ABSTRACT: GEORGES CANGUILHEM’S BIOPHILOSOPHY The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared «On n’interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires»: laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of “Life”. Certain influential French philosophers of science of the mid‐century such as Georges Canguilhem would disagree, or at least seek to resist some of Jacob’s diagnosis. Not by imposing a different kind of research program in laboratories, but by an unusual combination of historical and philosophical (...) inquiry into the foundations of the life sciences. Canguilhem speaks of «defending vitalist biology» and declares that Life cannot be grasped by logic. Is this history and philosophy of biology? Is it vitalism? It definitely is a different project from current philosophy of biology. One short‐lived term for it was “biophilosophy”. In this paper I explore the content of this term as it relates to the above questions. (shrink)

In the contemporary context of environmental crises and the degradation of resources, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and species extinction. Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an (...) event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this article explores how contemporary art—in particular, the series of works The Absence of Alice by Australian new-media and bioartist Svenja Kratz—challenges the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of ‘essences’, the article examines the ways Kratz’s works deterritorialise the conventional concept of death. In this way, it hopes to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living. (shrink)

Georges Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934; along with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem was the (...) main figure who introduced the work of Goldstein and his ‘phenomenology of embodiment’ into France. In this paper I inquire if we should view Canguilhem and Goldstein as ‘biochauvinists’, that is, as thinkers who consider that there is something inherently unique about biological entities as such, and if so, of what sort. (shrink)

In the present condition of planetary environmental crises, violence, and war, entire ecosystems are annihilated, habitats turn into unliveable spaces, and shared “more-than-human” vulnerabilities get amplified. Here and now, death and loss become urgent environmental concerns, while the Anthropocene-induced anxiety, anger, and grief are manifested in popular-scientific narratives, art, culture, and activism. Grounded in the theoretical framework of queer death studies, this article explores present grief imaginaries and engagements with more-than-human death, dying, and extinction, as they are interwoven through contemporary (...) art. It is there where an ecological ontology of death is being exposed and ethical territories of eco-grief unfold. (shrink)

The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared “On n’interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires”: laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of ‘Life’. Nowadays, as David Hull puts it, “both scientists and philosophers take ontological reduction for granted… Organisms are ‘nothing but’ atoms, and that is that.” In the mid-twentieth century, from the immediate post-war period to the late 1960s, French philosophers of science such as Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon (...) returned to Jacob’s statement with an odd kind of pathos: they were determined to reverse course. Not by imposing a different kind of research program in laboratories, but by an unusual combination of historical and philosophical inquiry into the foundations of the life sciences (particularly medicine, physiology and the cluster of activities that were termed ‘biology’ in the early 1800s). Even in as straightforwardly scholarly a work as La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1955), Canguilhem speaks oddly of “defending vitalist biology,” and declares that Life cannot be grasped by logic (or at least, “la vie déconcerte la logique”). Was all this historical and philosophical work merely a reassertion of ‘mysterian’, magical vitalism? In order to answer this question we need to achieve some perspective on Canguilhem’s ‘vitalism’, notably with respect to its philosophical influences such as Kurt Goldstein. (shrink)

Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934; along with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem was the main (...) figure who introduced the work of Goldstein and his ‘phenomenology of embodiment’ into France. In this paper I inquire if we should view Canguilhem and Goldstein as ‘biochauvinists’, that is, as thinkers who consider that there is something inherently unique about biological entities as such, and if so, of what sort. (shrink)

Taxonomically, lichens are classified as a distinct group under the Kingdom Fungi. They have been subject to materia medica books since the ancient times, drawing attention for their medicinal properties. Studies on the biology and history of lichens in Türkiye have now reached a significant level. Therefore, it is epistemologically plausible to consider lichens in philosophy and from a philosophical perspective. The dual nature of lichens known as symbiotic organisms leads to the emergence of certain properties that are not observable (...) when individual partners live separately. The present study explores whether lichens are indivisible individuals, discussing the lichen thallus as a relatively balanced system and even a miniature ‘ecosystem’. Consequently, this paper proposes that emergence, as a concept, can be considered a methodological apparatus in both defining and explaining biological facts and phenomena. Building on biological knowledge, it is suggested that philosophy, particularly biophilosophy and ethics, can consider lichens as model organisms. Through this perspective, principles for coexistence of both individuals, communities, and societies can be established. (shrink)

