Justin E. H. Smith
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691141787
- eISBN:
- 9781400838721
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691141787.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent ...
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Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.Less
Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.
Wes Furlotte
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474435536
- eISBN:
- 9781474453899
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474435536.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
Moving to Hegel’s writings on “Organics”, this chapter develops an acute sense of the paradoxical implications that follow from the fundamental exteriority and indeterminacy characteristic of ...
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Moving to Hegel’s writings on “Organics”, this chapter develops an acute sense of the paradoxical implications that follow from the fundamental exteriority and indeterminacy characteristic of Hegelian nature. Concentrating on Hegel’s writings on animal life, the chapter reveals that the organism’s self-referential structure is consistently given over to various forms of external determination that analogically reflect the externality permeating the categories of space and time. This collapse into exteriority proves dangerous to the interiority constituting organic life. By extension, such collapse is dangerous to the animal organism’s status as one of the primary upsurges of freedom within the matrices of material nature. The upshot of Hegel’s account of organic life is revealingly significant: nature’s exteriority and indeterminacy function as crucial preconditions for the emergence of freedom within nature and yet they also serve to perpetually threaten the very reality of that same freedom. This paradoxical tension constitutes a fundamental problem which the remainder of the monograph seeks to systematically explore, both in terms of Hegel’s anthropology and political philosophy.Less
Moving to Hegel’s writings on “Organics”, this chapter develops an acute sense of the paradoxical implications that follow from the fundamental exteriority and indeterminacy characteristic of Hegelian nature. Concentrating on Hegel’s writings on animal life, the chapter reveals that the organism’s self-referential structure is consistently given over to various forms of external determination that analogically reflect the externality permeating the categories of space and time. This collapse into exteriority proves dangerous to the interiority constituting organic life. By extension, such collapse is dangerous to the animal organism’s status as one of the primary upsurges of freedom within the matrices of material nature. The upshot of Hegel’s account of organic life is revealingly significant: nature’s exteriority and indeterminacy function as crucial preconditions for the emergence of freedom within nature and yet they also serve to perpetually threaten the very reality of that same freedom. This paradoxical tension constitutes a fundamental problem which the remainder of the monograph seeks to systematically explore, both in terms of Hegel’s anthropology and political philosophy.
Wes Furlotte
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474435536
- eISBN:
- 9781474453899
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474435536.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
This chapter intensifies the problem of the animal organism’s over-determination by external variables. The chapter concentrates on Hegel’s analyses of eating, sex, violence, sickness and, ...
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This chapter intensifies the problem of the animal organism’s over-determination by external variables. The chapter concentrates on Hegel’s analyses of eating, sex, violence, sickness and, ultimately, death. These phenomena exemplify how the animal organism is perpetually given over to external circumstances that threaten its self-perpetuating activity. Taken together they indicate, for Hegel, the truth of organic life: it must die. Organic life must prove a necessary yet insufficient condition for the life of conceptuality proper. In other words, the life of spirit requires embodiment and more. Conceptuality can only come into a robust self-relation in something that is, simultaneously, anticipatorily grounded in nature and yet, irreducible to those grounds. The space in which such self-mediation occurs is what Hegel refers to as the life of spirit (Geist). The self-grounding system of thought proper does not find sufficient existence in the natural world because the radical exteriority of the latter is hostile to the auto-dictates of conceptuality, its self-grounding basis. The chapter concludes with a question: what must this ‘monstrous’ conception of nature mean for human culture, specifically finite subjectivity and socio-political freedom?Less
This chapter intensifies the problem of the animal organism’s over-determination by external variables. The chapter concentrates on Hegel’s analyses of eating, sex, violence, sickness and, ultimately, death. These phenomena exemplify how the animal organism is perpetually given over to external circumstances that threaten its self-perpetuating activity. Taken together they indicate, for Hegel, the truth of organic life: it must die. Organic life must prove a necessary yet insufficient condition for the life of conceptuality proper. In other words, the life of spirit requires embodiment and more. Conceptuality can only come into a robust self-relation in something that is, simultaneously, anticipatorily grounded in nature and yet, irreducible to those grounds. The space in which such self-mediation occurs is what Hegel refers to as the life of spirit (Geist). The self-grounding system of thought proper does not find sufficient existence in the natural world because the radical exteriority of the latter is hostile to the auto-dictates of conceptuality, its self-grounding basis. The chapter concludes with a question: what must this ‘monstrous’ conception of nature mean for human culture, specifically finite subjectivity and socio-political freedom?
Melissa L. Caldwell
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520262843
- eISBN:
- 9780520947870
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520262843.003.0005
- Subject:
- Anthropology, European Cultural Anthropology
This chapter considers the sentimental attachments that Russians claim to feel for their dachas and for the countryside more generally, which take the form of nostalgic reminiscences and encapsulate ...
