Volume 70 (2015), 1

The paper deals with the thesis according to which the environmental responsibility is not to be seen as purely moral, but rather political and legal category. The environmental responsibility is related to environmental security, which is to be taken as a public good. Due to the processes of globalization states and their governments are unable to provide… Read more

The paper concerns a specific defence of vitalism in Georges Canguilhem’s essay “Aspects of Vitalism.” Canguilhem suggests that vitalism is not a scientific doctrine, but rather a demand or a claim of irreducibility of the living. Canguilhem even signifies it as an ethics (because the sphere of values is essential here for understanding vital phenomena). On the… Read more

George Canguilhem’s 1947 lecture, ‘Machine and organism,’ is a rich source of ideas for thinking about the relationships between living organisms and machines. He takes all tools and machines to be extensions of the body, and part of life itself (which does not make machines any more good or bad than every living organism is good or bad). These insights are… Read more

“Algorithms of life” is the term used by François Jacob in his perhaps most well-known book Logic of Life. Algorithms refer to the “program” that allows us to follow our goal in a very precise manner. We have a finite number of operations that can lead us to understand living beings in the way Jacob does. This does not mean that we can predict everything what… Read more

The article addresses the concept of life in relation to humanities as seen by Hannah Arendt. In the 1950s, Arendt criticized humanities for their inability to understand the specific character of the world as a space of appearance in which historical events take place. Instead they focused on grasping the expressions of human nature and/or a human as being… Read more

At the end of his lecture Das Ding Heidegger repeats his radical attempt at thinking of individual beings when he says: Each thing things in its own way. This surely is an extreme position in the context of the metaphysical tradition, which concentrates on the explication of Being as a universal ground of beingness. However, this statement could surprise also when… Read more