Browse — tag · philosophy-of-biology

Tag: philosophy-of-biology

Pages tagged with philosophy-of-biology.

24 pages

• Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault

  Penn State PhD researcher (bqd5342@psu.edu); author of two wiki-ingested papers:

• Creative Evolution Henri Bergson, 1907

  Author(s): Henri Bergson · Year: 1907 (trans. Donald A. Landes, Routledge 2023) · Type: book

• Creative Evolution (true vs. false evolutionism)

  Beyond the title of Bergson's book and the doctrine of the élan vital, "creative evolution" names a method and a thesis about reality: that evolution is a genuine creation of the unforeseeable, and that grasping it requires pursuing the th…

• Experimental Platonism

  Ruyer's coinage — originally for the phenomenon of supra-normal stimuli in ethology (eggs that are "more spotted than spotted eggs," dummies "more typical than typical" that elicit stronger responses from animals than the natural objects t…

• Georges Canguilhem

  French philosopher, physician, and historian of science (1904–1995), author of The Normal and the Pathological (1943), and one of the central pedagogical and institutional figures of twentieth-century French thought — a "point of contact"…

• Henri Bergson

  French philosopher (1859-1941), Nobel laureate (1927), author of Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), Creative Evolution (1907), The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), and Thought an…

• Intellect, Instinct, Intuition

  In Creative Evolution Bergson treats intellect, instinct, and intuition not as three rungs of one ladder but as divergent directions of a single consciousness, differing in kind not in degree — "the major error, the one that has been passe…

• Jakob von Uexküll

  Estonian-German biologist (1864–1944), founder of theoretical biology and biosemiotics, principal scientific source for Merleau-Ponty's 1956–58 Nature courses (Course 1: Animality, Course 2: Animality, the Human Body, Transition to Culture…

• Kinetic Melody of Behavior

  The melody-figure deployed by Merleau-Ponty in The Structure of Behavior (1942) as the philosophical model for the temporal Gestalt of behavior, learning, perception, and organic life. SB is the documented 1942 origin site of MP's signatur…

• Leben (Life, Hegel — logical category)

  Das Leben — Life — is the first concrete shape of die Idee in the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 179–198). Crucially: Hegel insists that the logical concept of Life is to be distinguished from Naturleben (the life of nature, treated in…

• Mechanism / Vitalism

  The classical opposition in philosophy of biology between mechanism (the organism is reducible to its physico-chemical parts and processes) and vitalism (the organism is governed by an irreducible vital principle — entelechy, dominant, and…

• Merleau-Ponty: Institution-Ontology-Politics Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (ed.), 2026

  Author(s): Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (ed.) Year: 2026 Type: edited volume (12 chapters + Introduction; 3 thematic Parts)

• Multilateral Emergence

  A concept introduced by Décarie-Daigneault (2025) to describe the non-teleological character of emergence in organic systems as theorized by both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Standard scientific accounts treat emergence as progressive comple…

• Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1956–60) Maurice Merleau-Ponty (compiled Dominique Séglard, tr. Robert Vallier), 2003

  Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty Compiler/editor (French): Dominique Séglard Translator: Robert Vallier Original French: La Nature: Notes, cours du Collège de France (Éditions du Seuil, 1995) English edition: Northwestern University Press, 20…

• Organismal Institution

  Jan Halák's name for Merleau-Ponty's extension of the institution-concept to organic life — the thesis that life is institution: a "form-generating logic inherent to life itself" expressing "proto-historicity and proto-culturality." Not a…

• Philosophy of Biology (Merleau-Ponty)

  MP's philosophy of biology develops continuously from La Structure du Comportement (1942) through the Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) and the Nature lectures (1956–60, published 2003). The corpus articulates a third position — neith…

• Raymond Ruyer

  French philosopher (1902–1987), specialist in the philosophy of biology and animal behavior. In the wiki's context, Merleau-Ponty's primary source for the animal and embryological material in the 1954–55 Institution course. MP follows Ruye…

• Schmerz als Vorrecht des Lebendigen (Pain as Privilege of the Living, Hegel)

  Schmerz als Vorrecht des Lebendigen — pain as privilege of the living — is Hegel's cardinal formulation in the Life chapter of the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 p. 194). The full sentence: "Der Schmerz ist daher das Vorrecht lebendiger Na…

• Teleology (Hegel)

  Teleologie is the third and culminating sub-moment of Objectivität in the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 154–172). For Hegel, teleology is not a regulative maxim of reflective judgment (Kant's restriction in the Critique of Judgment) a…

• The Anonymous Temporality of Animal Life: Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze on the Passive Syntheses of the Organic Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault, 2025

  Author(s): Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault Year: 2025 Type: paper (journal article, Continental Philosophy Review 58:445–467)

• The Structure of Behavior Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1942

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1942 (French original); 1963 English translation by Alden L. Fisher Type: book — Merleau-Ponty's first published work, defended as primary doctoral thesis in 1939, published 1942 by PUF; the propaedeu…

• Three Orders of Signification

  Merleau-Ponty's ontological-pivot thesis in The Structure of Behavior Ch III: matter, life, and mind are not powers of being but three orders of signification, distinguished by the type of equilibrium each achieves and the kind of integrat…

• What is Merleau-Ponty's relation to Ruyer's finalism?

  A split. Merleau-Ponty in the 1954–55 Institution course follows raymond-ruyer's 1953 Les Temps Modernes article "Les conceptions nouvelles de l'instinct" closely for data — Lorenz on imprinting, Tinbergen on supra-normal stimuli, Gesell o…

• Élan vital

  Bergson's name (introduced in Creative Evolution, 1907) for the original impetus of life: a single creative current that "passes from one generation of germs to the next," dividing itself among the divergent lines of evolution "without the…