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24A Humanist’s Response to Denis Noble’s “The Illusions of the Modern Synthesis”Biosemiotics 14 (1): 31-34. 2021.Denis Noble suggests that biologists who created the Modern Synthesis were taken in by conceptual traps and illusions hidden in the language they used. Rather than blame language itself, my response counters that all writers are responsible for careful attention to the implications of the metaphors they use, and that Richard Dawkins deliberately chose “the selfish gene.” Noble’s concept of biological relativity restores Darwin’s fuller and more nuanced definition of natural selection and shows h…Read more
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5The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and LanguageFordham University Press. 2014.Philosophy of life -- Animal kin -- Language is everywhere.
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7Review of Cynthia Willett, Interspecies Ethics (review)Environmental Values 25 (3): 375-377. 2016.
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15Tres Bête: Evolutionary Continuity and Human AnimalityEnvironmental Philosophy 11 (1): 1-16. 2014.As a way of extending Jacques Derrida’s urging that philosophers think about the findings of recent scientific animal studies, this essay asserts that such attention to ethology, primatology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience makes it necessary to accept a biological continuum between humans and other animals. Countering Heidegger’s claims of abyssal difference and Derrida’s apparent agreement, this discussion examines work by Terrence Deacon and Philip Lieberman on the evolution of human s…Read more
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95How Can the Study of the Humanities Inform the Study of Biosemiotics?Biosemiotics 10 (1): 9-31. 2017.This essay – a collection of contributions from 10 scholars working in the field of biosemiotics and the humanities – considers nature in culture. It frames this by asking the question ‘Why does biosemiotics need the humanities?’. Each author writes from the background of their own disciplinary perspective in order to throw light upon their interdisciplinary engagement with biosemiotics. We start with Donald Favareau, whose originary disciplinary home is ethnomethodology and linguistics, and the…Read more
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University of OregonRegular Faculty
Eugene, Oregon, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Biology |
Continental Philosophy |