Selected Writings: On Self-Organization, Philosophy, Bioethics, and Judaism (Forms of Living) - Tapa dura

Henri Atlan is one of the founding fathers of the general theory of self-organizing living systems and theories of complexity as well as an eminent specialist on the history of Jewish thought (notably the Talmud, Midrash, and Kabbalah) with a longstanding interest in the philosophy of Spinoza, whose monist metaphysics and no less stringent understanding ethics he has made his own in strikingly original ways. This timely collection, with its excellent introduction, gathers some of Atlan's most representative papers in all these different yet, in his view, complementary fields of study. The assembled essays move from the best modern science writing into literary and visual studies, into anthropology, the study of religion, and political philosophy, while carefully preparing a comparative-conceptual no less than rhetorical-analysis of the overlapping and differences between the humanities, broadly defined, and the natural sciences. Atlan's outstanding work offers a thoroughly argued engagement with some of the central assumptions of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. It is hard to imagine more daring cross- or trans-disciplinary work than the essays collected in this reader. -- -Hent de Vries * Johns Hopkins University * Henri Atlan's work has been enormously helpful to me as I try to think through Jewishness from the perspective of the human sciences. More broadly, Atlan's concept of 'the self-organization of the living' helps bridge the gap between scientific and humanistic inquiries. His work demonstrates that rigorous analysis of our condition with all the tools at our disposal can itself be one of the most vital ways to be human. -- Jonathan Boyarin * University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill * This book shows how concepts like "emergence" and "self-organization", when not assumed to imply the impossibility of causal explanation, can lead to novel solutions to old philosophical problems, reconciling what used to be staunch opposites: freedom and determinism, intentionality and mechanism. Armed with these new solutions Henri Atlan then reinjects life into the ethics first proposed in the seventeenth century by Spinoza, showing its implications for many areas of contemporary life. -- -Manuel DeLanda * author of A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History * Reading this collection of articles has been enlightening and enjoyable in equal measure. Atlan's work is driven by a desire to find in separate academic domains mutually supporting sources of insight that inform and guide one another toward the common goal of discovery and understanding. Both in the selection of texts and their ordering, the editors succeed admirably in highlighting this feature of Atlan's writing. -- -Martin Land * Hadassah Academic College *

Best known for his pioneering work in theories of self-organization and complexity, the biophysicist and philosopher Henri Atlan has during the past thirty years been a major voice in contemporary European philosophical and bioethical debates. In a massive oeuvre that ranges from biology and neural network theory to Spinoza's thought and the history of philosophy, and from artificial intelligence and information theory to Jewish mysticism and contemporary medical ethics, Atlan has come to offer an exceptionally powerful philosophical argumentation that is as hostile to scientism as it is attentive to biology's conceptual and experimental rigor, as careful with concepts of rationality as it is committed to rethinking the human place in a radically determined yet forever changing world. This is the first volume to bring together the major strands of Atlan's work for an English-language audience. It is an indispensable compendium for those seeking to clarify the joint stakes and shared import of philosophy and science for questions of life and the living-today and tomorrow.