Kann man das Leben führen? Die in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge stellen sich in kritischer Absicht dem modernen Konzept der »Lebensführung«, das die Technikphilosophie mit der Lebensphilosophie im frühen 20. Jahrhundert eng verbunden hat und teilweise bis heute verbindet. Auch relevante soziologische Positionen wurden in diesem Kontext entwickelt. Anhand zentraler Autoren wie Simmel, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Blumenberg, Berdjajew, Reuleaux, von Uexküll, Plessner, Freyer, Jonas und Günter Ropohl (dem dieser Band aus Anlass seines 75. Geburtstags gewidmet ist) werden die Bezugnahmen (...) zwischen Technik- und Lebensphilosophie analysiert, aber auch die Abgrenzungsversuche voneinander. Die Verhältnisbestimmung der Konzepte »Leben« und »Technik« kann systemischen Charakter annehmen und deshalb die Idee einer lebensbejahenden oder -verneinenden Technik nach sich ziehen, z.B. artikuliert als Technikoptimismus/-pessimismus oder als emanzipatorische Frage nach dem eigenen Leben und dessen Selbstverwirklichung. Wenn es um Lebensführung geht, werden also gleichzeitig die Ausgangsbedingungen der Identitätskonstruktion moderner Subjekte und die Frage thematisiert, inwieweit Systementwürfe jene ermöglichen oder begrenzen. (shrink)

Niemand kann in modernen Gesellschaften leben, ohne auf vielfaltigste Weise an der Wirtschaft teilzunehmen. Doch gemessen an dieser universellen Bedeutung befasst sich die Philosophie heute vergleichsweise wenig mit der Wirtschaft, und wenn sie es tut, stehen oft Fragen der Wirtschafts- oder Unternehmensethik im Zentrum. Sie sollte aber viel weiter gehen - dafur pladiert Ropohl in diesem Buch - und vermeintliche Grundgewissheiten immer wieder in Frage stellen: Warum mussen Menschen fremdbestimmte Arbeit leisten, um das Geld fur ihre Lebensfuhrung zu erwerben? (...) Wie steht es mit den Bedurfnissen, die angeblich durch Produkte befriedigt werden, fur die das muhsam verdiente Geld wieder ausgegeben wird? Ist es zwingend, dass eine auskommliche Existenz nur in wenigen Regionen der Erde moglich ist, wahrend anderwarts Hunger, Armut und Verelendung herrscht? Und die Philosophie sollte - was ihre klassische Domane ist - Begriffe und Theorien auf den Prufstand stellen. Sind die Konstrukte der heutigen Okonomik tauglich, die primar auf Geld, Gewinn und Wachstum abstellen, aber keine brauchbare Vorstellung von menschlicher Lebenspraxis, Arbeit und Technik haben und von Ungleichheit und den Gefahrdungen von Natur und Kultur nichts wissen wollen? (shrink)

Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners’ sense of identity and their ability to understand (...) the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. -/- Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused—when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being. (shrink)

What is the meaning of critique for critical phenomenology? Building on Gayle Salamon’s engagement with this question in the inaugural issue of Puncta: A Journal for Critical Phenomenology (2018), I will propose a six-fold account of critique as: 1) the art of asking questions, moved by crisis; 2) a transcendental inquiry into the conditions of possibility for meaningful experience; 3) a quasi-transcendental, historically-grounded study of particular lifeworlds; 4) a (situated and interested) analysis of power; 5) the problematization of basic concepts (...) and methods; and 6) a praxis of freedom that seeks not only to interpret the meaning of lived experience, but also to change the conditions under which horizons of possibility for meaning, action, and relationship are wrongfully limited or foreclosed. While the first two dimensions of critique are alive and well in classical phenomenology, the others help to articulate what is distinctive about critical phenomenology. (shrink)

First uniform description of all key levels of communication in the organismic kingdoms of plants, fungi, animals (bees and corals), bacteria and additionally the natural genome editing competences of viruses based on the most recent empirical data. The biocommunicative approach presented is based on the results of the philosophy of science discourse concerning coherent definitions of 'language' and 'communication'.

