Kant -- drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors -- provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that was impossible to explain it. Its ’inscrutability’ was intrinsic. The third ’Critique’ essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of prescientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity. By contrast, for Locke, and ’a fortiori’ for Buffon and his followers, ’intrinsic purposiveness’ was a fact of (...) the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. The difference comes most vividly to light once we recognize Kant’s distinction of the concept of organism from the concept of life. (edited). (shrink)

In C. S. Peirce, as well as in the work of many biosemioticians, the semiotic object is sometimes described as a physical “object” with material properties and sometimes described as an “ideal object” or mental representation. I argue that to the extent that we can avoid these types of characterizations we will have a more scientific definition of sign use and will be able to better integrate the various fields that interact with biosemiotics. In an effort to end Cartesian dualism (...) in semiotics, which has been the main obstacle to a scientific biosemiotics, I present an argument that the “semiotic object” is always ultimately the objective of self-affirmation (of habits, physical or mental) and/or self-preservation. Therefore, I propose a new model for the sign triad: response-sign-objective. With this new model it is clear, as I will show, that self-mistaking (not self-negation as others have proposed) makes learning, creativity and purposeful action possible via signs. I define an “interpretation” as a response to something as if it were a sign, but whose semiotic objective does not, in fact, exist. If the response-as-interpretation turns out to be beneficial for the system after all, there is biopoiesis. When the response is not “interpretive,” but self-confirming in the usual way, there is biosemiosis. While the conditions conducive to fruitful misinterpretation (e.g., accidental similarity of non-signs to signs and/or contiguity of non-signs to self-sustaining processes) might be artificially enhanced, according to this theory, the outcomes would be, by nature, more or less uncontrollable and unpredictable. Nevertheless, biosemiotics could be instrumental in the manipulation and/or artificial creation of purposeful systems insofar as it can describe a formula for the conditions under which new objectives and novel purposeful behavior may emerge, however unpredictably. (shrink)

This thesis addresses the relation between Immanuel Kant and Gilles Deleuze, with reference to women. It argues that Deleuze's "methods" reveal an intensive dyanamic in Kant obscured by readings which concentrate on the molar structures in his thought and that this dynamic is implicated with the deployment by Deleuze (and Guattari) of becoming-woman as a middle line which escapes the rational tribunal. It insists that a philosophy of difference function as a positive elimination of relations to unity, to the subject (...) and to other figures of power in philosophical thought and that Deleuze's oeuvre is a critical and creative engagement with the transformation of philosophical problems and the relation of thinking to history which emerge from this. The other theme, that of women, is addressed through Luce Irigaray's reading of Kant and Rosi Braidotti's reading of becoming-woman. I argue that whilst the former's critique of an uncritically assumed symmetry in Kant's work is effective and well-directed, she becomes caught in her own methodology of jamming, but that there are nonetheless strong and productive directions in her thought, many of which are parallel and/or connected to those of Deleuze and Guattari's becoming-woman. Against Braidotti's interpretation of becoming-woman, I argue that it adopts a molar political strategy and as such does not connect with the force behind this thought. Lastly, this thesis is an argument against bilateral sexual difference, in favour of distributive or 'n-sexes': the title, Breeding Demons connects the theme of demons in Deleuze's writing to the cycles which effect such distributions. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology claim that function talk is consistent with naturalism. Yet recent work in biology places new pressure on this claim. An increasing number of biologists propose that the existence of functions depends on the organisation of systems. While systems are part of the domain studied by physics, they are capable of interacting with this domain through organising principles. This is to say that a full account of biological function requires teleology. Does naturalism preclude reference to teleological causes? Or (...) are organised systems precisely a naturalised form of teleology? In this paper I suggest that the biology of organised systems reveals several contradictions in the main philosophical conceptions of naturalism. To integrate organised systems with naturalism’s basic assumptions—that there is no theory-independent view for metaphysics, and that nature is intelligible—I propose an idealist solution. (shrink)