Category: Philosophy
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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).…
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Book Review: Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning
Introduction Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning is a most interesting book. Eugene Gendlin examines the edge of awareness, where language emerges from non-language.1 This book is a philosophical work. Gendlin explores how concepts relate to experiencing.2 He adds a body of theory that refer to experiencing, and that can grasp the way in which experiencing…
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Masanobu Fukuoka in his own words
This post is a compilation of my tweets from reading of Masanobu Fukuoka’s two books The One-Straw Revolution and Sowing Seeds in the Desert. Masanobu Fukuoka (1913–2008) was a Japanese farmer and philosopher. He was an outspoken advocate of the value of observing nature’s principles. IntroductionThe One-Straw Revolution is Masanobu Fukuoka’s first book which became a…
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Book Review: A Brief History of Thought
A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living by Luc Ferry is, in a way, a beginner’s guide to philosopy. I particularly like that Luc Ferry addresses a nonacademic audience. I also like that Luc Ferry tries to place the different philosophical systems in the best possible light, without seeking to criticize.1 I…
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Book Review: The Structure of Value
The Structure of Value: Foundations of Scientific Axiology is Robert S. Hartman’s seminal work on Formal Axiology. Robert S. Hartman was born in Germany in 1910. Seeing the Nazis organize evil, he fled Nazi Germany for his opposition to Hitler. He devoted the rest of his life to organize good. This led him to a…
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Book Review: A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality
A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality by Donald W. Sherburne is a great guide to Whitehead’s philosophy! Alfred North Whitehead’s book Process and Reality (commonly referred to as PR) is extremely difficult to read.1 PR is rich and suggestive, but its opacity is monumental.2 The text of PR is in very poor condition. Whitehead…
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Book Review: The Systems View of Life
The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi is an interdisciplinary book which presents ”a unified systemic vision that includes and integrates life’s” different dimensions (p.xii). All living systems are ”highly nonlinear” networks where there are ”countless interconnections” (p.xii). Here is a summary of the book together with…