Download or read book Vitalism and Its Legacy in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy written by Christopher Donohue and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-02 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Open Access book combines philosophical and historical analysis of various forms of alternatives to mechanism and mechanistic explanation, focusing on the 19th century to the present. It addresses vitalism, organicism and responses to materialism and its relevance to current biological science. In doing so, it promotes dialogue and discussion about the historical and philosophical importance of vitalism and other non-mechanistic conceptions of life. It points towards the integration of genomic science into the broader history of biology. It details a broad engagement with a variety of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century vitalisms and conceptions of life. In addition, it discusses important threads in the history of concepts in the United States and Europe, including charting new reception histories in eastern and south-eastern Europe. While vitalism, organicism and similar epistemologies are often the concern of specialists in the history and philosophy of biology and of historians of ideas, the range of the contributions as well as the geographical and temporal scope of the volume allows for it to appeal to the historian of science and the historian of biology generally.
Download or read book Structuralism and Form in Literature and Biology written by Peter McMahon and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-28 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book considers biology in parallel with philosophical structuralism in order to argue that notions of form in the organism are analogous to similar ideas in structuralist philosophy and literary theory. This analogy is then used to shed light on debates among biological scientists from the turn of the 19th century to the present day, including Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Dawkins, Crick, Goodwin, Rosen and West-Eberhard. The book critiques the endorsement of genetic manipulation and bioengineering as keys to solving agricultural and environmental problems, suggesting that alternative models have been marginalized in the promotion of this discourse. Drawing from the work of philosophers including Cassirer, Saussure, Jakobson and Foucault the book ultimately argues that methods based on agroecology, supported by molecular applications (such as marker-assisted selection, MAS), can both advance agricultural development and remain focused on the whole organism.
Download or read book On the Riddle of Life written by Bohang Chen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Riddle of Organismal Agency written by Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Riddle of Organismal Agency brings together historians, philosophers, and scientists for an interdisciplinary re-assessment of one of the long-standing problems in the scientific understanding of life. Marshalling insights from diverse sciences including physiology, comparative psychology, developmental biology, and evolutionary biology, the book provides an up-to-date survey of approaches to non-human organisms as agents, capable of performing activities serving their own goals such as surviving or reproducing, and whose doings in the world are thus to be explained teleologically. From an Integrated History and Philosophy of Science perspective, the book contributes to a better conceptual and theoretical understanding of organismal agency, advancing some suggestions on how to study it empirically and how to frame it in relation to wider scientific and philosophical traditions. It also provides new historical entry points for examining the deployment, trajectories, and challenges of agential views of organisms in the history of biology and philosophy. This book will be of interest to philosophers of biology; historians of science; biologists interested in analysing the active roles of organisms in development, ecological interactions, and evolution; philosophers and practitioners of the cognitive sciences; and philosophers and historians of philosophy working on purposiveness and teleology.
Download or read book Natural and Artificial Bodies in Early Modern England written by Alvin Snider and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2024-11-28 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings contemporary ways of reconceptualizing the human relationship to things into conversation with seventeenth-century writing, exploring how the literature of the period intersected with changing understandings of the conceptual structure of matter and how human beings might reconfigure their place in a web of nonhuman relations. Focusing on texts that cross the frontier between literature and science, Snider recovers the material and body worlds of seventeenth-century culture as treated in poetry, natural philosophy, medical treatises, comedy, and prose fiction. He shows how a range of writers understood and theorized “matter,” “bodies,” and “spirits” as characters in complex and sometimes bizarre scenarios involving human relationships to the phenomenal world. The logic that made matter subject to uniform theorizing facilitated a crossing of boundaries between the human and nonhuman and became a persistent figure of explanation at the time when distinctions between the natural and the artificial were undergoing reformulation.
Download or read book Modernism Science and Technology written by Mark S. Morrisson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-17 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From quantum physics and genetics to psychology and the social sciences, from the development of atomic weapons to the growing mass media of film and radio, the early 20th century was a period of intense scientific and technological change. Modernism, Science, and Technology surveys the scientific contexts of writers from H.G. Wells and Gertrude Stein to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and the ways in modernist writers responded to these paradigm shifts. Introducing key concepts from science studies and their implications for the study of modernist literature, the book includes chapters covering the physical sciences, mathematics, life sciences, social sciences and 'pseudosciences'. Including a timeline of key developments and guides to further reading, this is an essential guide to students and researchers studying the topic at all levels.
Download or read book Theology Science and Life written by Carmody Grey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a bold intervention in the ongoing debate about the relationship between 'theology' and 'science', Theology, Science and Life proposes that the strong demarcation between the two spheres is unsustainable; theology occurs within and not outside what we call 'science', and 'science' occurs within and not outside theology. The book applies this in a penetrating way to the most topical, contentious and philosophically charged science of late modernity: biology. Rejecting the easy dualism of expressions such as 'theology and science', 'theology or science', modern biology is examined so as to illuminate the nature of both. In making this argument, the book achieves two further things. It is the first major English-language reception and application of the thought of philosopher Hans Jonas in theology, and it makes a decisive contribution to the unfolding reception of 'Radical Orthodoxy', one of the most influential schools in contemporary Anglophone theology.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought Volume 2 The Twentieth Century written by Warren Breckman and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the major themes, thinkers, and movements in modern European intellectual history.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought Volume 2 The Twentieth Century written by Peter E. Gordon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought is an authoritative and comprehensive exploration of the themes, thinkers and movements that shaped our intellectual world in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth century. Representing both individual figures and the contexts within which they developed their ideas, each essay is written in a clear accessible style by leading scholars in the field and offers both originality and interpretive insight. This second volume surveys twentieth-century European intellectual history, conceived as a crisis in modernity. Comprised of twenty-one chapters, it focuses on figures such as Freud, Heidegger, Adorno and Arendt, surveys major schools of thought including Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Conservatism, and discusses critical movements such as Postcolonialism, , Structuralism, and Post-structuralism. Renouncing a single 'master narrative' of European thought across the period, Peter E. Gordon and Warren Breckman establish a formidable new multi-faceted vision of European intellectual history for the global modern age.
