Author: Miguel García-Valdecasas
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319305026
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
Some may consider that the language and concepts of philosophy will eventually be superseded by those of neuroscience. This book questions such a naïve assumption and through a variety of perspectives and traditions, the authors show the possible contributions of philosophy to non-reductive forms of neuroscientific research. Drawing from the full range and depth of philosophical thought, from hylomorphism to ethics, by way of dynamical systems, enactivism and value theory, amongst other topics, this edited work promotes a rich form of interdisciplinary exchange. Chapters explore the analytic, phenomenological and pragmatic traditions of philosophy, and most share a common basis in the Aristotelian tradition. Contributions address one or more aspects of subjectivity in relation to science, such as the meaning and scope of naturalism and the place of consciousness in nature, or the relation between intentionality, teleology, and causality. Readers may further explore the nature of life and its relation to mind and then the role of value in mind and nature. This book shows how philosophy might contribute to real explanatory progress in science while remaining faithful to the full complexity of the phenomena of life and mind. It will be of interest to both philosophers and neuroscientists, as well as those engaged in interdisciplinary cooperation between philosophy and science.
Author: J. Neisser
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137466626
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Can neuroscience help explain the first-person perspective? The Science of Subjectivity delves into the nature of experience, arguing that unconscious subjectivity is a reality. Neisser identifies the biological roots of the first-person, showing how ancient systems of animal navigation enable creatures like us to cope with our worldly concerns.
Author: Russell Winslow
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 149855279X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
Organism and Environment performs an examination into the way the contemporary life sciences are heralding a revolution of the most basic philosophical concepts of the Western world. Analyzing recent research in microbiology and evolution theory, the present book argues that these discourses are adding their voices to a growing chorus which is announcing a disruption, if not an end, to the understanding of the order of the world articulated in humanism. What does it mean to be a living substance? Are there such things as living individuals? How are living beings free? The discourses of microbiology, the medical sciences and evolution theory are revealing a living organism that escapes the limited frame that Enlightenment humanism has traditionally used to answer these (and other) ontological questions. Appealing to the theoretical lenses provided by Michel Foucault, Hans Georg Gadamer and Gilles Deleuze, Organism and Environment offers an interpretation of the way the contemporary life sciences are giving articulation to a posthuman ontological order.
Author: Esha Shah
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429953178
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
This book explores two disparate sets of debates in the history and philosophy of the life sciences: the history of subjectivity in shaping objective science and the history of dominance of reductionism in molecular biology. It questions the dominant conception of the scientist-subject as a neo-Kantian ideal self – that is, the scientist as a unified and wilful, self-determined, self-regulated, active and autonomous, rational subject wilfully driven by social and scientific ethos – in favour of a narrative that shows how the microcosm of reductionism is sustained, adopted, questioned, or challenged in the creative struggles of the scientist-subject. The author covers a century-long history of the concept of the gene as a series of "pioneering moments" through an engagement with life-writings of eminent scientists to show how their ways of being and belonging relate with the making of the science. The scientist-self is theorized as fundamentally a feeling, experiencing, and suffering subject split between the conscious and unconscious and constitutive of personality aspects that are emotional/psychological, "situated" (cultural and ideological), metaphysical, intersubjective, and existential at the same time. An engaging interdisciplinary interpretation of the dominance of reductionism in genetic science, this book will be of major interest to scholars and researchers of science, history, and philosophy alike.
Author: Evan Thompson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674736885
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 561
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Book Description
How is life related to the mind? The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan Thompson explores in Mind in Life. Thompson draws upon sources as diverse as molecular biology, evolutionary theory, artificial life, complex systems theory, neuroscience, psychology, Continental Phenomenology, and analytic philosophy to argue that mind and life are more continuous than has previously been accepted, and that current explanations do not adequately address the myriad facets of the biology and phenomenology of mind. Where there is life, Thompson argues, there is mind: life and mind share common principles of self-organization, and the self-organizing features of mind are an enriched version of the self-organizing features of life. Rather than trying to close the explanatory gap, Thompson marshals philosophical and scientific analyses to bring unprecedented insight to the nature of life and consciousness. This synthesis of phenomenology and biology helps make Mind in Life a vital and long-awaited addition to his landmark volume The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (coauthored with Eleanor Rosch and Francisco Varela). Endlessly interesting and accessible, Mind in Life is a groundbreaking addition to the fields of the theory of the mind, life science, and phenomenology.
