This book explores the differences and similarities between Sartrean existentialism and French poststructuralism.

"-Barbara Ehrenreich, Mother Jones "This book represents the expression of a particular feminist perspective made all the more compelling by Keller's evident commitment to and understanding of science.

What do biologists want? If, unlike their counterparts in physics, biologists are generally wary of a grand, overarching theory, at what kinds of explanation do biologists aim? A history of the diverse and changing nature of biological explanation in a particularly charged field, "Making Sense of Life" draws our attention to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural components of what biologists mean, and what they understand, when they propose to explain life.

"Daimon Life is life-enchancing. To read it is to become richer in word." –John Llewelyn Disclosure of Martin Heidegger’s complicity with the National Socialist regime in 1933-34 has provoked virulent debate about the relationship between his politics and his philosophy. Did Heidegger’s philosophy exhibit a kind of organicism readily transformed into ideological "blood and soil"? Or, rather, did his support of the Nazis betray a fundamental lack of loyalty to living things? David Farrell Krell traces Heidegger’s political authoritarianism to (...) his failure to develop a constructive "life-philosophy"—his phobic reactions to other forms of being. Krell details Heidegger’s opposition to Lebensphilosophie as expressed in Being and Time, in an important but little-known lecture course on theoretical biology given in 1929–30 called "The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics," and in a recently published key text, Contributions to Philosophy, written in 1936–38. Although Heidegger’s attempt to think through the problems of life, sexual reproduction, behavior, environment, and the ecosystem ultimately failed, Krell contends that his methods of thinking nonetheless pose important tasks for our own thought. Drawing on and away from Heidegger, Krell expands on the topics of life, death, sexuality, and spirit as these are treated by Freud, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Irigaray. Daimon Life addresses issues central to contemporary philosophies of politics, gender, ecology, and theoretical biology. (shrink)

The ways in which the various activities of synthetic biology connect to those of conventional biology display both a multiplicity and variety that reflect the multiplicity and variety of meanings for which the term synthetic biology has been invoked, today as in the past. Central to this variety, as well as to the connection itself, is the complex relationship between knowing and making that has prevailed in the life sciences. That relationship is the focus of this article. More specifically, my (...) aim is to explore the different assumptions about how knowing is related to making that have prevailed, implicitly or explicitly in the various activities—now or in the past—subsumed under the name synthetic biology. (shrink)

After more than 15 years of study, the 1/f noise or complex-systems approach to cognitive science has delivered promises of progress, colorful verbiage, and statistical analyses of phenomena whose relevance for cognition remains unclear. What the complex-systems approach has arguably failed to deliver are concrete insights about how people perceive, think, decide, and act. Without formal models that implement the proposed abstract concepts, the complex-systems approach to cognitive science runs the danger of becoming a philosophical exercise in futility. The complex-systems (...) approach can be informative and innovative, but only if it is implemented as a formal model that allows concrete prediction, falsification, and comparison against more traditional approaches. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Systems Biology Function: A Minimalist Conception Kant and As‐If Purpose Cybernetics and Bernard Machines A Guarded Optimism Postscript: Counterpoint References.

Jacques Derrida’s final seminars were devoted to animal life and political sovereignty—the connection being that animals slavishly adhere to the law while kings and gods tower above it and that this relationship reveals much about humanity in the West. David Farrell Krell offers a detailed account of these seminars, placing them in the context of Derrida’s late work and his critique of Heidegger. Krell focuses his discussion on questions such as death, language, and animality. He concludes that Heidegger and (...) Derrida share a commitment to finding new ways of speaking and thinking about human and animal life. (shrink)

Through photographs and translations of Friedrich Nietzsche's evocative writings on his work sites, David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates explore the cities and landscapes in which Nietzsche lived and worked.

Through photographs and translations of Friedrich Nietzsche's evocative writings on his work sites, David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates explore the cities and landscapes in which Nietzsche lived and worked. "A brilliant juxtaposition of life and thought.... The sympathy of this pictorial biography is rivaled by few books on Nietzsche."—Charles M. Stang, _Boston Book Review_ "[A] distinguished addition to the Nietzsche-friendly corpus."—Alain de Botton, _Los Angeles Times Book Review_ "An odd and oddly endearing record of Nietzsche's travels."—John Banville, (...) _New York Review of Books_. (shrink)

