Overview
- Proposes that organisms must be understood in terms of their most fundamental activity of distinguishing
- Argues that distinction is the foundation of philosophy and biology
- Demonstrates that distinguishing is inherently anticipative, arbitrary, and continually unfolding
Part of the book series: Biosemiotics (BSEM, volume 26)
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book proposes a bold idea. Living beings are distinguishing distinctions. Single cells and multicellular organisms maintain themselves distinct by drawing distinctions. This is what organisms are and what they do. From this starting point, key issues examined range across ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, logic, and ethics. Topics discussed include the origin of life, the nature and purpose of biology, the relation between life and logic, the nature and limits of formal logic, the nature of subjects, the subject-object relation, subject-subject relationships and the deep roots of ethics. The book provides a radical new foundation to think about philosophy and biology and appeals to researchers and students in these fields. It powerfully debunks mechanical thinking about living beings and shows the vast reservoir of insights into aliveness available in the arts and humanities.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Daniel Mayer (Mexico City, 1956) is a researcher in the epistemology of biology, an organizational consultant, and a leadership educator. For decades he has reflected on the nature of organization, both of organisms and of organizations. This is the topic of this book. This project began in the 1980’s during ten years work (four as curator) at The Monkey Sanctuary, then a world-renowned center for conservation of Amazon woolly monkeys in the UK, and has continued during his career as a consultant and as an educator. He has read papers on these topics at the Annual Lonergan Symposium, at Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles, CA), at the Annual International Gathering in Biosemiotics, and is a regular participant in the Leadership for Change conferences at the University of San Diego. From 2005 to 2019 he was Adjunct Faculty for the Masters of Science in Organizational Leadership at National University, San Diego CA. Founder and CEO of Living Leadership (livingleadership.online), he designs and implements experiential team methodologies for online teaching based on the group-relations approach. Married to Mexican author Vicky Nizri, they have two children and six grandchildren.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Nature of Living Being
Book Subtitle: From Distinguishing Distinctions to Ethics
Authors: Daniel Carlos Mayer-Foulkes
Series Title: Biosemiotics
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24789-7
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life Sciences, Biomedical and Life Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-24788-0Published: 02 June 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-24791-0Due: 03 April 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-24789-7Published: 01 June 2023
Series ISSN: 1875-4651
Series E-ISSN: 1875-466X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 320
Number of Illustrations: 28 b/w illustrations, 8 illustrations in colour
Topics: Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Nature, Ontology