Plessner’s Stufen des Organischen questions both the conditions of possibility as well as the consequences of a self-understanding of life. Originally written against the background of urbanisation, industrialisation and colonisation, the strength of Plessner’s work lies in his combination of an analyticalphilosophical conceptualisation, the introduction of materiality and the body as well as his historical–ethical dimension. As a re-sult of this combination, Plessner’s approach is well suited to contribute to the current inter-national discourse on the relationship of sociality and materiality. (...) This article provides an overview of the reception of Plessner in Germany and embeds his approach into current de-bates, discussing its value with regard to the sociality-materiality relationship. The focus is on three issues: the definition of the boundaries of the social, the relationship between the social and the body as well as the cultural historic-ethical situation. Finally, Plessner’s Steps of the Organic are related to the current issues of ecologisation and digitalisation, allowing us to see what a Plessnerian perspective on the materiality-sociality relationship can do with-in applied social theory. (shrink)

At its inception innocent of philosophical or metaphysical designs, the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis was soon liberated from the precincts of scientific cultivation to enter into cultural free association. Nonetheless, scientific and scholarly attention and debate have long precipitated a bona fide discourse of Gaia theory. Moreover, intellectually serious extra-scientific figures of Gaia have also been on the rise in the last decade. This essay treats a selection of these newer Gaian figures, specifically, Isabelle Stengers’s Gaia (...) the Intruder and Bruno Latour’s secular Gaia, in relation to Lovelock’s Gaia and Lynn Margulis’s evocations of autopoietic Gaia. When nuanced through second-order systems theory, the discourse of autopoietic Gaia satisfies Stengers’s and Latour’s demands for a non-holistic, heterogeneous yet coherent Gaia concept fit for communicative efficacy in the so-called Anthropocene epoch. (shrink)