Selected Writings: On Self-Organization, Philosophy, Bioethics, and Judaism

Author:   Henri Atlan ,  Stefanos Geroulanos ,  Todd Meyers ,  Stefanos Geroulanos
Publisher:   Fordham University Press
ISBN:  

9780823231829


Pages:   368
Publication Date:   28 October 2011
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
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Selected Writings: On Self-Organization, Philosophy, Bioethics, and Judaism


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Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Henri Atlan ,  Stefanos Geroulanos ,  Todd Meyers ,  Stefanos Geroulanos
Publisher:   Fordham University Press
Imprint:   Fordham University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 3.30cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.590kg
ISBN:  

9780823231829


ISBN 10:   0823231828
Pages:   368
Publication Date:   28 October 2011
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

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Reviews

Henri Atlan's work has been enormously helpful to me as I try to think through Jewishness from the perspective of the human sciences. More broadly, Atlan's concept of the self-organization of the living helps bridge the gap between scientific and humanistic inquiries. His work demonstrates that rigorous analysis of our condition with all the tools at our disposal can itself be one of the most vital ways to be human. - Jonathan Boyarin, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill


Henri Atlan is one of the founding fathers of the general theory of self-organizing living systems and theories of complexity as well as an eminent specialist on the history of Jewish thought (notably the Talmud, Midrash, and Kabbalah) with a longstanding interest in the philosophy of Spinoza, whose monist metaphysics and no less stringent understanding ethics he has made his own in strikingly original ways. This timely collection, with its excellent introduction, gathers some of Atlan's most representative papers in all these different yet, in his view, complementary fields of study. The assembled essays move from the best modern science writing into literary and visual studies, into anthropology, the study of religion, and political philosophy, while carefully preparing a comparative-conceptual no less than rhetorical-analysis of the overlapping and differences between the humanities, broadly defined, and the natural sciences. Atlan's outstanding work offers a thoroughly argued engagement with some of the central assumptions of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. It is hard to imagine more daring cross- or trans-disciplinary work than the essays collected in this reader.----Hent de Vries, Johns Hopkins University Henri Atlan's work has been enormously helpful to me as I try to think through Jewishness from the perspective of the human sciences. More broadly, Atlan's concept of 'the self-organization of the living' helps bridge the gap between scientific and humanistic inquiries. His work demonstrates that rigorous analysis of our condition with all the tools at our disposal can itself be one of the most vital ways to be human.---Jonathan Boyarin, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 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, author of A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History 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, Hadassah Academic College


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


Author Information

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 Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University-Shanghai. He is the author of The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy.

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