Phenomenology of Biophilosophy
Phenomenological and Hermeneutical Approaches to the Philosophy of the Living
Starting from the observation that the language of molecular biology not only explains cellular functions, but describes life in a very specific way, several questions can be asked:
- In the modern life sciences, how does the describing subject position itself in relation to the life described?
- What kind of self-relation is drawn into the subject by this description when it is understood as a multicellular organism?
- Is the experience of aliveness as a human being a necessary starting point to be able to speak of "life" in nature at all?
- How can the experience of one's own and other's aliveness be meaningfully interpreted and phenomenologically explained?
A foundation of the project of a phenomenological biophilosophy, which understands the description of life itself as a practice in the Aristotelian sense, is available in the book Describing Life (1995). Specifically, I was interested in the ethical significance of biological description as an act in the human relation to the world. In discussion with the history of genetic developmental biology since August Weismann up to Walter Gehring and to modern stem cell research and epigenetics, a critique of the "central dogma" of molecular genetics and its central idea of a genetic program emerged. From this arose a draft for a philosophical systems theory of genetics and molecular biology (Genetics, Embodiment and Identity, 2002), which takes up approaches from Susan Oyama's Developmental Systems Approach. The book Between the Molecules (2005) deals with this in more detail.
In recent years I have been systematically studying the methodology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This has resulted in work on the phenomenon of aliveness (How do we see that something is living?, 2013). I am currently working on a book with the working title Bio-Spheres, which further elaborates the phenomenological approach to the philosophy of biology and relates it to terrestrial ecology and climate crisis.
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