The Philosophy of Living Nature

Cover
Contents
1. The philosophical concept of nature—physis. The traditionally problematic quality of natural philosophy. The decline and resurgence of a sense for physis
2. Individual nature. Physis. A thing as a grasping of physis. The subsoil of phenomena and things. The constitution of things. Things in the world. Things and matter, space, time. Knowledge and reduction. Exemplary entities
3. The cosmos. The world as the background of phenomena and the context of things. The world as the unity of horizons. Parts and wholes. The world and the paradigm of phenomena and the grasping of nature as a thing. The world and language. The plurality of the world
4. The natural world. Surroundings, the everyday world, the world-view. Reduction in objectivist science and phenomenological reduction. The natural world as a problem of life
5. Matter in experience, philosophy and science. Metaphysical explanations of matter. The intuition of the material and corporeal. The devastation of nature and the world as a consequence of the devastation of the meaning of matter
6. The structuring of space. Space and the world. Shape—eidos, morphe. Shape and categories of natural kinds (eidos = species). Shape and knowability. The fumbling of shape (kind) in trying to find itself, and shaping space. Landscape and orientation. A map. The devastation of space
7. The structuring of time. Memory. Horai (Hors, hours), rhythms and periods. Bearing, sequentiality. Causality and synchronicity. Knowing the past and foreseeing the new. The devastation of time
8. Evolution—why it tends to be a scandal. Its mechanomorphic reduction. In search of the ontology for which evolution is not scandalous. Bearing into the unknown
9. Living beings—organisms, metabole, self-reference; unity in transformation; between chaos and order. The relation to the whole as the openness of the living to the world. A living being as an autonomic whole searching for its own identity in transformation. The secret of sex, mortality and individuality
10. The problem of the knowability of the living. Reducing the living by releasing its soul. The ingraspability of life, which itself grasps. The devastation of life. Life and being
11. Paradigms—their bounds and transformations. Ancient models—the archetype of the soul. Modernity—the age of the ruling paradigm. Reductionism
12. Non-hierarchic holistic structure. Everything steers itself through all as if by one wisdom
13. The Philosophy of Living Nature after twelve years. The place for human beings in nature
14. Fate, chance and necessity. Necessity as victorious chance. The present as a crossroad of chances and necessity; of determinism and the wholly new. The event of an encounter. Fate as the intertwined quality of stories
15. Problems of the continuum. The continuity of natural actions and the discreteness of rational objects. Information and its context
16. Between images. Nature and its images. Genres and discourses. The culture of the text and the culture of the image
Appendix: Why nature likes to hide
About the author . . .
From his publications