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Bio-Aesthetics. A Critique examines the rising influence of evolutionary theory across academic disciplines today. Empowered by neo-Darwinian theory and recent advances in neuroscientific research, nascent academic fields have particularly challenged the Humanities’ non-empirical and largely speculative approach to modern art, culture, and aesthetic theory. In its stead, evolutionary scholars advocate a strict biological functionalism that effectively reduces mind to brain and art to science. Unfortunately, Humanities’ scholars so far have been slow to respond to this challenge. Bio-Aesthetics remedies this problem by providing the first comprehensive account of current evolutionary and neuroscientific approaches to art and human culture to demonstrate both the need for and the limits of interdisciplinary research in the Humanities. Above all, Bio-Aesthetics is A Critique in the Kantian sense of the term: it works through a critical appraisal of neo-Darwinian reductionism in order to develop a more germane and balanced methodology for future collaborative research across disciplines. Bio-Aesthetics central argument contends that Kant’s transcendentalism amounts to the “structural coupling” of organism and environment, which also applies to our knowledge of the (phenomenological) world we come to inhabit as living beings. Scientific reductionism and neo-Darwinian theory ignore the self-constructed nature of reason and culture for genetic laws and evolutionary principles that allegedly determine human behaviour. Hence the overriding goal of Bio-Aesthetics is to provide the Humanities with a self-critical, historically nuanced and epistemologically up-to-date counter-paradigm to what E. O Wilson called “sociobiology,” that is the reductionist view of human cultural evolution dominant in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory today.

Science is about finding the truth whether we like it or not; philosophy a questing spirit that questions even science itself; and both are the birthright of every person born on the planet. Cosmic Apprentice dovetails philosophy and science, reinvigorating both with new possibilities. Using both science and philosophyto “keep each other honest” in a kind of open circuit, Cosmic Apprentice explores the interplay between themes that range from deeply autobiographical to cosmically impersonal. In essays that intercalate postmodern thinkers such as Bataille, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida and Esposito with modern scientific thought, the great questions of ancient Greek philosophy are returned to with new rigor. Being, purpose, life, truth, poetry, sex, drugs, writing, thought and freedom are explored with data and theory from symbiogenetics, nonequilibrium thermodynamics and anthropic physics deconstructs. Authoritarianism in science is exposed along with obscurantism in philosophy. Healing the two cultures while rejecting aspects of both science and philosophy as recently practiced Ontos Telos Bios presents a heady synergistic mix of modern science and postmodern and classical philosophy. The blend will appeal to fans of science and its popularization, students of continental philosophy, critics of culture and politics, devotees of fiction and writing, and those interested in provocative essays and the life of the mind.

Gilles Deleuze once claimed that “modern science has not found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it needs.” This book responds to this need by investigating the consequences of the philosopher’s interest in (and appeal to) “the exact sciences.” In exploring the problematic relationship between the philosophy of Deleuze and science, the chapters gathered here examine how science functions in respect to Deleuze’s concepts of time and space, how science accounts for processes of qualitative change, how science actively participates in the production of subjectivity, and how Deleuze’s thinking engages neuroscience. The book works through Deleuze’s understanding of the virtual—a force of qualitative change that is ontologically primary to the exact, measurable relations that can be found in and among the objects of science. By adopting such a methodology, this text generates significant new insights, especially regarding the notion of scientific laws, and compels the rethinking of such ideas as reproducibility, the unity of science, and the scientific observer.

The word “biology” was first used to describe the scientific study of life in 1802, and as Davide Tarizzo demonstrates, our understanding of what being alive means is an equally recent invention. Circumventing tired debates about the validity of science and the truth of Darwinian evolution, Tarizzo instead envisions a profound paradigm shift in philosophical and scientific concepts of biological life.