The Gift of the Other brings together a philosophical analysis of time, embodiment, and ethical responsibility with a feminist critique of the way women’s reproductive capacity has been theorized and represented in Western culture. Author Lisa Guenther develops the ethical and temporal implications of understanding birth as the gift of the Other, a gift which makes existence possible, and already orients this existence toward a radical responsibility for Others. Through an engagement with the work of Levinas, Beauvoir, Arendt, Irigaray, and (...) Kristeva, the author outlines an ethics of maternity based on the givenness of existence and a feminist politics of motherhood which critiques the exploitation of maternal generosity. (shrink)

Communication is defined as an interaction between at least two living agents which share a repertoire of signs. These are combined according to syntactic, semantic and context dependent, pragmatic rules in order to coordinate behavior. This volume deals with the important roles of soil bacteria in parasitic and symbiotic interactions with viruses, plants, animals and fungi. Starting with a general overview of the key levels of communication between bacteria, further reviews examine the various aspects of intracellular as well as intercellular (...) biocommunication between soil microorganisms. Th is includes the various levels of biocommunication between phages and bacteria, between soil algae and bacteria, and between bacteria, fungi and plants in the rhizosphere, the role of plasmids and transposons, horizontal gene transfer, quorum sensing and quorum quenching, bacterial-host cohabitation, phage-mediated genetic exchange and soil viral ecology. (shrink)

Shame is notoriously ambivalent. On one hand, it operates as a mechanism of normalization and social exclusion, installing or reinforcing patterns of silence and invisibility; on the other hand, the capacity for shame may be indispensible for ethical life insofar as it attests to the subject’s constitutive relationality and its openness to the provocation of others. Sartre, Levinas and Beauvoir each offer phenomenological analyses of shame in which its basic structure emerges as a feeling of being exposed to others and (...) bound to one’s own identity. For Sartre, shame is an ontological provocation, constitutive of subjectivity as a being-for-Others. For Levinas, ontological shame takes the form of an inability to escape one’s own relation to being; this predicament is altered by the ethical provocation of an Other who puts my freedom in question and commands me to justify myself. For Beauvoir, shame is an effect of oppression, both for the woman whose embodied existence is marked as shameful, and for the beneficiary of colonial domination who feels ashamed of her privilege. For each thinker, shame articulates the temporality of social life in both its promise and its danger. (shrink)

: Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of natality, Guenther argues that Martin Heidegger overlooks the distinct ontological and ethical significance of birth as a limit that orients one toward an other who resists appropriation, even while handing down a heritage of possibilities that one can—and must—make one's own. Guenther calls this structure of natality Being-from-others, modifying Heidegger's language of inheritance to suggest an ethical understanding of existence as the gift of the other.

Boards of directors affect corporate strategy and decision-making through monitoring of management and resource provision. Recently, an increasing number of studies have examined the relationships between board characteristics and corporate social responsibility (CSR). These studies have yielded inconsistent findings. This article therefore reports the results of a study applying meta-analytical techniques to a sample of 82 empirical studies to help clarify the relationships between board characteristics and CSR. Although prior research has tended to apply relatively simplistic models investigating the impact (...) of individual board characteristics independently and only directly, we adopt a more complex perspective to shed new light on the board characteristics–CSR nexus. Specifically, we use a meta-analytic path model that accounts for the potential interplay between board characteristics in determining CSR and tests whether the presence of a CSR committee plays a meditating role. Our findings suggest that board size, board independence, and female board representation are partially interrelated with each other and jointly influence CSR directly as well as indirectly via the presence of a CSR committee. In addition, we find that country-level institutional factors act as moderators and that the relationships differ with regard to the specific dimension of CSR (i.e., social, environmental, or aggregate). (shrink)

In Remnants of Auschwitz , Giorgio Agamben argues that the hidden structure of subjectivity is shame. In shame, I am consigned to something that cannot be assumed, such that the very thing that makes me a subject also forces me to witness my own desubjectification. Agamben’s ontological account of shame is problematic insofar as it forecloses collective responsibility and collapses the distinction between shame and humiliation. By recontextualizing three of Agamben’s sources – Primo Levi, Robert Antelme and Maurice Blanchot – (...) I develop an alternative account of shame as the structure of intersubjectivity , and of a collective responsibility that is more fundamental than the subject itself. On this basis, I sketch the preliminary outline of a biopolitics of resistance rooted in the ethics of alterity. The intuition driving this approach is that life is never bare ; even in situations of extreme affliction there remains a relation to alterity which provides a starting point for resistance. (shrink)

This is the first coherent description of all levels of communication of ciliates. Ciliates are highly sensitive organisms that actively compete for environmental resources. They assess their surroundings, estimate how much energy they need for particular goals, and then realise the optimum variant. They take measures to control certain environmental resources. They perceive themselves and can distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’. They process and evaluate information and then modify their behaviour accordingly. These highly diverse competences show us that this is (...) possible owing to sign-mediated communication processes within ciliates, between the same, related and different ciliate species, and between ciliates and non-ciliate organisms. This is crucial in coordinating growth and development, shape and dynamics. This book further serves as a learning tool for research aspects in biocommunication in ciliates. It will guide scientists in further investigations on ciliate behavior, how they mediate signaling processes between themselves and the environment. (shrink)