Download or read book A Simpler Life written by Talia Dan-Cohen and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Simpler Life approaches the developing field of synthetic biology by focusing on the experimental and institutional lives of practitioners in two labs at Princeton University. It highlights the distance between hyped technoscience and the more plodding and entrenched aspects of academic research. Talia Dan-Cohen follows practitioners as they wrestle with experiments, attempt to publish research findings, and navigate the ins and outs of academic careers. Dan-Cohen foregrounds the practices and rationalities of these pursuits that give both researchers' lives and synthetic life their distinctive contemporary forms. Rather than draw attention to avowed methodology, A Simpler Life investigates some of the more subtle and tectonic practices that bring knowledge, doubt, and technological intervention into new configurations. In so doing, the book sheds light on the more general conditions of contemporary academic technoscience.
Download or read book The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy written by Donna V. Jones and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the élan vital, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as "mechanical," and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist discourse. Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy written by Stuart Glennan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientists studying the burning of stars, the evolution of species, DNA, the brain, the economy, and social change, all frequently describe their work as searching for mechanisms. Despite this fact, for much of the twentieth century philosophical discussions of the nature of mechanisms remained outside philosophy of science. The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into four Parts: Historical perspectives on mechanisms The nature of mechanisms Mechanisms and the philosophy of science Disciplinary perspectives on mechanisms. Within these Parts central topics and problems are examined, including the rise of mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century; what mechanisms are made of and how they are organized; mechanisms and laws and regularities; how mechanisms are discovered and explained; dynamical systems theory; and disciplinary perspectives from physics, chemistry, biology, biomedicine, ecology, neuroscience, and the social sciences. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of science, the Handbook will also be of interest to those in related fields, such as metaphysics, philosophy of psychology, and history of science.
Download or read book Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post Enlightenment Life Science 1800 2010 written by Sebastian Normandin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vitalism is understood as impacting the history of the life sciences, medicine and philosophy, representing an epistemological challenge to the dominance of mechanism over the last 200 years, and partly revived with organicism in early theoretical biology. The contributions in this volume portray the history of vitalism from the end of the Enlightenment to the modern day, suggesting some reassessment of what it means both historically and conceptually. As such it includes a wide range of material, employing both historical and philosophical methodologies, and it is divided fairly evenly between 19th and 20th century historical treatments and more contemporary analysis. This volume presents a significant contribution to the current literature in the history and philosophy of science and the history of medicine.
Download or read book The Bergsonian Mind written by Mark Sinclair and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henri Bergson (1859–1941) is widely regarded as one of the most original and important philosophers of the twentieth century. His work explored a rich panoply of subjects, including time, memory, free will and humour and we owe the popular term élan vital to a fundamental insight of Bergson’s. His books provoked responses from some of the leading thinkers and philosophers of his time, including Albert Einstein, William James and Bertrand Russell, and he is acknowledged as a fundamental influence on Marcel Proust. The Bergsonian Mind is an outstanding, wide-ranging volume covering the major aspects of Bergson’s thought, from his early influences to his continued relevance and legacy. Thirty-six chapters by an international team of leading Bergson scholars are divided into five clear parts: Sources and Scene Mind and World Ethics and Politics Reception Bergson and Contemporary Thought. In these sections fundamental topics are examined, including time, freedom and determinism, memory, perception, evolutionary theory, pragmatism and art. Bergson’s impact beyond philosophy is also explored in chapters on Bergson and spiritualism, physics, biology, cinema and post-colonial thought. An indispensable resource for anyone in Philosophy studying and researching Bergson’s work, The Bergsonian Mind will also interest those in related disciplines, such as Literature, Religion, Sociology and French Studies.
Download or read book The Encyclodedia of Christianity Vol 5 written by Erwin Fahlbusch and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2008-02-14 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by leading scholars from around the world, the articles in this volume range from sin, Sufism and terrorism to theology in the 19th and 20th centuries, Vatican I and II and the virgin birth.
Download or read book Ernst Bloch s Speculative Materialism written by Cat Moir and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-12-09 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics, Cat Moir offers a new interpretation of the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. The reception of Bloch’s work has seen him variously painted as a naïve realist, a romantic nature philosopher, a totalitarian thinker, and an irrationalist whose obscure literary style stands in for a lack of systematic rigour. Moir challenges these conceptions of Bloch by reconstructing the ontological, epistemological, and political dimensions of his speculative materialism. Through a close, historically contextualised reading of Bloch’s major work of ontology, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz (The Materialism Problem, its History and Substance), Moir presents Bloch as one of the twentieth century’s most significant critical thinkers.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Biology written by Kostas Kampourakis and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 765 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together for the first time philosophers of biology to write about some of the most central concepts and issues in their field from the perspective of biology education. The chapters of the book cover a variety of topics ranging from traditional ones, such as biological explanation, biology and religion or biology and ethics, to contemporary ones, such as genomics, systems biology or evolutionary developmental biology. Each of the 30 chapters covers the respective philosophical literature in detail and makes specific suggestions for biology education. The aim of this book is to inform biology educators, undergraduate and graduate students in biology and related fields, students in teacher training programs, and curriculum developers about the current state of discussion on the major topics in the philosophy of biology and its implications for teaching biology. In addition, the book can be valuable to philosophers of biology as an introductory text in undergraduate and graduate courses.
