A number of areas of biology raise questions about what is of value in the natural environment and how we ought to behave towards it: conservation biology, environmental science, and ecology, to name a few. Based on my experience teaching students from these and similar majors, I argue that the field of environmental ethics has much to teach these students. They come to me with pent-up questions and a feeling that more is needed to fully engage in their subjects, and (...) I believe some exposure to environmental ethics can help focus their interests and goals. I identify three primary areas in which environmental ethics can con- tribute to their education. The first is an examination of who (or what) should be considered to be part of our moral community (i.e., the community to whom we owe direct duties). Is it humans only? Or does it include all sentient life? Or all life? Or ecosystems considered holistically? Often, readings implicitly assume one or more of these answers; the goal is to make the student more sensitive to these implicit claims and to get them to think about the different reasons that support them. The second area, related to the first, is the application of the different answers concerning the extent of the ethical community to real environmental issues and problems. Students need to be aware of how the different answers concerning the moral community can imply conflicting answers for how we should act in certain cases and to think about ways to move toward conflict resolution. The third area in which environmental ethics can contribute is a more conceptual one, focusing on central concepts such as biodiversity, sustainability, species, and ecosystems. Exploring and evaluating various meanings of these terms will make students more reflective and thoughtful citizens and biologists, sensitive to the implications that different conceptual choices make. (shrink)

The viewpoint of Evolutionary Epistemology (EE) and of Genetic Epistemology (GE) on classical epistemological questions is strikingly different: EE starts with Evolutionary Biology, the subject of which is population's dynamics. GE, however, starts with Developmental Psychology and thus focusses the development of individuals. By EE knowledge is seen as portraying or copying process, and truth is interpreted as a product of adaptation, whereas for GE knowledge is due to a construction process in which the production of true insights is only (...) one possibility among others: Like falsity, error and deception, true knowledge goes back to a free relationship to reality. The difference between scientific and common knowledge is hard to be checked by EE, since both result ultimately from human hereditary structures. The study of how scientific knowledge emerges from everyday cognition is rather the task of GE. (shrink)

La nécessité d’une approche anthropologique du concept d’identité provient de la nature de l’identité, qu’elle soit personnelle ou collective, qui n’est pas un phénomène « donné naturellement », mais une forme, culturellement définie et construite, de la vie humaine dans un milieu culturel en tant que « seconde nature » ; celle-ci conditionne et conceptualise humainement les différents « modes de vie » des individus et des peuples. Étant donné que la culture représente le contexte essentiel de la vie sociale (...) et individuelle de l’homme, elle fournit un modèle pour un mode de vie et de pensée commun de l’expérience collective, comme cadre des valeurs de référence sur lequel s’appuient les définitions et les interprétations de l’identité. Ainsi, le paradigme culturel permet aux chercheurs de comprendre ce que signifie l’identité dans des conditions socio-historiques et des connotations idéologiques différentes, en assumant un concept dynamique inverse du modèle national d’identité, qui lui est lié aux groupes ethniques et exclut la possibilité du changement. Le texte traitera également de la conceptualisation, orientée traditionnellement, de l’identité en Serbie, ainsi que de son influence sur la lenteur des changements dans la transition démocratique en ce nouveau millénaire. (shrink)

Der anthropologische Ansatz zum Identitätskonzept wird benötigt, da die „Identität“ nicht von Natur aus „gegeben“ ist, sondern für Menschenwesen kulturell definiert und konstituiert ist, die in dem kulturellen Rahmen als der „anderen Natur des Menschen“ leben; so existieren sie menschlich bedingt und konzeptualisiert in verschiedenerlei „menschlichen Lebensarten“. Diese Kultur zu durchleben bildet den essenziellen Kontext des Soziallebens wie auch der Persönlichkeitsgründung, es liefert die Muster der gemeinschaftlichen Lebens- und Denkweise der kollektiven Erfahrung, und zwar als wertmäßig-referenzielles Gerüst, woran sich die (...) Definitionen und Interpretationen der Identitäten anlehnen. Aufgrund dessen befähigt das kulturelle Paradigma die Erforscher zum Verständnis, welche Identität sich in diversen sozialhistorischen Gegebenheiten sowie ideologischen Konnotationen offenbart, vorausgesetzt, dass dieses Konzept im Vergleich zum anderen dynamisch ist, wie zum nationalen Identitätsentwurf, welcher sowohl begrenzt als auch abschließend wirkt und als statische Kategorie keinerlei Änderungsmöglichkeiten duldet. In dem Artikel wird ebenso die traditionell ausgerichtete Identitätskonzeptualisierung in Serbien behandelt und ihre Einwirkung auf die Wandelträgheit innerhalb der demokratischen Transition im neuen Millennium. (shrink)

Constructivist biosemiotics foundations imply the first-person basis of cognition. CBF are developed by the biology of cognition, relational biology, enactive approach, ecology of mind, second order cybernetics, genetic epistemology, gestalt, ecological perception and affordances, and active inference by minimization of free energy. CBF reject the idea of an objective independent reality to be represented by information processing in order to be the fittest. CBF assumes that perception is the behavioral configuration of an object and objects are tokens for eigen-behaviors. Cognition (...) takes place in the organism-environment structural coupling during the ontogeny and phylogeny of all biological unities including unicellular organisms. Therefore, if exogenous DNA particles are just tokens for the cell signalling eigen-behaviors, if there is no ‘information’ in the DNA sequence, how can we explain that the same virus or trans- sequence is associated with a similar phenotype? We call this ‘exogenomic problem’. With this basic example, but sufficiently generic to the whole biological world, we agree respectively with Autopoiesis, -system, and Gaia theory: i) ‘Information, code and meaning’ in the DNA sequence belong to the domain of the observer’s description. ii) Genetic ‘information’ is not a program or algorithmic software in DNA sequence. Rather it is a microphysical observable mode of eigen-behaviors in biological unities. iii) The transfer and acquisition of DNA particles is a biospheric phenomenon that maintains its homeorhesis, symbiotic and biosemiotic entailment. Based on the theoretical and experimental results of these theories, it is concluded that genetic ‘information’ is not a genomic sequence, nor any kind of information, but for the cell DNA must embody physical forcing. Genetic characters are the effects and not the cause of phenotype and DNA particles do not ‘use or manipulate’ cellular metabolism. Rather, any cellular configuration change that occurred before or during DNA perturbation is determined on the basis of the cellular standpoint. (shrink)