•  398
    The Semiotics of Global Warming: Combating Semiotic Corrruption
    Theory and Science 9 (2): 1-36. 2007.
    The central focus of this paper is the disjunction between the findings of climate science in revealing the threat of global warming and the failure to act appropriately to these warnings. The development of climate science can be illuminated through the perspective provided by Peircian semiotics, but efforts to account for its success as a science and its failure to convince people to act accordingly indicate the need to supplement Peirce’s ideas. The more significant gaps, it is argued, call f…Read more
  •  385
    The Politics of Recognition versus the Politics of Hatred
    Democracy and Nature 8 (2): 261-280. 2002.
    Hatred of America expressed in the September 11th attack is more than matched by the hatred by Americans for Islamists expressed in the war on Afghanistan, the War against Terror and the threatened wars against the “Axis of Evil”. It is argued here that there is a pattern of self-reinforcing hatred operating in the world set in motion by the actions of the United States, particularly by George Bush Snr. and embraced and used by George Bush Jr. to reinforce and further develop this pattern. To op…Read more
  •  372
    Approaches to the Question, ‘What is Life?’: Reconciling Theoretical Biology with Philosophical Biology
    Cosmos and History : The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 4 (1-2): 53-77. 2008.
    Philosophical biologists have attempted to define the distinction between life and non-life to more adequately define what it is to be human. They are reacting against idealism, but idealism is their point of departure, and they have embraced the reaction by idealists against the mechanistic notion of humans developed by the scientific materialists. Theoretical biologists also have attempted to develop a more adequate conception of life, but their point of departure has been within science itsel…Read more
  •  372
    For a New Naturalism
    Telos Press. 2017.
    Contemporary naturalism is changing and scientific reductionism is under challenge from those who advocate a more comprehensive outlook. This special issue of Telos, based on the first Telos Australia Symposium held at Swinburne University in Melbourne in February 2014, introduces some of the key questions in the current debates. It also poses the question of whether more satisfactory political and social thought can be produced if scientific reductionism is replaced by a richer and more hermene…Read more
  •  366
    Life Processes as Proto-Narratives: Integrating Theoretical Biology and Biosemiotics through Biohermeneutics
    Cosmos and History : The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 18 (1): 210-251. 2022.
    The theoretical biology movement originating in Britain in the early 1930’s and the biosemiotics movement which took off in Europe in the 1980’s have much in common. They are both committed to replacing the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and they have both invoked theories of signs to this end. Yet, while there has been some mutual appreciation and influence, particularly in the cases of Howard Pattee, René Thom, Kalevi Kull, Anton Markoš and Stuart Kauffman, for the most part, these movements have de…Read more
  •  357
    James Hansen, the world’s leading climate scientist, argues that global climate destabilization could totally destroy the conditions for life on Earth, and further, that politicians are not taking effective action. Instead, they are using their power to cripple science. This situation is explained in this paper as the outcome of the successful alliance between a global class of predators and people who must be recognized as idiots taking over the institutions of government, research and educatio…Read more
  •  343
    Introduction: The Future of Philosophy
    Cosmos and History : The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 8 (1): 1-17. 2012.
    This is the editorial introduction to the special edition of Cosmos & History on the future of philosophy.
  •  340
    Michel Weber, Whitehead's Pancreativism: The Basics Reviewed by (review)
    Philosophy in Review 27 (6): 444-447. 2007.
    Michel Weber Whitehead’s Pancreativism: The Basics. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag 2007. Pp. 255. US$106.00 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-3-938793-15-2). In his introduction to After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre called upon his readers to imagine a culture in which, to begin with, the natural sciences had been destroyed by an anti-science movement, and then, reacting against this movement, people had attempted to reconstruct science from surviving fragments. In this imaginary world adults argue over the respective…Read more
  •  325
    Creating a New Mathematics
    In Ronny Desmet (ed.), Intuition in Mathematics and Physics. pp. 146-164. 2016.
    The focus of this chapter is on efforts to create a new mathematics, with my prime interest being the role of mathematics in comprehending a world consisting first and foremost of processes, and examining what developments in mathematics are required for this. I am particularly interested in developments in mathematics able to do justice to the reality of life. Such mathematics could provide the basis for advancing ecology, human ecology and ecological economics and thereby assist in the transfo…Read more
  •  305
    Nihilism Incorporated: European Civilization and Environmental Destruction (Review) (review)
    Environmental Values 4 (3): 278-280. 1995.
