You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In this book philosophers, scholars of religion, and activists address the theme of responsibility. Dr. Barbara Darling-Smith brings together an enlightening collection of essays that analyze the ethics of responsibility, its relational nature, and its global struggle.
Combining research approaches from biology, philosophy and linguistics, the field of Biosemiotics proposes that animals, plants and single cells all engage in semiosis – the conversion of objective signals into conventional signs. This has important implications and applications for issues ranging from natural selection to animal behavior and human psychology, leaving biosemiotics at the cutting edge of the research on the fundamentals of life. Drawing on an international expertise, the book details the history and study of biosemiotics, and provides a state-of-the-art summary of the current work in this new field. And, with relevance to a wide range of disciplines – from linguistics and semiotics to evolutionary phenomena and the philosophy of biology – the book provides an important text for both students and established researchers, while marking a vital step in the evolution of a new biological paradigm.
All species, extant and extinct, from the simplest unicellular prokaryotes to humans, have an existential consciousness. Without sentience, the first cells that emerged some 4 billion years ago would have been evolutionary dead-ends, unable to survive in the chaotic, dangerous environment in which life first appeared and evolved. In this book, Arthur Reber's theory, the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), is outlined and distinguished from those models that argue that minds could be instantiated on artificial entities and those that maintain consciousness requires a nervous system. The CBC framework takes a novel approach to classic topics such as the origin-of-life, philosophy of mind, t...
Reviving the Living: Meaning Making in Living Systems presents a novel perspective that relates to current biological knowledge and issues. Written by polymath Dr. Yair Neuman, the book challenges the dogmas that frame our understanding of living systems and presents a radical alternative approach to understanding the world around us, one that avoids the pitfalls of non-scientific perspectives such as Vitalism and Creationism. In this thought provoking and iconoclastic manuscript, Neuman follows the footsteps of Gregory Bateson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michael Polanyi and others, to suggest that living systems are meaning making systems. The book delves into the unique processes of meaning making t...
In 1972, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis began collaborating on the Gaia hypothesis. They suggested that over geological time, life on Earth has had a major role in both producing and regulating its own environment. Gaia is now an ecological and environmental worldview underpinning vital scientific and cultural debates over environmental issues. Their ideas have transformed the Earth and life sciences, as well as contemporary conceptions of nature. Their correspondence describes these crucial developments from the inside, showing how their partnership proved decisive for the development of the Gaia hypothesis. Clarke and Dutreuil provide historical background and explain the concepts and references introduced throughout the Lovelock-Margulis correspondence, while highlighting the major landmarks of their collaboration within the sequence of almost 300 letters written between 1970 and 2007. This book will be of interest to researchers in ecology, history of science, environmental history and climate change, and cultural science studies.
This volume features new research about the philosophy of plant intelligence and plant cognition, one of the most intriguing and complex current debates at the intersection of biology, cognitive science and philosophy. The debate about plant cognition is marked by deep disagreements. Some theorists are confident that the empirical evidence supports the ascription of cognitive capacities to plants. Others hold that such claims are overblown, and defend more traditional, non-cognitive accounts of plant behavior. Still others seek to formulate intermediate positions. This volume brings together leading researchers from across this theoretical spectrum to tackle the foundational questions that a...
This book features the full scope of Susan Petrilli's important work on signs, language, communication, and of meaning, interpretation, and understanding. Although readers are likely familiar with otherness, interpretation, identity, embodiment, ecological crisis, and ethical responsibility for the biosphere-Petrilli forges new paths where other theorists have not tread. This work of remarkable depth takes up intensely debated topics, exhibiting in their treatment of them what Petrilli admires-creativity and imagination. Petrilli presents a careful integration of divergent thinkers and diverse perspectives. While she abandons hope of attaining a final synthesis or an unqualifiedly comprehens...
What is evolution? What is a gene? How did these concepts originate and how did they develop? This book is a short history ranging from Lamarck and Darwin to DNA and the Human Genome Project, exploring the conceptual oppositions, techniques, institutional conditions and controversies that have shaped the development of biology.
None