ISN Summer Conference 2008:
"Hans Jonas and the Rediscovery of Nature"
The Summer Conference ran from Friday afternoon, June 13th,
through Saturday evening, June 14th roughly according to the following
schedule.
For further background and context, please review the previously published
Invitation to the Summer Conference.
All sessions unless otherwise noted, were in MIT room 3-270.
Most talks were one half hour followed by a fifteen-minute
question-answer period. Keynote speeches were an hour
long followed by fifteen minutes for questions.
All speakers were present, but Dr. Carroll was ill so Mark
Ryland had to read his paper. Further information about the talks
and presenters follows the schedule.
Friday, June 13th
|
3:00-3:30pm
|
Registration |
3:30-3:50pm |
Opening remarks (ISN staff) |
|
3:50-4:35pm |
Paper 1: William Carroll, "The Scientific
Revolution and the Recovery of Nature" (read by
Mark Ryland) |
|
4:35-4:45pm |
Break |
|
4:45-5:30pm |
Paper 2: Travis Dumsday, "Scientific
Essentialism and Thomistic Philosophy of Nature:
Some Interconnections and a Common Problem" |
|
5:30-5:45pm |
Break |
|
5:45-7:00pm
|
Keynote 1: Lenny Moss, "Detachment,
Genomics and the Nature of Being Human"
 |
|
7:30-9:00pm |
Informal dinner |
Saturday, June 14th
|
9:00-9:10am
|
Introductory remarks (ISN staff) |
|
9:10-9:55am
|
Paper 3: Tom McLaughlin, "Claustrophobia and
Liberation: Aristotle’s Cosmos and the Copernican
Revolution" |
|
9:55-10:40am |
Paper 4: Bruce Lundberg, "Human Nature and
Mathematics: Some Reflections Based on the Work of
Hans Jonas" |
|
10:40-10:50am |
Break |
|
10:50-11:35am |
Paper 5: Michael Storck, "Why Is a Dog Not a
Computer?: The Unity of Complex Bodies" |
|
11:35-11:45am |
Break |
|
11:45-1:00pm
|
Keynote 2: Michael Denton, "The
Formalist Challenge to Orthodox Darwinism: What
Would Jonas Say?"
 |
|
1:10-1:55pm |
Lunch |
|
Special Tracks
|
Ethics & Education
(Room 3-343)
|
The Natural Philosophical Tradition
(Room 3-270)
|
Scientific Implications
(Room 1-371)
|
|
2:10-2:55pm |
Paper 6a: Christopher Blum, "The Natural Way
of Discovering Nature" |
Paper 6b: Susan Waldstein, "Jonas’ Criteria for an Ascending Scale in Nature" |
Paper 6c: Sean Collins, "Animals, Inertia, and
Projectile Motion or What Is Force?" (hour-long
talk)
|
|
2:55-3:40pm |
Paper 7a: Christine Metzo, "Nature and Ethics:
The Imperative of Responsibility as a Bodily
Imperative" |
Paper 7b: Robert Sandmeyer, "The Rediscovery of Life within Phenomenology: Hans Jonas and
His Relation to Max Scheler" |
|
3:40-3:50pm |
Break |
|
3:50-4:35pm |
Paper 8: Daniel Kuebler, "Can We Ever Understand
Behavior?" |
|
4:35-4:45pm |
Break |
|
4:45-5:30pm |
 Paper 9: Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo, "Beyond
Ontological Reductionism, and Towards an Ontological
Revolution: A Comparison between Norbert Wiener’s
Cybernetics, Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory, and
Hans Jonas"
|
|
5:30-5:45pm |
Closing remarks (ISN staff) |
|
6:30-9:30pm |
Conference Dinner at area restaurant
 |
More Information
Alphabetized by presenter's name.
Blum, Chris
Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (Merrimack, NH)
“The Natural Way of Discovering Nature”
The successful transmission of an adequate conception of nature requires that the refutation of rival accounts of the principles of nature be accompanied by the experience of nature and the interrogation of the senses, the inculcation of the habits of right reasoning, and the instilling of the right desire to know the causes of things in relation to the highest cause.
Carroll, William
Oxford University
“The Scientific Revolution and the Recovery of Nature”
Standard interpretations of the rise of modern science often see it as rendering irrelevant (if not false) Aristotelian natural philosophy. I want to challenge such interpretations in order to show that the Scientific Revolution is really not such a barrier to the continuing relevance of traditional natural philosophy.
Collins, Sean D.
Thomas Aquinas College (Santa Paula, CA)
“Animals, Inertia, and Projectile Motion Or What is Force?”
The reduction of the natural sciences to a non-teleological, "mechanist" form began with physics, and within physics, it appears to have begun with the introduction of the concept of force. Accordingly, the recovery of genuine teleology in the natural sciences requires a careful reexamination of the concept of force, a reexamination freed from the strictures of radical positivism.
