Category: Books

  • Book Review: Biopoetics

    Biopoetics: Towards an Existential Ecology by Andreas Weber connects our human experience with a scientific understanding of life. A major limitation of conventional scientific objectivity is the exclusion of the first-person subjective perspective. Rational thinking has omitted the rationality of the living body. Andreas Weber proposes an existential poetics for living systems: 1) Perception and…

  • Book Review: Biology of Wonder

    Andreas Weber writes in Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science that the more technology allows us to study life, the stronger the evidence of life’s complexity and intelligence becomes. For two hundred years, biology made no major efforts to answer what life really is. Most biologists assumed organisms to be tiny…

  • Book Review: Matter and Desire

    Andreas Weber pursues an ambitious goal with Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology. He investigates the principles of reality that we experience and are part of through a science of the heart. It became clear to Weber that we need to completely rethink how we understand life and its significance. It also means that we…

  • Book Review: Enlivenment

    Enlivenment: Towards a fundamental shift in the concepts of nature, culture and politics by Andreas Weber is an e-book published by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung which can be downloade here. Andreas Weber sees Enlivenment as a way to move beyond Enlightenment. Enlivenment is a way to acknowledge the deeply creative processes embodied in all living…

  • Andreas Weber on erotic, poetic, and existential ecology

    Introduction Andreas Weber is a biologist, philosopher, and author. He is one of the most interesting authors I have read lately. This is a review of Andreas Weber’s essay Enlivenment (Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2013), and books Matter & Desire (Chelsey Green Publishing Company, 2014), Biology of Wonder (New Society Publishing, 2016), and Biopoetics (Springer, 2016).…

  • Organizing retrospective 126

    This is a post in my series on organizing ”between and beyond.” Other posts are here. This is a retrospective of what has happened during the week. The purpose is to reflect on the work itself. Here is my previous retrospective. What has happened? What needs to be done?This is a retrospective, not only of…

  • Organizing retrospective 122-125

    This is a post in my series on organizing ”between and beyond.” Other posts are here. This is a retrospective of what has happened during the month. The purpose is to reflect on the work itself. Here is my previous retrospective. What has happened? What needs to be done?I’ve finished reading five books this month.…

  • Organizing retrospective 117-121

    This is a post in my series on organizing ”between and beyond.” Other posts are here. This is a retrospective of what has happened during the week. The purpose is to reflect on the work itself. Here is my previous retrospective. Here is my next retrospective. What has happened? What needs to be done? I’m…

  • Book Review: Catafalque

    Catafalque is a biography where Peter Kingsley offers a view of Carl Jung as a mystic and prophet. Kingsley is a pleasure to read. His writing is like music, but after a couple of hundred pages I got tired of the single tune. Catafalque is a meticulous work about Jung, and as such it’s impressive.…

  • Book Review: Who Do We Choose to Be?

    Who Do We Choose to Be: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity by Margaret J. Wheatley offers a perspective on how to engage sanely with the destructive dynamics of our time. We do that by facing reality, willingly seeing where we are, and how we got here. Wheatley seeks to understand the forces that have…