Natural genome editing from a biocommunicative perspective is the competent agent-driven generation and integration of meaningful nucleotide sequences into pre-existing genomic content arrangements, and the ability to (re-)combine and (re-)regulate them according to context-dependent (i.e. adaptational) purposes of the host organism. Natural genome editing integrates both natural editing of genetic code and epigenetic marking that determines genetic reading patterns. As agents that edit genetic code and epigenetically mark genomic structures, viral and subviral agents have been suggested because they may be (...) evolutionarily older than cellular life. This hypothesis that viruses and viral-like agents edit genetic code is developed according to three well investigated examples that represent key evolutionary inventions in which non-lytic viral swarms act symbiotically in a persistent lifestyle within cellular host genomes: origin of eukaryotic nucleus, adaptive immunity, placental mammals. Additionally an abundance of various RNA elements cooperate in a variety of steps and substeps as regulatory and catalytic units with multiple competencies to act on the genetic code. Most of these RNA agents such as transposons, retroposons and small non-coding RNAs act consortially and are remnants of persistent viral infections that now act as co-opted adaptations in cellular key processes. (shrink)

All the conserved detailed results of evolution stored in DNA must be read, transcribed, and translated via an RNAmediated process. This is required for the development and growth of each individual cell. Thus, all known living organisms fundamentally depend on these RNA-mediated processes. In most cases, they are interconnected with other RNAs and their associated protein complexes and function in a strictly coordinated hierarchy of temporal and spatial steps (i.e., an RNA network). Clearly, all cellular life as we know it (...) could not function without these key agents of DNA replication, namely rRNA, tRNA, and mRNA. Thus, any definition of life that lacks RNA functions and their networks misses an essential requirement for RNA agents that inherently regulate and coordinate (communicate to) cells, tissues, organs, and organisms. The precellular evolution of RNAs occurred at the core of the emergence of cellular life and the question remained of how both precellular and cellular levels are interconnected historically and functionally. RNA-networks andRNA-communication can interconnect these levels.With the reemergence of virology in evolution, it became clear that communicating viruses and subviral infectious genetic parasites are bridging these two levels by invading, integrating, coadapting, exapting, and recombining constituent parts in host genomes for cellular requirements in gene regulation and coordination aims. Therefore, a 21st century understanding of life is of an inherently social process based on communicating RNA networks, in which viruses and cells continuously interact. (shrink)

Whereas telomeres protect terminal ends of linear chromosomes, telomerases identify natural chromosome ends, which differ from broken DNA and replicate telomeres. Although telomeres play a crucial role in the linear chromosome organization of eukaryotic cells, their molecular syntax most probably descended from an ancient retroviral competence. This indicates an early retroviral colonization of large double-stranded DNA viruses, which are putative ancestors of the eukaryotic nucleus. This contribution demonstrates an advantage of the biosemiotic approach towards our evolutionary understanding of telomeres, telomerases, (...) other reverse transcriptases and mobile elements. Their role in genetic/genomic content organization and maintenance is no longer viewed as an object of randomly derived alterations (mutations) but as a highly sophisticated hierarchy of regulatory networks organized and coordinated by natural genome-editing competences of viruses. (shrink)

First, I offer a short overview on the classical occidental philosophy as propounded by the ancient Greeks and the natural philosophies of the last 2000 years until the dawn of the empiricist logic of science in the twentieth century, which wanted to delimitate classical metaphysics from empirical sciences. In contrast to metaphysical concepts which didn’t reflect on the language with which they tried to explain the whole realm of entities empiricist logic of science initiated the end of metaphysical theories by (...) reflecting on the preconditions for foundation and justification of sentences about objects of investigation, i.e. a coherent definition of language in general, which was not the aim of classical metaphysics. Unexpectedly empiricist logic of science in the linguistic turn failed in the physical and mathematical reductionism of language and its use in communication, as will be discussed below in further detail. Nevertheless, such reflection on language and communication also introduced this vocabulary into biology. Manfred Eigen and bioinformatics, later on biolinguistics, used ‘language’ applied linguistic turn thinking to biology coherent to the logic of science and its formalisable aims. This changed significantly with the birth of biosemiotics and biohermeneutics. At the end of this introduction it will be outlined why and how all these approaches reproduced the deficiencies of the logic of science and why the biocommunicative approach avoids their abstractive fallacies. (shrink)

Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian has proposed the term “SHU syndrome” to name the cluster of cognitive, perceptual and affective symptoms that commonly arise for inmates held in the Special Housing Units (SHU) of supermax prisons. In this paper, I analyze the harm of solitary confinement from a phenomenological perspective by drawing on Husserl’s account of the essential relation between consciousness, the experience of an alter ego and the sense of a real, Objective world. While Husserl’s prioritization of transcendental subjectivity over transcendental (...) intersubjectivity underestimates the degree to which first-person consciousness is constitutively intertwined with the embodied consciousness of others, Husserl’s phenomenology nevertheless provides a fruitful starting-point for a philosophical engagement with the psychiatric research on solitary confinement. (shrink)

Manfred Eigen employs the terms language and communication to explain key recombination processes of DNA as well as to explain the self-organization of human language and communication: Life processes as well as language and communication processes are governed by the logic of a molecular syntax, which is the exact depiction of a principally formalizable reality. The author of the present contribution demonstrates that this view of Manfred Eigen’s cannot be sufficiently substantiated and that it must be supplemented by an approach (...) based on linguistic pragmatics. (shrink)

In Otherwise than Being, Levinas writes that the alterity of the Other escapes “le flair animal,” or the animal’s sense of smell. This paper puts pressure on the strong human-animal distinction that Levinas makes by considering the possibility that, while non-human animals may not respond to the alterity of the Other in the way that Levinas describes as responsibility, animal sensibility plays a key role in a relation to Others that Levinas does not discuss at length: friendship. This approach to (...) friendship addresses a gap in Levinas’ work between the absolute Other for whom I am responsible and the “brother” who is my political equal. (shrink)

Archaea represent a third domain of life with unique properties not found in the other domains. Archaea actively compete for environmental resources. They perceive themselves and can distinguish between 'self' and 'non-self'. They process and evaluate available information and then modify their behaviour accordingly. They assess their surroundings, estimate how much energy they need for particular goals, and then realize the optimum variant. These highly diverse competences show us that this is possible owing to sign- mediated communication processes within archaeal (...) cells, between the same, related and different archaeal species, and between archaea and non-archaeal organisms. This is crucial in coordinating growth and development, shape and dynamics. Such communication must function both on the local level and between widely separated colony parts. This allows archaea to coordinate appropriate response behaviors in a differentiated manner to their current developmental status and physiological influences. This book will orientate further investigations on how archaeal ecosphere inhabitants communicate with each other to coordinate their behavioral patterns and whats the role of viruses in this highly dynamic interactional networks. (shrink)

In searching for life in extraterrestrial space, it is essential to act based on an unequivocal definition of life. In the twentieth century, life was defined as cells that self-replicate, metabolize, and are open for mutations, without which genetic information would remain unchangeable, and evolution would be impossible. Current definitions of life derive from statistical mechanics, physics, and chemistry of the twentieth century in which life is considered to function machine like, ignoring a central role of communication. Recent observations show (...) that context-dependent meaningful communication and network formation (and control) are central to all life forms. Evolutionary relevant new nucleotide sequences now appear to have originated from social agents such as viruses, their parasitic relatives, and related RNA networks, not from errors. By applying the known features of natural languages and communication, a new twenty-first century definition of life can be reached in which communicative interactions are central to all processes of life. A new definition of life must integrate the current empirical knowledge about interactions between cells, viruses, and RNA networks to provide a better explanatory power than the twentieth century narrative. (shrink)

The world as we know it is structured by intersecting forms of systemic violence. It might seem obvious that this violence calls for critique. But this essay experiments with another, more radical possibility inspired by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Black feminist poethics and by abolitionist refusals of critique as an end in itself and a substitute for collective action. To what extent might phenomenology, even in its most critical form, be so deeply invested in the Kantian tradition of transcendental critique (...) that it confirms the logic of the world as we know it? And how, if at all, might a praxis of phenomenology beyond critique imagine and affirm a poethical world in which entanglement, indeterminacy, and simultaneity generate virtual possibilities for being, knowing, and doing beyond and against racial violence? (shrink)