Denton, Michael
Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Monréal, Canada
“The Formalist Challenge to Orthodox Darwinism: What Would Jonas Say?”
In my talk I describe the pre-Darwinian formalist conception that the invariant organic forms [deep homologies] which underlie the adaptive diversity of life are lawful natural kinds which like atoms and crystals are determined by natural law and built into the order of nature. I point out that despite the enormous advances in biology since 1859 the deep homologies and especially their remarkable stability remain inexplicable in Darwinian terms. And I argue that Jonas would have seen the failure to reduce organic forms to ‘ bottom up’ selectionist explanations as vindicating his own philosophy of nature.
Dumsday, Travis
University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada)
“Scientific Essentialism and Thomistic Philosophy of Nature: Some Interconnections and a Common Problem”
Scientific essentialism is a prominent school of thought
in contemporary analytic philosophy of science. It is also a
school whose ontology bears some marked similarities to
Thomistic philosophy of nature, and I intend to explore their
common ground and briefly examine a significant problem they
both face.
Franzini Tibaldeo, Roberto
University of Torino (Italy)
“Beyond Ontological Reductionism, and Towards an Ontological Revolution: A comparison between Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory, and Hans Jonas”
What is life? Is scientific knowledge able to comprehend
the phenomenon of life and its teleological meaning? Through a
close comparison with Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics and
Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General System Theory, Hans
Jonas concludes that the comprehension of life requires a wider,
ontological thinking
Kuebler, Daniel
Franciscan University of Steubenville (Ohio)
“Can We Ever Understand Behavior?”
In our efforts to understand behavior we tend to reduce it to either the result of neurons firing in the brain or a probabilistic model of decision making. Such approaches will always be limited because both fail to take into account the autonomous organism which is responsible for generating the behavior.
Lundberg, Bruce
Colorado State University - Pueblo
“Human Nature and Mathematics: Some Reflections Based on the Work of Hans Jonas”
Hans Jonas founds his ethics in a certain natural thing,
from the very being (the is) of which an imperative (an
ought) plainly follows and ramifies to all of nature. His
"No!" to a purely mathematical view of nature and to a
cybernetic "image of man" is the obverse side of his positive
views on mathematics and technology, all coined together to help
clarify and care for purposeful, free, responsible and open
human futures.
McLaughlin, Tom
St. John Vianney Theological Seminary (Denver, CO)
“Claustrophobia and Liberation: Aristotle’s Cosmos and the
Copernican Revolution”
The thesis of this paper is that Aristotle’s conception of
the cosmos located human beings in a place that was too small
for their nature. Aquinas's treatment of Aristotle’s cosmos
makes this point evident. The Copernican Revolution resulted in
a more expansive cosmology that provides a more fitting place
for human nature.
Metzo, Christine
Minnesota State University - Moorhead
“Nature and Ethics: The Imperative of Responsibility as a Bodily Imperative”
Hans Jonas, in The Imperative of Responsibility,
argues that it is only in rediscovering human nature as a part
of nature that we will be able to recover a grounding for
ethics. In my paper, I will demonstrate how Jonas’s
phenomenology of life grounds an embodied ethics that takes the
intercorporeal nature of being as its center.
Moss, Lenny
University of Exeter (UK)
“Detachment, Genomics and the Nature of Being Human”
From an ‘anthropological’ perspective it is argued that an
idea of ‘detachment’, that scales with an entity’s internal
degrees of freedom, can be used to renew a vision of nature in
which human self-understanding can locate itself. The idea of
progressive detachment is then shown to provide the means for
making sense of the otherwise paradoxical findings of
comparative genomics which in turn provides a theory of
detachment with empirical resources and constraints. Finally,
the human socio-cultural life-form itself is suggested to be
both necessitated and made possible by its level of detachment
and as constituting species-cosmopolitan, ecological regimes of
‘compensation.’
Sandmeyer, Robert
University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY)
“The Rediscovery of Life within Phenomenology: Hans Jonas and his Relation to Max Scheler”
I will offer an analysis of Hans
Jonas’s ontology of life against the backdrop of Max Scheler's
ontology of the same. The ontology of life that Scheler
articulates is, I will argue, fundamental toward properly
framing the new philosophical monism at the heart of Jonas’s
work, The Phenomenon of Life.
Storck, Michael
Magdalen College (Warner, NH)
“Why Is a Dog Not a Computer?: The Unity of Complex Bodies”
Both living things and
complex non-living bodies such as water present something of a
puzzle: They seem to have some sort of unity, yet at the same
time do depend on their parts at least to some extent. I argue
that such complex things must indeed have real, i.e.,
substantial unity, and discuss how their parts can be said to be
present given this unity.
Waldstein, Susan
International Theological Institute (Gaming, Austria)
“Jonas’ Criteria for an Ascending Scale in Nature”
I will use Hans Jonas to help me analyze metabolism,
sensation, animal behavior, and human moral responsibility in
order to find criteria for an ascending scale in nature.
