janMar 31, 2025
“Tim…suggested that, if one generalizes Darwin’s principle in line with thinkers like Charles Sanders Peirce or Alfred North Whitehead, natural selection can be extended beyond biology to show how constraint and self-organization interact with selection-like processes even in physics and chemistry. Understood in this broader way, variation and selection become part of a generative schema of immanent form-production, not just a set of blind mechanics that weed out unfit mutations.”
—Matthew Segall, Hans Jonas' "The Phenomenon of Life: A dialogue with Timothy Jackson about Jonas' treatment of Darwinism”
https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/hans-jonas-the-phenomenon-of-life
#darwin #peirce #whitehead
Hans Jonas' "The Phenomenon of Life"

A dialogue with Timothy Jackson about Jonas' treatment of Darwinism

Footnotes2Plato
Show threadjanMar 31, 2025
“…many biologists, craving the prestige of physics (“physics envy”), indeed tried to reduce living phenomena to clockwork processes or gene-based instructions. However, Darwin himself took a less reductionistic approach. Darwin was not imposing a precise blueprint upon nature but describing how purposive behaviors, preferences, and local constraints yield emergent patterns of speciation.”
—Matthew Segall, Hans Jonas' "The Phenomenon of Life”: A dialogue with Timothy Jackson about Jonas' treatment of Darwinism
#darwin
Show threadjanMar 31, 2025
“My sense is that Jonas, caught up in the existential crisis of late modernity, saw an urgent need to restore purpose, value, and inwardness to a world threatened by nihilism.”
—Matthew Segall, Hans Jonas' "The Phenomenon of Life”
#hansjonas #jonas
Show threadjanMar 31, 2025
“Darwin wrote extensively on animal behaviors, local adaptations, and reciprocal relationships that speak to co-creation, not a fixed environment imposing design by negation. Modern complexity theorists have taken these insights further, highlighting how variation and selection act alongside emergent order, morphological constraints, and even convergent evolutionary trends.”
—Matthew Segall, Hans Jonas' "The Phenomenon of Life”
#darwin #complexity #complexitytheory #emergentorder #morphologicalconstraints
Show threadjanMar 31, 2025
“…read superficially, Darwin’s ideas can indeed tip into a vision of “mindless, purposeless algorithmic” selection—a view popularized by several late-twentieth-century biologists and philosophers (eg, Dennett, Dawkins). … Yet Darwin’s own texts, especially when read in the context of thinkers like Whitehead or Peirce, open onto the possibility that teleology is not an external imposition but a creative principle intrinsic to living organisms…”
—Matthew Segall, Hans Jonas' "The Phenomenon of Life”: A dialogue with Timothy Jackson about Jonas' treatment of Darwinism
#darwin #dennet #dawkins #whitehead #peirce
Show threadjanMar 31, 2025
“He [Hans Jonas] sought a new cosmological narrative that locates intrinsic value and interiority in nature, and that calls human beings to become morally responsible for Life… Darwin, ironically, can aid this quest if we appreciate his rich references to the agency of organisms, their mutual influences, and his resolute rejection of fixed essences.”
—Matthew Segall, Hans Jonas' "The Phenomenon of Life”: A dialogue with Timothy Jackson about Jonas' treatment of Darwinism
#hansjonas #jonas #darwin #agency #organisms
Show threadjan
“…our conversation can be read as an attempt to rescue Darwin’s insights from a cramped materialistic framing and to champion Jonas’ ethical and phenomenological call to acknowledge the interior dimension of life—while clarifying how Jonas sometimes conflates Darwin’s ideas with the mechanical worldview he rightly criticizes.”
—Matthew Segall, Hans Jonas' "The Phenomenon of Life”: A dialogue with Timothy Jackson about Jonas' treatment of Darwinism
https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/hans-jonas-the-phenomenon-of-life
#hansjonas #jonas #darwin #matthewsegall #segall #timothyjackson #jackson
Hans Jonas' "The Phenomenon of Life"

A dialogue with Timothy Jackson about Jonas' treatment of Darwinism

Footnotes2Plato
Mar 31, 2025 at 2:17amWeb