CONCEPT OF LIFE AS THE FUNDAMENTAL PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY

Author(s):  
Michael Goodhart

This chapter puts many of the ideas outlined previously to work in considering the problem of responsibility for systemic injustice. Building on the insights of Iris Marion Young and Marion Smiley, it argues that responsibility must be reconceptualized as a political rather than a philosophical problem and that its solution lies in counterhegemonic political struggles over the meaning of injustice itself. The chapter shows, in a concrete way, what such struggles might look like, describing the ways in which social conventions and interpretations structure our thinking about responsibility and what might be done to challenge and change them. It concludes that to take responsibility for injustice is to take up this political work.


1948 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph S. Lillie
Keyword(s):  

Biosemiotics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Schaetzle ◽  
Yogi Hendlin

AbstractDenis Noble convincingly describes the artifacts of theory building in the Modern Synthesis as having been surpassed by the available evidence, indicating more active and less gene-centric evolutionary processes than previously thought. We diagnosis the failure of theory holders to dutifully update their beliefs according to new findings as a microcosm of the prevailing larger social inability to deal with competing paradigms. For understanding life, Noble suggests that there is no privileged level of semiotic interpretation. Understanding multi-level semiosis along with organism and environment contrapunctally, according to Jakob von Uexküll’s theoretical biology, can contribute to the emerging extended evolutionary synthesis.


Author(s):  
Yael Tamir

Philosophical questions are not like empirical problems, which can be answered by observation or experiment or entitlements from them. Nor are they like mathematical problems which can be settled by deductive methods, like problems in chess or any other rule-governed game or procedure. But questions about the ends of life, about good and evil, about freedom and necessity, about objectivity and relativity, cannot be decided by looking into even the most sophisticated dictionary or the use of empirical or mathematical reasoning. Not to know where to look for the answer is the surest symptom of a philosophical problem.Isaiah BerlinCritics of recent philosophical analyses of nationalism suggest that nationalism is a unique social phenomenon that cannot, and need not, be theorized. Are there, indeed, some special features constitutive of nationalism that might defy theorization? Those answering this question in the affirmative point to the plurality and specificity of national experiences, as well as to the emotional and eclectic nature of nationalist discourse.


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