Darwinian evolutionary theory has two key terms, variations and biological selection, which finally lead to survival of the fittest variant. With the rise of molecular genetics, variations were explained as results of error replications out of the genetic master templates. For more than half a century, it has been accepted that new genetic information is mostly derived from random error-based events. But the error replication narrative has problems explaining the sudden emergence of new species, new phenotypic traits, and genome innovations (...) as a sudden single event. Meanwhile, it is recognized that errors cannot explain the evolution of genetic information, genetic novelty, and complexity. Now, empirical evidence establishes the crucial role of non-random genetic content editors, such as viruses, diversity generating retroelements, and other RNA networks, to produce new genetic information, complex regulatory control, inheritance vectors, genetic identity, immunity, new sequence space, evolution of complex organisms, and evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

Emmanuel Levinas compares ethical responsibility to a maternal body who bears the Other in the same without assimilation. In explicating this trope, he refers to a biblical passage in which Moses is like a “wet nurse” bearing Others whom he has “neither conceived nor given birth to”. A close reading of this passage raises questions about ethics, maternity, and sexual difference, for both the concept of ethical substitution and the material practice of mothering.

Fungi are sessile, highly sensitive organisms that actively compete for environmental resources both above and below the ground. They assess their surroundings, estimate how much energy they need for particular goals, and then realise the optimum variant. They take measures to control certain environmental resources. They perceive themselves and can distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’. They process and evaluate information and then modify their behaviour accordingly. These highly diverse competences show us that this is possible owing to sign-mediated communication processes (...) within fungal cells, between the same, related and different fungal species, and between fungi and non-fungal organisms. Intraorganismic communication involves sign-mediated interactions within cells and between cells. This is crucial in coordinating growth and development, shape and dynamics. Such communication must function both on the local level and between widely separated mycelium parts. This allows fungi to coordinate appropriate response behaviors in a differentiated manner to their current developmental status and physiological influences. (shrink)

Abstract The quasispecies theory is a helpful concept in the explanation of RNA virus evolution and behaviour, with a relevant impact on methods used to fight viral diseases. It has undergone some adaptations to integrate new empirical data, especially the non-deterministic nature of mutagenesis, and the variety of behavioural motifs in cooperation, competition, communication, innovation, integration, and exaptation. Also, the consortial structure of quasispecies with complementary roles of memory genomes of minority populations better fits the empirical data than did the (...) original concept of a master sequence and its mutant spectra. The high productivity of quasispecies variants generates unique sequences that never existed before and will never exist again. In the present essay, we underline that such sequences represent really new ontological entities, not just error copies of previous ones. Their primary unique property, the incredible variant production, is suggested here as quasispecies productivity, which replaces the error-replication narrative to better fit into a new relationship between mankind and living nature in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Prisoners involved in the Attica rebellion and in the recent Georgia prison strike have protested their dehumanizing treatment as animals and as slaves. Their critique is crucial for tracing the connections between slavery, abolition, the racialization of crime, and the reinscription of racialized slavery within the US prison system. I argue that, in addition to the dehumanization of prisoners, inmates are further de-animalized when they are held in conditions of intensive confinement such as prolonged solitude or chronic overcrowding. To be (...) de-animalized is to be treated not as a living being who is sustained by its mutual relations with other living and nonliving beings, but rather as a thing to be warehoused and/or exchanged for a profit. The violence of de-animalization affects both human and nonhuman animals held in control prisons, factory farms, laboratories and other sites of intensive confinement. In order to make the connections between these sites, and to develop forms of solidarity appropriate to our shared animality, we need a post-humanist critique of intensive confinement that breaks with the logic of opposition between human and animal, and articulates our constitutive relationality as (inter)corporeal beings. (shrink)

Irigaray's early work seeks to multiply possibilities for women's self-expression by recovering a sexual difference in which male and female are neither the same nor opposites, but irreducibly different modes of embodiment. In her more recent work, however, Irigaray has emphasized the duality of the sexes at the expense of multiplicity, enshrining the heterosexual couple as the model of sexual ethics. Alison Stone's recent revision of Irigaray supplements her account of sexual duality with a theory of bodily multiplicity derived from (...) Butler, Nietzsche, and certain German Romantics; but to the extent that Stone maintains the primacy of sexual duality, her revision fails to address the claims of multiplicity on their own terms. In this paper, I interpret a passage from Marcel Proust's novel, Sodom and Gomorrah, in order to develop an alternative theory of sexual difference in which sexual duality is affirmed in relation to a third, unsexed but sexual force which multiplies the possibilities for sexual pleasure beyond heterosexual coupling. Proust's emphasis on sexed ``parts'' rather than sexed morphologies is generative of maximally diverse combinations, all of which are equally natural and equally enhanced through artifice. (shrink)