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6Semiocide as Negation: Review of Michael Marder’s Dump Philosophy (review)Biosemiotics 17 (1): 233-255. 2024.This review admires Michael Marder’s inquiry as a parallel for which biosemiotics can find points of conceptual resonance, even as methodological differences remain. By looking at the dump of ungrounded semiosis – the semiotics of dislocating referents from objects, and its effects – we can better do the work of applying biosemiotics not just towards the wonders of living relations, but also to the manifold ways in which industrial civilization is haphazardly yet systematically destroying the po…Read more
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30Being Algae: Transformations in Water, Plants (edited book)BRILL. 2024.Water plants of all sizes, from the 60-meter long Pacific Ocean giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) to the micro ur-plant blue-green algae, deserve attention from critical plant studies. This is the first book in environmental humanities to approach algae, swimming across the sciences, humanities, and arts, to embody the mixed nature and collaborative identity of algae. Ranging from Medieval Islamic texts describing algae and their use, Japanese and Nordic cultural practices based in seaweed and a…Read more
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309Algae communication, conspecific and interspecific: the concepts of phycosphere and algal-bacteria consortia in a photobioreactor (PBR)Plant Signaling and Behavior 18. 2023.Microalgae in the wild often form consortia with other species promoting their own health and resource foraging opportunities. The recent application of microalgae cultivation and deployment in commercial photobioreactors (PBR) so far has focussed on single species of algae, resulting in multi-species consortia being largely unexplored. Reviewing the current status of PBR ecological habitat, this article argues in favor of further investigation into algal communication with conspecifics and inte…Read more
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196The Threshold Problem in Intergenerational JusticeEthics and the Environment 19 (2): 1. 2014.It is common practice in intergenerational justice to set fixed thresholds determining what qualifies as justice. Static definitions of how much and what to save for future generations, however, overestimate human epistemological limits and predictive capacity in regard to uncertainty in social- and ecosystems. Long-term predictions cannot account for the inherent range of contingent variables at play, especially according to contemporary theories of punctuated equilibrium. It is argued that pol…Read more
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36The Musical Turn in BiosemioticsBiosemiotics 16 (2): 221-237. 2023.Human music and language are two systems of communication and expression that, while historically considered to overlap, have become increasingly divergent in their approach and study. Music and language almost certainly co-evolved and emerged from the same semiotic field, and this relationship as well as co-origin are actively researched and debated. For the sake of evaluating the semiotic content of zoomusicology, we investigate music from a ‘bottom-up’ biosemiotic functionalist account consid…Read more
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27Object‐Oriented Ontology and the Other of We in Anthropocentric PosthumanismZygon 58 (2): 315-339. 2023.The object-oriented ontology group of philosophies, and certain strands of posthumanism, overlook important ethical and biological differences, which make a difference. These allied intellectual movements, which have at times found broad popular appeal, attempt to weird life as a rebellion to the forced melting of lifeforms through the artefacts of capitalist realism. They truck, however, in a recursive solipsism resulting in ontological flattening, overlooking that things only show up to us acc…Read more
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224Fake cells and the aura of life: A philosophical diagnostic of synthetic lifeEndeavour 46. 2022.Synthetic biology is often seen as the engineering turn in biology. Philosophically speaking, entities created by synthetic biology, from synthetic cells to xenobots, challenge the ontological divide between the organic and inorganic, as well as between the natural and the artificial. Entities such as synthetic cells can be seen as hybrid or transitory objects, or neo–things. However, what has remained philosophically underexplored so far is the impact these hybrid neo–things will have on (our p…Read more
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12Stan Cox. The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency while We Still CanEnvironmental Ethics 44 (1): 91-92. 2022.
