The field of `science and religion' is exploding in popularity among both academics and the reading public. This is a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to the debate, written by the leading experts yet accessible to the general reader.

In response to recent theories of emergence which attempt to examine system dynamics and the evolution of complexity from physics to biology and consciousness, a number of theologians have attempted to distill religious insights from a philosophical concept of emergence. Recent work by Terrence Deacon, however, which emphasizes constraint and a process understanding of complexity, undercuts significant features in emergent theologies, namely the privileging of certain loci within emergent complexity, an emphasis on efficient causation, and, theologically, an agential and personal (...) God. The final section of this article, using the example of Navaho religious thought, argues that other religious insights which centralize norm-ativity, global features of complexity, and are depersonalized, have greater traction with current scientific theories of emergence. (shrink)

Recent work by Renaud Barbaras on the definition of life has shown the fecundity of a phenomenological approach that sees absence as having a positive status. This phenomenon allows Barbaras to identify life with “desire,” the indefinite exploration of the exterior world. It also allows Barbaras to defeat competing definitions of life in the sciences, particularly biology. In this paper, I propose a mutual complementarity between the work of Barbaras and that in contemporary systems science, namely by Stuart Kauffman, suggesting (...) that scientific concepts of subcriticality may allow for more overlap between phenomenological and scientific definitions of life than Barbaras acknowledges. (shrink)

ABSTRACTContinental theorists have been increasingly drawn towards elements of the everyday – food, sex, exercise, and so forth – as sites of ethical and epistemological analysis and modification. These analyses have generally been seen separately through the lens of phenomenological, critical, or experimental methods. Despite this division, this paper argues, in line with the work of Bruno Latour, that the analysis of food reveals a complex interplay between the social, political, personal, and experimental dimensions of food. Food should thus be (...) seen as ecological and intermodal, as a complex site of interchange between multiple forms of activity and knowing. This explains both food’s potential for appropriation by multiple projects, but problematizes any single method for analyzing the politics, pleasure or culture surrounding food. (shrink)

Life as Art synthesizes a number of aesthetic theories in philosophy after 1850 and shows the ways in which they contribute to a unified field of analysis and potential implementation. The book is framed both as a secondary text, analyzing 19th and 20th Century aesthetics, and a primary argument for the viability of life as art as a unified philosophical position.