Universal Biology after Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel


Book Description

Here is a universal biology that draws upon the contributions of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel to unravel the mystery of life and conceive what is essential to living things anywhere they may arise. The book develops a philosopher’s guide to life in the universe, conceiving how nature becomes a biosphere in which life can emerge, what are the basic life processes common to any organism, how evolution can give rise to the different possible forms of life, and what distinguishes the essential life forms from one another.




Conceiving Nature after Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel


Book Description

This book defies the reigning dismissal of the philosophy of nature by turning to what Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel have had to say about nature and critically thinking through their arguments to reconstruct a comprehensive account of the universe. Aided by the contributions of more recent thinkers, such as Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Michael B. Foster, and Hans Jonas, Conceiving Nature shows how the mechanics of matter in motion, the physics of electromagnetism, and chemical process provide all that is needed for life to emerge and give rise to rational animals capable of knowing nature in truth. The work contains detailed discussions of much of Aristotle’s writing on nature, of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, and of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature.




Rethinking the Arts after Hegel


Book Description

In this book, Richard Dien Winfield builds upon Hegel’s Aesthetics to provide a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the individual fine arts, which remedies Hegel's inconsistencies and major omissions. In addition to conceiving the general aesthetics and particular stylistic forms of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature, Winfield determines the fundamental character of the new arts of photography and cinema that the master thinkers of aesthetics never had the opportunity to consider. Winfield’s analysis covers a wide-ranging array of artistic creations from diverse periods and cultures, while engaging in debate with the most important aesthetic theorists of the past and present.




Dialectics of the Big Bang and the Absolute Existence of the Multiverse


Book Description

This interdisciplinary book develops a dialectical narrative about the beginning of the universe by combining Hegel’s philosophy with texts about the Big Bang theory. Scientific accounts of the Big Bang indicate that the first second of existence was an eventful period in which the universe progressed through six different epochs. Bringing together cosmological narratives and Hegel’s writings (particularly The Science of Logic), Gregory Phipps reads this movement as a dialectical progression, a sequence of transitions among interlinked concepts like being and nothing, finitude and infinitude, and space and time. He also draws upon Hegel’s concept of absolutes to outline a model of the multiverse. In doing so, Phipps brings Hegel’s philosophy into dialogue with contemporary science, arguing that Hegelian readings of the first second offer speculative snapshots of a hypothetical multiverse that contains the full (and probably infinite) scope of existence. For scholars and enthusiasts alike, Dialectics of the Big Bang and the Absolute Existence of the Multiverse is a thought-provoking exploration of the crosscurrents between philosophy, science, and narrative, inviting readers to contemplate the profound mysteries of the cosmos.




Animal Choice and Human Freedom


Book Description

In Animal Choice and Human Freedom: On the Genealogy of Self-Determined Action, Michael Yudanin argues that describing freedom conceptually is impossible without explaining how it can exist in the world. Yudanin develops an account of freedom’s instantiation in biological agents and provides several prerequisites that are necessary for its exercise. He demonstrates that freedom is linked to the form of life and distinguishes between choice in non-verbal animals and human freedom, where the latter is enabled by the development of language and thus possesses a distinct character. Following this descriptive account, Yudanin explores freedom’s evolutionary history, explaining how it developed in the course of the evolution of species.




Meaning and Embodiment


Book Description

Meaning and Embodiment provides a detailed study of Hegel's anthropology to examine the place of corporeity or embodiment in human life, identity, and experience. In Hegel's view, to be human means in part to produce one's own spiritual embodiment in culture and habits. Whereas for animals nature only has meaning relative to biological drives, humans experience meaning in a way that transcends these limits, and which allows for aesthetic appreciation of beauty and sublimity, nihilistic feelings of meaninglessness, and the complex and different systems of symbolic speech and action characterizing language and culture. By elucidating the different forms of embodiment, Nicholas Mowad shows how for Hegel we are embodied in several different ways at once: as extended, subject to physical-chemical forces, living, and human. Many difficult problems in philosophy and everyday experience come down to using the right concept of embodiment. Mowad traces Hegel's account through the growth and development of the body, gender and racial difference, cycles of sleep and waking, and sensibility and mental illness.