Author: Jesse Bazzul
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319391321
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 74
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Book Description
This book encapsulates a line of research that looks at how students are positioned as ethical actors/decision makers in biology education by science policy, curriculum, and classroom resources. Its basis comes from a textbook study that examined how biology texts work to constitute subjectivities related to neoliberalism and global capitalism, sex/gender and sexuality, and ethics. The study found that textbook discourses set limits on a) the types of ethical concerns represented b) the modes of ethical engagement c) the dispositions necessary to engage in ethical action or decision-making. Policy reform, regulation, and personal lifestyle choices were the primary ways students could approach ethical decision-making or action. While these approaches are useful, they are likely not sufficient for dealing with major twenty first century problems such as climate change and social inequality, along with new ethical dimensions introduced by biotechnologies and genomic research. This research brief sets a context for how discourses of science education policy and curricula work to shape a ‘subject of ethics’, that is how students come to see themselves as participants in issues of ethical concern. Drawing from a structural-poststructural philosophical approach, Science and Technology Studies, educational research, and a methodology based on discourse analysis and ethnography, this book's overall goal is to assist with research into subjectivity, ethics, politics, policy, and socioscientific issues in science education.
Author: Andreas Weber
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9402408320
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 157
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Book Description
Meaning, feeling and expression – the experience of inwardness – matter most in human existence. The perspective of biopoetics shows that this experience is shared by all organisms. Being alive means to exist through relations that have existential concern, and to express these dimensions through the body and its gestures. All life takes place within one poetic space which is shared between all beings and which is accessible through subjective sensual experience. We take part in this through our empirical subjectivity, which arises from the experiences and needs of living beings, and which makes them open to access and sharing in a poetic objectivity. Biopoetics breaks free from the causal-mechanic paradigm which made biology unable to account for mind and meaning. Biology becomes a science of expression, connection and subjectivity which can understand all organisms including humans as feeling agents in a shared ecology of meaningful relations, embedded in a symbolical and material metabolism of the biosphere.
Author: Andreas Weber
Publisher: New Society Publishers
ISBN: 1550925946
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
A new way of understanding our place in the web of life from a scholar praised for his “graceful prose” (Publishers Weekly). The disconnection between humans and nature is perhaps one of the most fundamental problems faced by our species today. This schism is arguably the root cause of most of the environmental catastrophes unraveling around us. Until we come to terms with the depths of our alienation, we will continue to fail to understand that what happens to nature also happens to us. In The Biology of Wonder Andreas Weber proposes a new approach to the biological sciences that puts the human back in nature. He argues that feelings and emotions, far from being superfluous to the study of organisms, are the very foundation of life. From this basic premise flows the development of a "poetic ecology" which intimately connects our species to everything that surrounds us—showing that subjectivity and imagination are prerequisites of biological existence. Written by a leader in the emerging fields of biopoetics and biosemiotics, The Biology of Wonder demonstrates that there is no separation between us and the world we inhabit, and in so doing it validates the essence of our deep experience. By reconciling science with meaning, expression, and emotion, this landmark work brings us to a crucial understanding of our place in the rich and diverse framework of life—a revolution for biology as groundbreaking as the theory of relativity for physics. “Grounded in science, yet eloquently narrated, this is a groundbreaking book. Weber’s visionary work provides new insight into human/nature interconnectedness and the dire consequences we face by remaining disconnected.” —Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods
Author: Jesse Bazzul
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Harvie Ferguson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813919669
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Few concepts have come to dominate the human sciences as much as modernity, yet there is very little agreement over what the term actually means. Every aspect of contemporary human reality--modern society, modern life, modern times, modern art, modern science, modern music, the modern world--has been cited as a part of modernity's distinctive and all-embracing presence. But what is the exact nature of the reality to which the term modern refers? Has not such a promiscuous, ill-defined concept come to obscure and confuse rather than clarify a genuine understanding of our experience? Harvie Ferguson proposes a new view of modernity, arguing that, although it may variously be associated with the Renaissance, the European discovery of the New World, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and many other significant ruptures with primitive or premodern society, modernity fails as an idea if it only defines itself against what it replaced. Instead, he writes, modernity finds its clearest definition through an exploration of subjectivity. For the modern world there is no higher authority than experience. No longer is the human world subordinate to a divine reality beyond the capacity of its own senses. This idea finds its greatest expression in the philosophy of doubt originated by Descartes. Doubt seemed the radical starting point from which to found a wholly modern philosophy that makes the distinction between subject and object, but those who came after Descartes soon reached the limits of self-discovery and became trapped in deepening levels of despair. This despair in turn found expression in the concepts of self and other, and eventually in a dialectic of ego and world, which distinguishes and links together the most important social, cultural, and psychological aspects of modernity. Moving beyond these dualities of subject and object, mind and body, ego and world, and replacing them with the triad of body, soul, and spirit, Ferguson redraws the map of contemporary experience, finding links with the premodern world that modernity's self-founding concealed.