The “deconstruction” that is commonly seen to be the method of Derrida’s philosophy has an inescapably negative connotation. To counter this view of Derrida’s thought as basically destructive, David Farrell Krell invites readers to understand how it may instead be seen as fundamentally affirmative—just as Nietzsche’s philosophy, so allegedly nihilistic, is at heart a call for tragic affirmation, in _amor fati_. But, while affirmative, Derrida is also engaged in a thinking of mourning, which he views as the promise of (...) memory—a fragile yet vital promise that binds past and future. The book explores what mourning means in Derrida’s writing and how the labors of mourning and affirmation are mediated by works of art. Thus the book engages many different areas of Derrida’s work, from the classic texts of deconstruction to the more recent meditations on art and mourning. "This chance [affirmation without issue] can come to us only from you, do you hear me? Do you understand me?... And me, the purest of bastards, leaving bastards of all kinds just about everywhere.” This passage from Derrida’s _La Carte postale _nicely encapsulates what David Farrell Krell wants to convey about Derrida’s thought_—_its astonishing mix of negativity and affirmation in his labors of mourning. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida’s final seminars were devoted to animal life and political sovereignty—the connection being that animals slavishly adhere to the law while kings and gods tower above it and that this relationship reveals much about humanity in the West. David Farrell Krell offers a detailed account of these seminars, placing them in the context of Derrida’s late work and his critique of Heidegger. Krell focuses his discussion on questions such as death, language, and animality. He concludes that Heidegger and (...) Derrida share a commitment to finding new ways of speaking and thinking about human and animal life. (shrink)

"Krell writes here with a brilliance of style that few other philosophers can match." —John Sallis Although the Romantic Age is usually thought of as idealizing nature as the source of birth, life, and creativity, David Farrell Krell focuses on the preoccupation of three key German Romantic thinkers—Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel—with nature’s destructive powers—contagion, disease, and death.

A key public health measure has received far too little attention over the course of the Covid‐19 pandemic: paid sick leave policies that encourage people at risk of spreading disease to stay home rather than come to work. The United States is one of the only developed countries that fails to guarantee paid sick leave at the federal level, leaving a patchwork of state and private policies that undersupply time off when people are contagious and protect top wage earners at (...) wildly disproportionate rates compared with what workers with lower incomes experience. Other countries have shown that sick leave mandates are neither unjustified burdens on employers nor gratuitous giveaways to employees. In fact, sick leave saves on health care costs by making employees less likely to infect coworkers, to be absent for longer themselves, or to need treatment in expensive hospital emergency departments. Nationally guaranteed sick leave is urgently needed to promote public health. (shrink)

The campaign to discredit predictions of man-made global warming—originally organized by readily identifiable vested interests—has by now recruited a large popular constituency of declared “skeptics” increasingly disposed to “take a stand”: some of them opposed to government regulation in general, some resistant to any claims to intellectual authority (perhaps especially scientific), and some mobilized by a version of the right to individual freedom of opinion. As a result, confidence in the expertise of scientists has reached an all time low: Internet (...) sites, radio talk shows, and television channels preferentially transmit “contrarian” attacks on the credibility of climate scientists. Even our most responsible newspapers and journals, in their very commitment to the traditional ethic of “balance,” sometimes contribute to the widespread misimpression that climate scientists are deeply divided about both the extent of the dangers we face and the relevance of human activity to global warming. Not knowing who or what to believe, the natural response for most people is to do nothing, and the consequence, as Thomas Homer-Dixon wrote last year for the New York Times: “Climate policy is gridlocked, and there’s virtually no chance of a breakthrough” (2010). Meanwhile, as evidence both of the role of human contributions to global warming and the dangers of that warming continues to mount, consensus among climate scientists grows ever stronger, and those of us who attend to that evidence are increasingly alarmed. (shrink)

A Black Forest Walden is a work of philosophical reflection, nature description, and sly humor. In brief chapters, or aphorisms, the American philosopher David Farrell Krell recounts his experiences in a cabin located in the mountains of southern Germany's Black Forest, where he has lived for several decades. Insofar as Krell compares his experiences with those of Henry David Thoreau, who serves as both inspiration and irritation, the book could be described as a critical commentary on Thoreau's Walden. Yet (...) it equally reads as a rigorous yet playful and profoundly literary manifestation of where and how the mind wanders. Hence, the "Marlonbrando" of the subtitle is not the late actor but a feral cat who frequents the cabin and comes to be an important interlocutor, as if playing the role of analyst to the author. The subjects Krell treats are wide-ranging: the changing seasons, environmental issues, romantic love, parent-child relations, European versus American "values," higher education, artistic creativity, solitude, and the contrast between lifestyles in a quiet Black Forest village and in a noisy contemporary United States. Forty-one black-and-white photographs taken by the author accompany and enliven the text. (shrink)