Nature's Primal Self


Book Description

Nature's Primal Self examines Corrington's thought, called "ecstatic naturalism," in juxtaposition to both C. S. Peirce's pragmatic and semiotic concept of the self and Karl Jaspers' existential elucidation of Existenz. Peirce's and Jaspers' anthropocentrism is thus corrected by Corrington's ecstatic naturalism. Ecstatic naturalism, as a new movement, is both a semiotic theoretical method and a metaphysics that probes deeply into the ontological divide between nature naturing and nature natured. Author Nam T. Nguyen attempts to achieve three goals: first, to present and elucidate the underlying philosophical concepts of Charles Peirce, Karl Jaspers, and Robert Corrington; second, to critique the anthropocentric self of Peirce's semiotic pragmatism and of Jaspers' existential anthropology (periechontology) from the standpoint of ecstatic naturalism; and third, to introduce the concept of nature's primal self, radically grounded in the perspective of ecstatic naturalism, as a judicious, more encompassing, and richer framework compared to Peirce's semiotic construction of the self and Jaspers' existential concept of Existenz.




Paradigm Lost


Book Description

This sequel to "Man and the Biosphere" is an account of the origins and development of a cultural, social energetic and systems theoretical contribution to critical Marxism. It examines: the intellectual contributions of the Russian philosophers, A.A. Bogdanov and A.I. Bukharin; Bogdanov's and Bukharin's contributions as a search for a unity of scientific knowledge; and a paradigmatic change from a closed mechanical system to an open systems paradigm.




Kevin Macdonald’s Metaphysical Failure: a Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics


Book Description

In Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure, Jonas E. Alexis offers a thoroughly researched, nuanced and lucid analysis of Kevin MacDonald’s thought, in particular MacDonald’s belief in biological and philosophical Darwinism. It is an important book that fills a critical gap in the literature on the history of revolutionary movements and Darwinism both in the West and in Asia. It is also a study that adds many significant strands to the densely interwoven history of ideas such as Malthusianism and Eugenics. Alexis’s book engages debates in the history of ideas—going back to Madison Grant and beyond—and the history of Darwinism. It challenges many of the life-long prevailing assumptions about identity politics and produces a powerful critique of how “scientific” theories have been misused to uphold misguided and faulty categorizations. Powerfully reasoned, and backed with a startling array of documented studies, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure presents an in-depth look at key beliefs behind many mistaken and consequently destructive actions taken by numerous writers and thinkers, particularly Darwin’s ardent enthusiasts and devoted disciples. The book presents eye-opening insights into the historical development of Darwin’s ideological project and how that project ended up crippling Darwin’s intellectual children—from Richard Dawkins, Francis Crick, James Watson, Daniel Dennett, Ernst Mayr, and E. O. Wilson to Kevin MacDonald, Richard Spencer, David Duke, and Jared Taylor.




From the 'Rivers of Babylon' to the 'Rivers of the Internet'


Book Description

The ‘rivers of Babylon’ were built 3500 years ago by technical and political leaders between Euphrates and Tigris, creating the high culture of Mesopotamia, cultivating dry desert lands into fertile soil, built central cities and the Gardens of Semiramis, using the waterways for exchange of communication, commerce, and control. The ‘rivers of the Internet’ are built in the 21st century creating integrated cultures of people, of things and everything, of geospaces and cyberspaces, of artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial sensuality (AS), changing individuals, cultures and politics, creating newly integrated state and non-state bodies of culture, commerce, control, politics, and power. New tools and technologies have changed our ideational, environmental, economic, political and cultural biotopes, but people and communities are still good or bad as they were 3500 years ago. Hegel measured progress in world history via the ‘progress of the ‘consciousness of freedom’ in communities and civilizations. The Hegelian geography teacher and 1848 rebel Ernst Kapp measured progress in world history via the ‘cultivation of lands and communities by tools and technologies’. Should we understand World History as unilinear (Hegel), or rotating (Polybius), or spiraling (Burckhardt), or conditional on tools and techniques (Kapp), or based on trends and fashions? Hans-Martin Sass (* 1935 in Hagen /Germany) now lives in Reston, Virginia. He holds faculty positions in philosophy and bioethics at Ruhr University, Bochum, FRG (since 1966), and Georgetown University, Washington DC (since 1980); Honorary Professor at Renmin University (1985) and Peking Union Medical College (2001) in Beijing PRC. 100+ separate publications, 250+ journal articles, 300+ invited lectures.




Recent Books