    Review of 'Nihilism Incorporated: European Civilization and Environmental Destruction
  •  299
    Speculation
    In Vlad Petre Glăveanu (ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1-9. 2021.
    ‘Speculation’ originally meant ‘reflective observation’. It came to mean ‘conjecture’ or ‘mere conjecture’ as philosophers strove for certainty, consecrating science as rigorously acquired knowledge accumulated through application of the scientific method and devalued the cognitive status of other discourses. The present conventional meaning of speculation, where the place of observation has disappeared, is a by-product of this consecration. In this entry I show how through efforts to defend the…Read more
  •  294
    The post-Kantians were inspired by Kant’s Critique of Judgment to forge a new synthesis of natural philosophy, art and history that would overcome the dualisms and gulfs within Kant’s philosophy. Focusing on biology and showing how Schelling reworked and transformed Kant’s insights, it is argued that Schelling was largely successful in laying the foundations for this synthesis, although he was not always consistent in building on these foundations. To appreciate this achievement, it is argued th…Read more
  •  290
    The theoretical biologist Waddington drew attention to the damage to scientific progress by COWDUNG – the Conventional Wisdom of the Dominant Group. Despite Popper’s attack on what he called “the bucket theory of science”, that scientific knowledge accumulates incrementally, adding one fact after another, this is now conventional wisdom among biologists. Denis Noble is challenging not only the Neo-Darwinist orthodoxy dominating biology, but revealing the distortions of science produced by this b…Read more
  •  273
    Challenging the dominant grand narrative in global education and culture
    In R. Rozzi, A. Tauro, N. Avriel-Avni & T. Wright (eds.), Field Environmental Philosophy, Springer. pp. 309-326. 2023.
    This chapter critically examines the dominant tradition in formal education as an indirect driver of biocultural homogenization while revealing that there is an alternative tradition that fosters biocultural conservation. The dominant tradition, originating in the Seventeenth Century scientific revolution effected by René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, John Locke and allied thinkers, privileges science, seen as facilitating the technological domination of the world in the service of eco…Read more
  •  262
    The primordial role of stories in human self-creation
    Cosmos and History 3 (1): 93-114. 2007.
    We now have a paradoxical situation where the place and status of stories is in decline within the humanities, while scientists are increasingly recognizing their importance. Here the attitude towards narratives of these scientists is defended. It is argued that stories play a primordial role in human self-creation, underpinning more abstract discourses such as mathematics, logic and science. To uphold the consistency of this claim, this thesis is defended by telling a story of the evolution of …Read more
  •  258
    Creating the Future
    Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. 2021.
    “Creating the future” is a notion introduced by Alfred North Whitehead to define the task of universities and the function of philosophy. Implicitly, it is a rejection of the idea that the future is already determined, and in some sense, already exists, with the appearance of temporal becoming an illusion. “Creation” originally meant “the action of causing to exist”, or “a coming into being”. The “future” is not normally considered to be what can be created. Originally, it meant “yet to be”. It …Read more
  •  255
    Ecological Economics and Human Ecology
    In Michel Weber & William Desmond (eds.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, . pp. 161-176. 2008.
    While economic theory has been enormously influential since the eighteenth century, the level of dominance of culture, politics and ethics gained by it in the last few decades is unprecedented. Not only has economic theory taken the place of political philosophy and ethical discourse and imposed its own concepts and image of society on other social sciences, it has redefined the natural sciences through its own categories as nothing but instruments of production, investment in which is to be jud…Read more
  •  249
    Book Review of Christopher Alexander, 'The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Book Two, The Process of Creating Life'
  •  245
    Narratives and culture: The role of stories in self-creation
    Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2002 (122): 80-100. 2002.
    The condition of postmodernity has been associated with the depreciation of narratives. Here it is argued that stories play a primordial role in human self-creation, underpinning more abstract discourses such as mathematics, logic and science. This thesis is defended telling a story of the evolution of European culture from Ancient Greece to the present, including an account of the rise of the notion of culture and its relation to the development of history, thereby showing how stories function …Read more
  •  239
    Re-Embedding the Market: Institutionalizing Effective Environmentalism
    In Andrew M. Davis, Maria-Terisa Teixeira & Andrew Schwartz (eds.), Nature in Process: Organic Proposals in Philosophy, Society and Religion, Process Century Press. pp. 145-169. 2022.
    Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation diagnosed what had happened in the Nineteenth Century that led to poverty, increasingly wild economic fluctuations, increasingly severe depressions, and social dislocation and oppression on a massive scale – the market had been disembedded from communities which were then subjected to the imperatives of a supposedly autonomous market. In fact, such disembedding and imposition of these imperatives was a deliberate strategy developed as a means to impose ex…Read more
  •  227
    Endorsing Bill Readings’ argument that there is an intimate relationship between the dissolution of the nation-State, the undermining of the Humboldtian ideal of the university and economic globalization, this paper defends both the nation-State and the Humboldtian university as core institutions of democracy. However, such an argument only has force, it is suggested, if we can revive an appreciation of the real meaning of democracy. Endorsing Cornelius Castoriadis’ argument that democracy has b…Read more
  •  215
    Book Review: The Great Adventure: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution (review)
    Cosmos and History 3 (1): 230-235. 2007.
    Book Review of David Loye (ed). The Great Adventure: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution. N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2004.
  •  202
    The central aim of this thesis is to confront the world-view of positivistic materialism with its nihilistic implications and to develop an alternative world-view based on process philosophy, showing how in terms of this, science and ethics can be reconciled. The thesis begins with an account of the rise of positivism and materialism, or ‘scientism’, to its dominant position in the culture of Western civilization and shows what effect this has had on the image of man and consequently on ethical …Read more
  •  202
    The Liberal Arts, the Radical Enlightenment and the War Against Democracy
    In Luciano Boschiero (ed.), On the Purpose of a University Education, Australian Scholarly Publishing Ltd. pp. 67-102. 2012.
    Using Australia to illustrate the case, in this paper it is argued that the transformation of universities into businesses and the undermining of the liberal arts is motivated by either contempt for or outright hostility to democracy. This is associated with a global managerial revolution that is enslaving nations and people to the global market and the corporations that dominate it. The struggle within universities is the site of a struggle to reverse the gains of the Radical Enlightenment, the…Read more
  •  201
    The Arts and the Radical Enlightenment
    The Structurist 47 20-27. 2007/2008.
    The arts have been almost completely marginalized - at a time when, arguably, they are more important than ever. Whether we understand by “the arts” painting, sculpture and architecture, or more broadly, the whole aesthetic realm and the arts faculties of universities concerned with this realm, over the last half century these fields have lost their cognitive status. This does not mean that there are not people involved in the arts, but they do not have the standing participants in these fields …Read more
  •  201
    The Hippocratic Oath is a code of ethics defining correct behaviour by physicians they are required to commit themselves to before being accepted into the profession. It was the first code of ethics for any profession. While originating in Ancient Greece, it subsequently evolved, but the current code still embodies many of the core injunctions of the original code. The most widely accepted current form is the 2006 The Declaration of Geneva by the World Medical Association to be taken before …Read more
  •  199
    Civilization in Crisis: Editorial Introduction
    Cosmos and History : The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 17 (3): 1-7. 2021.
    This is the editorial introduction to the edition of Cosmos & History on Civilization in Crisis.
  •  197
    Environmental Philosophy a Collection of Readings /Edited by Robert Elliot and Arran Gare. --. --
    with Robert Elliot
    Pennsylvania State University Press, C1983. 1983.
    Contents: Ethical principals for environmental protection / Robert Goodin -- Political representation for future generations / Gregory S. Kavka and Virginia L. Warren -- On the survival of humanity / Jan Narveson -- On deep versus shallow theories of environmental pollution / C.A. Hooker -- Preservation of wilderness and the good life / Janna L. Thompson -- The rights of the nonhuman world / Mary Anne Warren -- Are values in nature subjective or objective? / Holmes Rolston III - Duties concernin…Read more
  •  194
    This is Part 2 of an article aimed at defending Marx against orthodox Marxists to reveal the possibilities for overcoming capitalism. It is argued that Marx’s general theory of history is inconsistent with his profound insights into alienation and commodity fetishism as the foundations of capitalism. Humanist Marxists focused on the latter in opposition to Orthodox Marxists, but without fully acknowledging this inconsistency and its implications, failed to realize the full potential of Marx’s wo…Read more
  •  193
    Report on the 19th annual Gathering in Biosemiotics in Moscow
    Sign Systems Studies 47 (3-4): 627-640. 2019.
    The Nineteenth Annual Biosemotics Gathering was hosted by the Philosophy Faculty of Lomonsov Moscow State University. That it was hosted by a philosophy faculty rather than a science faculty, and that it was hosted in Russia, are both significant. Biosemiotics is a challenge to mainstream biology, still struggling to gain acceptance despite the work of a great many researchers and a great many publications, along with nineteen annual biosemiotics gatherings. But it is much more than this, and th…Read more