Selected Writings
Price:
$35.00 (01)A Fordham University Press Publication
Description
Best known for his pioneering work in theories of self-organization and complexity, the biophysicist and philosopher Henri Atlan has during the past thirty years been a major voice in contemporary European philosophical and bioethical debates. In a massive oeuvre that ranges from biology and neural network theory to Spinoza's thought and the history of philosophy, and from artificial intelligence and information theory to Jewish mysticism and contemporary medical ethics, Atlan has come to offer an exceptionally powerful philosophical argumentation that is as hostile to scientism as it is attentive to biology's conceptual and experimental rigor, as careful with concepts of rationality as it is committed to rethinking the human place in a radically determined yet forever changing world.This is the first volume to bring together the major strands of Atlan's work for an English-language audience. It is an indispensable compendium for those seeking to clarify the joint stakes and shared import of philosophy and science for questions of life and the living-today and tomorrow.Reviews
Reading this collection of articles has been enlightening and enjoyable in equal measure. Atlan's work is driven by a desire to find in separate academic domains mutually supporting sources of insight that inform and guide one another toward the common goal of discovery and understanding. Both in the selection of texts and their ordering, the editors succeed admirably in highlighting this feature of Atlan's writing.-Martin Land
This book shows how concepts like emergence and self-organization, when not assumed to imply the impossibility of causal explanation, can lead to novel solutions to old philosophical problems, reconciling what used to be staunch opposites: freedom and determinism, intentionality and mechanism. Armed with these new solutions Henri Atlan then reinjects life into the ethics first proposed in the seventeenth century by Spinoza, showing its implications for many areas of contemporary life.-Manuel DeLanda
"The product of an extraordinarily eclectic mind grounded in the sciences, but whose scope extends well beyond to ethics and metaphysics...The translations are excellent and the editors have provided a useful introductory overview. Once the mix of ideas is seen as a whole, the reader will perceive a philosophical medley worthy of serious consideration... Atlan has re-captured Spinoza's dialectic of Natura naturans and Natura naturata that recognizes, in principle, that a multiplicity of forms, descriptions, and explanations are required to capture reality. So, instead of a singular epistemological strategy or disciplinary knowledge base, Atlan celebrates how a collective of diverse perspectives offer insights not available from any one of the refractions alone. Putatively, in their syntheses, novelty should appear. Reading Atlan, this intuition is amply confirmed and richly rewarded."-Alfred Tauber, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
About the Author(s)
Henri Atlan is Professor Emeritus of Biophysics and Director of Research on Human Biology at Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem and Director of Studies at the cole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His books include the two-volume Les Etincelles de hasard; Enlightenment to Enlightenment: Intercritique of Science and Myth; La fin du tout gntique?; and L'utrus artificiel. Starting withits inception in 1983, he was for decades a member of the French National AdvisoryCommittee on Ethics in the Life Sciences and Medicine. Stefanos Geroulanos is Assistant Professor of Modern European Intellectual History at New York University. He is the author of An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought and the co-translator of Georges Canguilhem's Knowledge of Life (Fordham). Todd Meyers is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at Wayne State University and the co-editor of Georges Canguilhem's Knowledge of Life (Fordham).
