Vital Normativity

Research Project

Vital Normativity

Metanoia is pleased to announce the Vital Normativity: Beyond the Is/Ought Divide research project, headed by assoc. prof. Sebastjan Vörös (Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana) and organised jointly with Metanoia.

Exploring the idea and implications of vital normativity as a key feature of living beings, the project will encompass a symposium and workshop taking place in Fall 2023, an international conference in 2024, as well as a series of related online articles, including papers, reports, and interviews, intended both for academic and wider audiences. On this website, you may find general information, announcements, and articles concerning project activities.

Learn more about the project

The purpose of this project is to explore the idea of vital normativity and its scientific and philosophical implications. This concept seeks to capture the inherent normative capacities of living beings to determine their own conditions of viability and to engage dynamically and meaningfully with their environments in ways that are conducive to their preservation and development. Drawing on a number of thinkers, schools of thought, and disciplines, we will challenge reductionist and mechanicist views prevalent in the life sciences, compare vital normativity with related ideas, such as autonomy, emergence, and teleology, and explore the important bearings it has on how we understand both the relation of the objective and phenomenal worlds as well as the is/ought gap.

This project is a part of the “New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe“ initiative organised by the Ian Ramsey Center of the University of Oxford in cooperation with the John Templeton Foundation.