The first part of the paper offers philosophical landmarks on the general issue of defining life.
§ 1 defends that the recognition of “life” has always been and remains primarily an intuitive …

Life is a complex phenomenon that not only requires individual self-producing and self-
sustaining systems but also a historical-collective organization of those individual systems …

To date, no definition of life has been unequivocally accepted by the scientific community. In
frustration, some authors advocate alternatives to standard definitions. These include using …

The criteria used for defining life are influenced by various philosophical visions about life,
ranging from holism to reductionism and from mechanistic-reductionism to vitalism. Using …

The question 'what is life?'has long been a source of philosophical debate and in recent
years has taken on increasing scientific importance. The most popular approach among …

Many theories on origin of life at the end of the XIXth century and the beginning of the XXth,
generally use conceptions of life instead of explicit definitions of life. This paper presents …

A central question of astrobiology concerns the origin and distribution of life in the Universe.
For this reason, astrobiology can be considered to fall within the science called transitional …

In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life
research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the …

This paper addresses the open philosophical and scientific problem of explaining and
defining life. This problem is controversial, and there is nothing approaching a consensus …

The purposeful nature of all living organisms has been one of the most pervasive issues in
the whole history of biological thought. Not so much the idea of purposiveness in life by itself …