In Robinson in Ruins, the third of Patrick Keiller’s trilogy of fictionalised documentaries concerning the wanderings and speculations of an unseen protagonist, the narrator informs us that Robinson had been reading Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which ‘locates the origin of twentieth century catastrophe in the development of market society in England’. Polanyi identifies how the self-regulating market is not a naturally emergent social form, but was the product of the active interventions of the state. For Robinson (and for Keiller) (...) the contradictions between displacement and dwelling generated by laissez-faire can be revealed and challenged by an exploration of the relationships between landscape, space and politics. The melancholy tone of this trilogy can also be sensed in one of Henri Lefebvre’s final essays, in which he laments the dissolution of the utopian promise of the urban that he once dramatised through his thesis of the ‘urban revolution’. This article explores the themes that drive Keiller’s approach in the Robinson trilogy and draws out the associations in these works to Lefebvre’s writings on the politics of space, Polanyi’s critique of laissez-faire capitalism, and Walter Benjamin’s response to the historical catastrophe we understand as ‘progress’. I will argue that Keiller’s engagement with the idea of catastrophe, through spatial, social and historical registers, is an attempt to link the material ruins of our present with utopian imaginings of alternative forms of sociality—beyond the conceptual limits of capitalist realism and the catastrophic futures of neoliberal space. (shrink)

David Lack of Oxford University and V. C. Wynne- Edwards of Aberdeen University were renowned ornithologists with contrasting views of the modern synthesis which deeply influenced their interpretation and explanation of bird behavior. In the 1950's and 60's Lack became the chief advocate of neo-Darwinism with respect to avian ecology, while Wynne- Edwards developed his theory of group selection. Lack 's position was consistent with the developing focus on individual level adaptation, which was a core concept of the modern synthesis. (...) Alternatively, Wynne- Edwards viewed the emphasis on populations as the most important development provided by the modern synthesis. In this paper, I present the development of these two positions and trace their roots in the literature of the synthesis. Through an analysis of Lack 's 1966 critique of Wynne- Edwards I conclude that Wynne- Edwards was, in many ways, justified in his pursuit of group level explanations. (shrink)

The global ecological crisis is upon us. From global warming to the long-term implications of ocean acidification, air and water pollution, deforestation, and the omnipresent dangers of nuclear technology the future of our planetary home is threatened. Yet in the midst of the unfolding crisis, the conventional ideologies of the twentieth century and their representations of nature remain unchallenged by both the defenders of capitalism and capitalism's most radical critics. The Distortion of Nature's Image illustrates how the anti-naturalism of late (...) capitalist society, in which nature is reified into the emptiness of mere matter, simply a thing to be dominated, is subtly complemented by the failure of the Left to go both beyond the historic limitations of Marx's ninteenth-century viewpoint and beyond anarchism's blind faith in "natural law." However, an alternative for comprehending nature and the ecological crisis as historical and social phenomena remains open in the dialectical naturalism of Western Marxism and Murray Bookchin's social ecology. By examining in closer detail how Bookchin's social ecology politicizes the concept of nature, as well as how precursory models in Western Marxist thought provide a foundation for this, Damian Gerber illustrates how the notion of an ecological society remains a decisively political question. (shrink)

Kirjoituksessa argumentoin, että metafysiikka on ollut valistusta, vaikka se edelleen kaipaa lisää valistumista, kun valistus ymmärretään avoimena prosessina, joka ei ole ajasta ja paikasta riippuvaista. Käsittelen ensin sitä, mitä metafysiikka ja valistus ovat. Sitten lausun länsimaisen metafysiikan historiasta hyvin lyhyesti. Päätän esseen argumentoimalla, että metafysiikka on valistunutta siinä mielessä, että klassisen substanssi-ominaisuus-skeeman sokeasta seuraamisesta on pitkälti päästy eroon. Metafysiikka kaipaa kuitenkin lisää valistusta ja kriittistä tarkastelua, jotta vapaudumme täysin kyseisen skeeman ja modernin predikaatti-logiikan johdatuksen aiheuttamasta kolmesta ongelmallisesta suositusta (tausta)oletuksesta: (1) (...) perustavat partikulaariset yksilöoliot ovat (periaatteessa) laskettavia, (2) ne eivät ole relationaalisia ja (3) ominaisuudet ovat ontologisesti riippuvaisia kantajistaan. (shrink)