Biology –in its simplest definition– is a natural science that studies the living things. Philosophy of Biology, on the other hand, is the whole of conceptual analysis, synthesis and deductions that filters the scientific information being produced by biology, especially those of ‘life’ and ‘evolution’. In this study, the importance of the philosophy-science view of the famous philosopher Teoman Duralı, who passed away a year ago, will be mentioned in terms of contemporary biology and philosophy of biology. In doing this, (...) first of all, the historical relationship between the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of science will be revealed. Then having in consideration of the scope of the philosophy of biology, its relationship to the pure biology and to the history of biology will be mentioned. Then, Duralı’s philosophy-science view will be examined in terms of meaning and cause-effect relationships, thus both his contribution to the philosophy of biology literature in Turkish and his position will be pointed out. In conclusion, the use of the term biophilosophy, which concerns and connects two separate-but-adjoint flowing rivers ‘the philosophy’ and ‘the biology’, will be mentioned by pointing out why ‘biology for philosophy’ and why ‘philosophy for biology’ are important reciprocally. Finally, a declaration consisting a list of ten proposed items will be put forth. (shrink)

Within continental philosophy of biology the work of Michel Serres has not received a lot of attention. Nonetheless, this chapter wants to argue that Serres was part of a group of thinkers – together with Jacques Monod and Henri Atlan – that started to think about biology in terms of second-order cybernetics and information theory. Therefore, this chapter aims to do four things. First of all, it maps the relation between Serres and Canguilhem, one that was mediated by authors such (...) as Louis Althusser or Jacques Monod. Secondly, it fleshes out Serres’s own ‘biophilosophy’. I label this alternative tradition as a ‘biophilosophy without a subject’. Finally, this chapter explores the consequences of this alternative biophilosophy through a brief examination of two authors whose work lies in the line of this tradition: René Girard and Bruno Latour. Though at first sight different, they both draw inspiration from this biophilosophy to develop a framework that, paradoxically, ‘jumps over’ the subject. Hence, the reason why biology is neither a prominent theme in Girard’s nor in Latour’s work. This is not because of a lack of biophilosophy, but because of an implicit one: a biophilosophy without a subject. (shrink)

This intra-view explores a number of productive junctions between contemporary Deleuzoguattarian and new materialist praxes via a series of questions and provocations. Productive tensions are explored via questions of epistemological, ontological, ethical, and political intra-sections as well as notions of difference, transversal contamination, ecosophical practices, diffraction, and, lastly, schizoanalysis. Various irruptions around biophilosophy, transduction, becomology, cartography, power relations, hyperobjects as events, individuation, as well as dyschronia and disorientation, take the discussion further into the wild pedagogical spaces that both praxes (...) have in common. -/- . (shrink)

When a group of processes achieves such closure that a set of states of affairs recurs continually, then the effect of that coherence on the world differs from what would occur in the absence of that closure. Such altered effectiveness is an attribute of the system as a whole, and would have consequences. This indicates that the network of processes, as a unit, has ontological significance. Whenever a network of processes generates continual return to a limited set of states of (...) affairs, the system may function as a “whole”— with respect to appropriate interaction partners. The balance achieved by the processes provides the form of definiteness of a unified agent. The causal powers of such coherent aggregates are indeed just the powers of the “constituents acting in concert”. However, the components act in concert in the specific way they do only because of their inclusion in the closed set of interactions that defines the coherence. This renders the causal powers of the coherence defined by that closure non-redundant, and hence the coherence, as a unit, is ontologically significant. The form of definiteness that provides internal coherence also grounds external efficacy of the societal aggregation. The closure is a structural feature of the coherence — possibly, but not necessarily, apparent in spatial structuring. This approach can provide a unified account that includes quantum microphysics, systems biology, and the philosophy of organism ─ without reducing any of these to another. (shrink)