The “deconstruction” that is commonly seen to be the method of Derrida’s philosophy has an inescapably negative connotation. To counter this view of Derrida’s thought as basically destructive, David Farrell Krell invites readers to understand how it may instead be seen as fundamentally affirmative—just as Nietzsche’s philosophy, so allegedly nihilistic, is at heart a call for tragic affirmation, in _amor fati_. But, while affirmative, Derrida is also engaged in a thinking of mourning, which he views as the promise of (...) memory—a fragile yet vital promise that binds past and future. The book explores what mourning means in Derrida’s writing and how the labors of mourning and affirmation are mediated by works of art. Thus the book engages many different areas of Derrida’s work, from the classic texts of deconstruction to the more recent meditations on art and mourning. "This chance [affirmation without issue] can come to us only from you, do you hear me? Do you understand me?... And me, the purest of bastards, leaving bastards of all kinds just about everywhere.” This passage from Derrida’s _La Carte postale _nicely encapsulates what David Farrell Krell wants to convey about Derrida’s thought_—_its astonishing mix of negativity and affirmation in his labors of mourning. (shrink)

Nik Byle argues that Dietrich Bonhoeffer theologically adapts Heideggerian concepts about human existence such as temporality. Bonhoeffer is thus able to provide a positive account of Christ’s relation to time and history moving, Bonhoeffer beyond impasses found in both dialectical and liberal theology.

‘What it is like’ talk (‘WIL-talk’) — the use of phrases such as ‘what it is like’ — is ubiquitous in discussions of phenomenal consciousness. It is used to define, make claims about, and to offer arguments concerning consciousness. But what this talk means is unclear, as is how it means what it does: how, by putting these words in this order, we communicate something about consciousness. Without a good account of WIL-talk, we cannot be sure this talk sheds light, (...) rather than casts shadows, on our investigations of consciousness. The popular technical account of WIL-talk (see e.g. Lewis, 1995, and Kim, 1998) holds that WIL-talk involves technical terms — terms which look like everyday words but have a distinct meaning — introduced by philosophers. I argue that this account is incorrect by showing that the alleged technical terms were not introduced by philosophers, and that these terms do not have a technical meaning. (shrink)

Is it rational to be moral? How do rationality and morality fit together with being human? These questions are at the heart of David Schmidtz's exploration of the connections between rationality and morality. This inquiry leads into both metaethics and rational choice theory, as Schmidtz develops conceptions of what it is to be moral and what it is to be rational. He defends a fairly expansive conception of rational choice, considering how ends as well as means can be rationally chosen (...) and explaining the role of self-imposed constraints in a rational life plan. His moral theory is dualistic, ranging over social structure as well as personal conduct and building both individual and collective rationality into its rules of recognition for morals. To the "why be moral" question, Schmidtz responds that being moral is rational, but he does not assume we have reasons to be rational. Instead, Schmidtz argues that being moral is rational in a particular way and that beings like us in situations like ours have reasons to be rational in just that way. This approach allows him to identify decisive reasons to be moral; at the same time, it explains why immorality is as prevalent as it is. This book thus offers a set of interesting and realistic conclusions about how morality fits into the lives of humanly rational agents operating in an institutional context like our own. (shrink)

The paper identifies in the literature two categories of codes of ethics, inspirational and prescriptive, and introduces new classification categories of allodial and decretal. The first classification is based on the identity of the ethics decision‐maker – the authors or the addressees of codes. The second classification is based on whether operational definitions are applied by the codes. Such concrete definitions may be in the rules themselves, in related documents or be known from shared knowledge. The second classification has importance (...) if national associations of accountants use codes as a means for assurance of specific outcomes of defined ethical behaviours. For the study, a survey of 57 codes of ethics issued by national associations of professional accountants was undertaken to determine the basic features of codes and to analyse their content. The areas of ethical concern in national associations were identified and compared to the IFAC model code for professional accountants. The paper reports that national organisations of accountants have promulgated decretal codes in 96% of cases examined. As these codes contain operational definitions, their outcomes can be scientifically measured and sanctions for breaches fairly and reasonably imposed. (shrink)

Heidegger scholarship has done an admirable job accounting for Luther’s influence on key Heideggerian concepts such as his method of destruction and anxiety. Yet given Heidegger’s statements concerning Luther’s immense personal and philosophical importance, it is likely that Luther’s influence extends further and deeper than might first appear. I argue that this influence also manifests in Heidegger’s concept of authentic existence. In particular, I argue that Luther’s understanding of Christian freedom and servitude form ontic material from which Heidegger draws to (...) come to his general ontological understanding of Dasein’s freedom as power over its existence and servitude to its communal involvements. As Luther understands the freedom of a Christian, everything comes to aid the Christian in salvation, much like Dasein gains power over its existential possibilities in coming to authenticity. Yet this newly created freedom also creates additional ontological or existential connections with one’s community. The consequence of such connections is the addition of new responsibilities, or form of servitude, to one’s community wherein one aids others in coming to faith or authenticity, respectively. (shrink)