Piotr Kropotkin był najważniejszym przedstawicielem tzw. darwinizmu rosyjskiego oraz teorii pomocy wzajemnej, która podkreślała znaczenie współpracy wewnątrzgatunkowej w procesie doboru naturalnego oraz walki o byt. Na jej kanwie rosyjski badacz wysunął tezę o ewolucyjnych źródłach moralności, będącej problem badawczym w niniejszym artykule. Stanowi to jednocześnie powód dlaczego poza przedstawieniem wspomnianej tezy i jej założeń, w publikacji zilustrowana została także teoria pomocy wzajemnej. Zaproponowana przez Kropotkina wizja moralności suponowała, iż stanowi ona „przyrodzoną” właściwość ludzkiej natury. Podstawę dla niej stanowić ma instynkt (...) społeczny oraz jego przejawy, takie jak: równość, solidarność, sprawiedliwość, itd., a także pomoc wzajemna. Stawiało to propozycję rosyjskiego darwinisty w opozycji wobec dominujących trendów w myśleniu o ludzkiej moralności na przełomie XIX i XX wieku, zwłaszcza wobec tzw. darwinizmu społecznego i charakterystycznego dlań dualizmu moralnego. Ponadto zrywała z antropocentryzmem zakładając, iż poza gatunkiem ludzkim, także inne gatunki cechują się uczuciami moralnymi. (shrink)

In the 1950s, George Canguilhem became known in France as a vocal exponent of the philosophy of the concept, an approach to epistemology that treated science as the highest expression of human rationality and scientific concepts as the necessary preconditions for the manifestation of scientific truth. Philosophers of the concept, Canguilhem included, viewed concepts as the key to the study of science; and science, in turn, as the key to a substantive theory of reason. This article explains what concepts are (...) for Canguilhem, how they are extracted from the history of the sciences, and why they continue to matter for contemporary debates in the History and Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

Variations in life history define key comparative and evolutionary biological questions, important for understanding the mechanisms of mammalian evolutionary divergence, developmental adaptability and plasticity. In this regard, the differences among predominantly altricial and precocial species represent a particularly significant, if still poorly understood and contested case. Here, it will be shown how the classical analysis of such ontogenetic variations, going back to the semantic biology of A. Portmann, can be expanded and synthesized with comparative physiological approaches, based on the negentropic (...) theory of ontogeny by I. A. Arshavsky and his school. In this little received but pioneering tradition, extensive comparative and experimental investigations were carried out on the role of musculoskeletal systems and stressors in driving life history variations, particularly in the altricial-precocial spectrum. As shown by Arshavsky and co-workers, by focusing on general allometric regularities, the approximations based on the classical energy rules of surface and mass offer valuable benchmarks, but also predictions that are frequently violated by the variability of physiological and metabolic scaling relationships among altricials and precocials, and thus, a complex and historical approach is needed to describe their local physiological mechanisms and systemic regularities. This paper shows how Arshavsky’s findings and framework can play an integrative role in this context, potentially helping to bridge the mainly descriptive approach of semantic morphology, as developed by Portmann’s school, with the more functional explanations predominating current ecology and life history theory. These problems can be important for biosemiotics by highlighting the contingent, activity-dependent, and surplus anabolic stress mechanisms underlying diversification in eutherian developmental systems and possibly, the epigenetic evolution of pace-of-life syndromes. (shrink)

DEFINING THE LIMITS OF THE FIELD. Because 'consciousness and the body' is central to so many philosophical endeavors, I cannot provide a comprehensive survey of recent work. So we must begin by limiting the scope of our inquiry. First, we will concentrate on work done in English or translated into English, simply to ensure ease of access to the texts under examination. Second, we will concentrate on work done in the last 15 years or so, since the early 1990s. Third, (...) we will concentrate on those philosophers who treat both consciousness and the body together. Thus we will not treat philosophers who look at body representations in culture, nor philosophers who examine socio-political bodily practices with minimal or no reference to consciousness. Finally, even with the philosophers we choose to treat, we cannot be comprehensive and will instead make representative choices among their works. With that being said, we will have a fairly liberal definition of continental philosophy, operationally defined as that which makes (non-exclusive) reference to the classic phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Thus we will include the radical.. (shrink)