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16Food and Medicine: A biosemiotic perspective (edited book)Springer Nature. 2021.This edited volume provides a biosemiotic analysis of the ecological relationship between food and medicine. Drawing on the origins of semiotics in medicine, this collection proposes innovative ways of considering aliments and treatments. Considering the ever-evolving character of our understanding of meaning-making in biology, and considering the keen popular interest in issues relating to food and medicines - fueled by an increasing body of interdisciplinary knowledge - the contributions here…Read more
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71Plant Philosophy and Interpretation: Making Sense of Contemporary Plant Intelligence DebatesEnvironmental Values 31 (3): 253-276. 2022.Plant biologists widely accept plants demonstrate capacities for intelligence. However, they disagree over the interpretive, ethical and nomenclatural questions arising from these findings: how to frame the issue and how to signify the implications. Through the trope of 'plant neurobiology' describing plant root systems as analogous to animal brains and nervous systems, plant intelligence is mobilised to raise the status of plants. In doing so, however, plant neurobiology accepts an anthropocent…Read more
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10Between Teleophilia and TeleophobiaBiosemiotics 14 (1): 95-100. 2021.Denis Noble convincingly describes the artifacts of theory building in the Modern Synthesis as having been surpassed by the available evidence, indicating more active and less gene-centric evolutionary processes than previously thought. We diagnosis the failure of theory holders to dutifully update their beliefs according to new findings as a microcosm of the prevailing larger social inability to deal with competing paradigms. For understanding life, Noble suggests that there is no privileged le…Read more
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60Methodologies of Curiosity: Epistemology, Practice, and the Question of Animal MindsBiosemiotics 12 (2): 349-356. 2019.Umwelt theory has finally come of age. The paradigm-breaking power of Jakob vonUexküll’s technical term, after decades of inquiry by scholars such as Merleau-Ponty(1962) and Kauffman (1993) has become part of the vernacular of animal studies, psychology, sociology, and other scientific domains (Buchanan 2008; Lahti 2015;Stevens et al. 2018). The newfound fame of the Umwelt frame, however, is as much a boon to the field of biosemiotics as it is a burden, due to the usual serial misinterpretation …Read more
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42I Am a Fake Loop: the Effects of Advertising-Based Artificial SelectionBiosemiotics 12 (1): 131-156. 2019.Mimicry is common among animals, plants, and other kingdoms of life. Humans in late capitalism, however, have devised an unique method of mimicking the signs that trigger evolutionarily-programmed instincts of their own species in order to manipulate them. Marketing and advertising are the most pervasive and sophisticated forms of known human mimicry, deliberately hijacking our instincts in order to select on the basis of one dimension only: profit. But marketing and advertising also strangely u…Read more
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12Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical PerspectivesEnvironmental Values 27 (3): 319-321. 2018.
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28Multiplicity and WeltSign Systems Studies 44 (1-2): 94-110. 2016.This article interprets Jakob von Uexkull’s understanding of different beings’ Innenwelt, Gegenwelt, and umwelt through Deleuzian insights of multiplicity, context, and particularity. This Deleuzian interpolation into Uexkull’s insights acknowledges the absence of a unitary ‘human’ view of nature, recognizing instead that plural viewpoints of cultures, subgroups and individuals understand and interpret natural signs variously not just because of ideology but because of physiology and contrastive…Read more
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39Habermas on NatureEnvironmental Ethics 38 (2): 183-208. 2016.Environmental ethicists typically consider Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action to exclude moral consideration for nonhuman animals. Habermas's early work indeed limits relationships with nature to instrumental ones. Yet, interspersed throughout Habermas's writings are clear indications that nonhuman life deserves moral consideration, and that humans can enter into communicative relationships with nonhumans, however asymmetrical. Habermas’s anthropocentric theoretical foundations can…Read more
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26Jamie Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature (review)Environmental Values 25 (5): 627-629. 2016.
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15William Ophuls. Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology (review)Environmental Ethics 36 (1): 115-118. 2014.
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122From Terra Nullius to Terra CommunisEnvironmental Philosophy 11 (2): 141-174. 2014.This article argues that understanding “wild” land as terra nullius (“land belonging to no one”) emerged during historical colonialism, entered international law, and became entrenched in national constitutions and cultural mores around the world. This has perpetuated an unsustainable and unjust human relationship to land no longer tenable in the post-Lockean era of land scarcity and ecological degradation. Environmental conservation, by valuing wild lands, challenges the terra nullius assumptio…Read more
Yogi Hendlin
Erasmus University Rotterdam
University of California, San Francisco
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University of California, San FranciscoResearch Associate
Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
PhD, 2015
Rotterdam, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands
Areas of Interest
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