall (is_oa true, oa_status green, one location: the HAL deposit, CC BY-NC).
- HAL’s API record for hal-01151449 (title “Introduction”, document type book chapter, the book’s description as abstract, file Book_Autonomy_web.pdf, licence CC BY-NC 4.0, submitted 2015-05-13). The file itself returned HAL’s “Making sure you’re not a bot!” page.
- Springer’s book page returned a bot challenge to plain requests.
Note of 2026-10-30: the Introduction read
The HAL deposit turned out to hold the Introduction and the front and back matter only, and the Introduction is now read (NOTE-1437). It previews the book’s answers: closure of constraints “fundamentally differs from other ‘process loops’ and self-organising phenomena in Physics and Chemistry” (p. xxix), dissipative structures “lack internal complexity and functionality” (p. xx), and ecosystems fulfil “only the requirements for closure” (p. xxxi). The arguments are in chapters 1, 3 and 6, which remain unread, so the priority above stands.