Contributions

Part 2: From the Symbolic Species to Incomplete Nature Auguste Nahas  So it’s only in your first book, The Symbolic Species, that you came back to Peirce.  Terrence Deacon Yes. I was thinking about the evolutionary origins of human language. It was very clear to me that you just couldn’t talk about ‘pre-language’. Animals aren’t […]

Part 1: Undergraduate & Graduate Days: Peirce, Cybernetics, Neuroscience Terrence Deacon is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches the co-evolution of language and the human brain. His recent work has touched on diverse questions at the intersection of philosophy and biology, such as the nature of complexity and […]

     Life’s complexity – even if we just stick to its basic core, the prokaryotic world – is overwhelming. This is not only due to the diversity of biomolecules and their amazing structural properties, or to the multiple and sophisticated transformations they undergo, but also to their dynamic organization and functional integration into cells. Let […]

In an unpublished manuscript datable to 1956-1957, La vision comme modèle de la connaissance[1] (Vision as a model of knowledge), the philosopher of medicine and biology Georges Canguilhem referred to specific biological-adaptive mechanisms compensating for some human vision anomalies, particularly hemianopic anomalies. In individuals in whom it tends to occur, hemianopsia (or hemianopia) involves the loss of one half of a […]

How can the meeting between a philosopher of science and an ecologist contribute to the advancement in an area of ​​Ecology? Do we have anything to gain from this dialogue? And if the answer is “yes”, who wins in this story? It was in the search for a solution to existing problems in a certain […]

An opinionated, partial review of: Köchy, Kristian and Francesca Michelini (eds.) (2019), Jakob von Uexküll and Philosophy: Life, Environments, Anthropology, New York: Routledge. Schnödl, Gottfried, and Florian Sprenger (2021), Uexküll’s Surroundings: Umwelt Theory and Right-Wing Thought, Lüneburg: meson press eG. Reading Uexküll in the 2020s The work of Jakob von Uexküll’s has seen a remarkable […]

The question of the place of mind in nature is one of the oldest and deepest questions in philosophy and the sciences. If the physical sciences to tell us ‘what nature is’, what happens to mental phenomena: thoughts, beliefs, desires, emotions, memories, and ideals? For centuries, philosophers, theologians, and scientists argued about what a “science […]

Biology studies organisms. This seems to be a truism. But is this assumption really correct? Some scientists and philosophers hold that it is not. Developmental biologist Brian Goodwin, for example, states:   “Organisms have disappeared as fundamental entities, as basic unities, from contemporary biology because they have no real status as centres of causal agency. […]

What is an ‘organism’? A state of matter, or a particular type of living being chosen as an experimental object, like the fruit fly or the zebrafish, which are ‘model organisms’? Organisms are real, in a trivial sense, since flies and fish and thylacines or Tasmanian tigers are (or were, in the latter case) as […]

An Interview with Jannie Hofmeyr in Three Parts What is life? This is a question biologists have almost forgotten to ask. Apart from a few lonely souls who occupy themselves with astrobiology or the origin of life, we no longer seem to wonder about life itself. Maybe we have lost the forest for the trees? […]