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This chapter considers the sentimental attachments that Russians claim to feel for their dachas and for the countryside more generally, which take the form of nostalgic reminiscences and encapsulate a larger and more contentious set of debates about the nature and direction of the past, present, and future in today's Russia. The unpleasant reality faced by many dachniki is that there may come a day when they must dispose of their dacha property. Narratives about change and transformation cohere around mythologies of “disappearing dachniki.” Dachniki did not deny that change could bring tremendous improvements in their lifestyles at the dacha, even though they might grumble about the change. The challenges of authenticity facing dachniki are then reported. Nostalgia is both a commentary on social change and a form of social change itself, just as the organic life is as much a state of mind as it is a lifestyle.Less
This chapter considers the sentimental attachments that Russians claim to feel for their dachas and for the countryside more generally, which take the form of nostalgic reminiscences and encapsulate a larger and more contentious set of debates about the nature and direction of the past, present, and future in today's Russia. The unpleasant reality faced by many dachniki is that there may come a day when they must dispose of their dacha property. Narratives about change and transformation cohere around mythologies of “disappearing dachniki.” Dachniki did not deny that change could bring tremendous improvements in their lifestyles at the dacha, even though they might grumble about the change. The challenges of authenticity facing dachniki are then reported. Nostalgia is both a commentary on social change and a form of social change itself, just as the organic life is as much a state of mind as it is a lifestyle.
George Slusser
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252038228
- eISBN:
- 9780252096037
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252038228.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter examines Nigel Walmsley's space odyssey in In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns, which span the dates from 1999 to 2061. By the end of the first novel, Nigel has discovered a ...
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This chapter examines Nigel Walmsley's space odyssey in In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns, which span the dates from 1999 to 2061. By the end of the first novel, Nigel has discovered a cosmic struggle between machine intelligence and organic life that will soon engulf Earth. Through several contacts with alien artifacts and entities that had come to Earth in both prehistoric and recent times, he predicts the coming of the machines. In Across the Sea of Suns, Nigel does battle with the machines with the help of organic life forms he finds on the moon of a planet in distant Epsilon Eridani. In the process, he reaffirms what he had earlier discovered on Earth: that, in the evolutionary sense, the boundary between machine and organism is not clear cut. The stamp of Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey is clearly on both In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns. The chapter analyzes the two novels in order to understand how Gregory Benford launched his space epic.Less
This chapter examines Nigel Walmsley's space odyssey in In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns, which span the dates from 1999 to 2061. By the end of the first novel, Nigel has discovered a cosmic struggle between machine intelligence and organic life that will soon engulf Earth. Through several contacts with alien artifacts and entities that had come to Earth in both prehistoric and recent times, he predicts the coming of the machines. In Across the Sea of Suns, Nigel does battle with the machines with the help of organic life forms he finds on the moon of a planet in distant Epsilon Eridani. In the process, he reaffirms what he had earlier discovered on Earth: that, in the evolutionary sense, the boundary between machine and organism is not clear cut. The stamp of Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey is clearly on both In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns. The chapter analyzes the two novels in order to understand how Gregory Benford launched his space epic.
David Wills
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816698820
- eISBN:
- 9781452954301
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816698820.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
Inanimation is the third volume in a series of attempts to analyze the technology of the human. Following Prosthesis (1995), where our attachment to “external” objects was traced back to a necessity ...
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Inanimation is the third volume in a series of attempts to analyze the technology of the human. Following Prosthesis (1995), where our attachment to “external” objects was traced back to a necessity within the body itself, and Dorsality (2008), where technology was understood to function behind or before the human, Inanimation proceeds by taking literally the idea of inanimate or inorganic forms of life. Such an idea is presumed, for example, by our referring to a work of art that “lives on” after its author. My book takes its inspiration from Walter Benjamin, who states in his famous essay “The Task of the Translator” that “the idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity,” continuing that “even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought, there was an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporeality.” On that basis Inanimation questions the coherence and limitations of the category of “what lives,” and argues that there can be no clear opposition between a live animate and dead inanimate. Three major forms of inorganic life emerge from the discussion--autobiography, translation, and what I call “resonance”—and each is examined and expanded by means of three “case studies.” Inanimate life forms are uncovered not only in textual remainders and in translation, but also in “places” as disparate as the act of thinking, the death drive, poetic blank space, the technology of warfare, the heart stopped by love, visualized music and recorded bird songs.Less
Inanimation is the third volume in a series of attempts to analyze the technology of the human. Following Prosthesis (1995), where our attachment to “external” objects was traced back to a necessity within the body itself, and Dorsality (2008), where technology was understood to function behind or before the human, Inanimation proceeds by taking literally the idea of inanimate or inorganic forms of life. Such an idea is presumed, for example, by our referring to a work of art that “lives on” after its author. My book takes its inspiration from Walter Benjamin, who states in his famous essay “The Task of the Translator” that “the idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity,” continuing that “even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought, there was an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporeality.” On that basis Inanimation questions the coherence and limitations of the category of “what lives,” and argues that there can be no clear opposition between a live animate and dead inanimate. Three major forms of inorganic life emerge from the discussion--autobiography, translation, and what I call “resonance”—and each is examined and expanded by means of three “case studies.” Inanimate life forms are uncovered not only in textual remainders and in translation, but also in “places” as disparate as the act of thinking, the death drive, poetic blank space, the technology of warfare, the heart stopped by love, visualized music and recorded bird songs.
Raymond Ruyer and Alyosha Edlebi
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816692040
- eISBN:
- 9781452953700
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816692040.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter shows through an extended example how organic life and activity enjoy finality and sense. Ruyer further discusses the locus of instinct between organic activity and intelligent finalist ...
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This chapter shows through an extended example how organic life and activity enjoy finality and sense. Ruyer further discusses the locus of instinct between organic activity and intelligent finalist activity.Less
This chapter shows through an extended example how organic life and activity enjoy finality and sense. Ruyer further discusses the locus of instinct between organic activity and intelligent finalist activity.
