Philosophical understandings of Nature and Human Nature. Classical Greek and modern West, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, by 14 authors, including Robert Neville, Stanley Rosen, David Eckel, Livia Kohn, Tienyu Cao, Abner Shimoney, Alfred Tauber, Krzysztof Michalski, Lawrence Cahoone, Stephen Scully, Alan Olson and Alfred Ferrarin. Dedicated to the phenomenological ecology of Erazim Kohák, with 10 of his essays and a full bibliography. Overall theme: on the question of the moral sense of nature.

Upshot: The cognitive paradigm organizes immune phenomena with an eye towards understanding the immune system as a perceptive faculty, where examination of the basic regulation of unstimulated immune activity becomes the primary investigative focus. While a fecund research program organized around the hypothesized “autonomous network theory” has yielded important insight into the “conservative physiology of the immune system,” the theoretical basis for these studies offers little more than one set of metaphors (arranged around “cognition”) challenging another (“selfhood”). However, breaking the (...) theoretical hold of protecting the immune self as the focus of immunology is no mean feat in terms of shifting research interest towards a key, but neglected aspect of immunity. (shrink)