In the 1960s the German émigré philosopher, Hans Jonas, published a collection of eleven essays under the title The Phenomenon of Life. 1 In these disparate essays he lays out, as he says, "an 'existential' interpretation of biological facts." 2 Though, itself, not a single essay, Jonas sets about to weave from the various themes he examines a new, "post-dualistic" philosophical monism. This is a theory that disavows both the strictly idealistic conception of consciousness and the rigorously materialist conception of organic processes. With this new theory Jonas achieves a genuine rediscovery of life. 3 In a mathematized functional description of organic processes, the organism remains, itself, merely the incidental material substrate of concurrent forces. 4 Thus living being is overlooked by the sciences in their purely physiochemical description of an organic mode of functioning. 5 And in the idealistic conception of consciousness, the material body remains merely a phenomenal structure. Idealism interprets the living body like all other bodies, that is to say, as an external idea; it thus disowns the corporeality of the self. 6

When Husserl retired in 1928, he began to feel increasing doubts over the reception of transcendental phenomenology in Germany and abroad. Heidegger had just published Being and Time, and it was becoming more and more clear to him not only that Heidegger's reputation was outstripping his own but also, more significantly, that Heidegger was not the philosopher he once thought him to be.

The term, ecology, is not ancient in origin. It is a neologism introduced in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel in his Generelle Morphologie. According to Haeckel, Oecologie signifies a branch of animal physiology that studies the relations of the animal to its environment. Within the study of the physiology of relations, he paired ecology to chorology. Chorology is the physiology of the geographic and topographic extension of animal habitation. Thus chorology studies animal physiology in relation to its place. Ecology, by contrast, is the physiology of the reciprocal relations [Wechselbeziehungen] of the animal organism both to the external world and to other organisms. Thus ecology is the study of the animal in relation not merely to place but to the world as inhabited by other organisms, including others of its own kind. According to Haeckel, this latter domain of investigation remained absent in any zoological textbook published to that point. Hence he coined the term "Oecologie" as the study of the natural household [die Lehre vom Naturhaushalt] of the organism.

My aim in this presentation is to analyze Hans Jonas's "post-dualistic" philosophy of life articulated in his work, The Phenomenon of Life, against the backdrop of Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology.  I will argue that Scheler's analysis of life frames the problem for which Jonas's monism is response.  Scheler is well known for asserting a dualism of life and spirit in his anthropology.  I will show that Jonas's conception of life bears a fundamental affinity to the principle of life advanced by Scheler, and that both men agree on the ontological identity of physiological and psychic processes. (Revised: updated cited material)

I propose an existential ecology using Hans Jonas's analysis as my cue but applying this to the concept of land. This concept of land is one I will borrow from Aldo Leopold. My preeminent aim is to offer a new standpoint for the study of the oikos or of the home. Though this new understanding may be prefigured by Jonas or even by Leopold, it is nowhere explicit in either. I conclude by illustrating how this existential ecology coordinates with neo-Lammarkian niche construction theory of organism-environment interactions.

In his influential work, The Phenomenon of Life, Hans Jonas articulates what he terms an "existential interpretation of biological facts." A broadening of Jonas's existential interpretation is necessary, I believe. For I hold that Jonas's philosophy of life lacks an explicit ecological understanding of living entities. I accordingly propose an existential ecology, using Jonas's analysis as my cue but applying it to the land. This concept of land is one I borrow from Aldo Leopold, particularly as he expresses it in his beautiful work, A Sand County Almanac. This idea of an existential ecology is congruent with a current neo-Lamarckian evolutionary model of organism-environment interactions known as niche construction theory. My paper consequently has three parts: (1) a brief outline of Jonas' existential interpretation, (2) Leopold's land concept interpreted existentially, and (3) the congruence of this idea to niche construction evolutionary theory.

I argue that a central question for any Leopold scholar interested in animal studies concerns the precise valuation of the animal in his ethical theory. Do animals have value merely insofar as they preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the land? Or is there a place for the intrinsic valuation of animals in Leopold's land ethic? This is an important question, since if the answer is yea to the former but nay to the latter then the land ethic not only allows for but commands the culling of destabilizing "varmint" populations for the benefit of land health. This would by extension, it has been argued, include theoretically the application of such a policy to human populations. I will present evidence from his writings that speak against this fascistic interpretation of the land ethic. I argue, in other words, that there is a place for the intrinsic valuation of animals in Leopold's philosophy, however weakly expressed this may be in his extant corpus.

The essence of life according to Max Scheler is found in the ecstatic impulse and purposive directionality of an entity either toward that which entices it or away from that which repels it. Scheler presented his conceptualization of this idea in a lecture before the Schule der Weisheit in Darmstadt, and published this lecture in 1927 under the title "The Special Station of the Human Being." Martin Heidegger asserts very much the same distinction, i.e., that the animal is world-poor and the human world-open, in his Winter Semester course of 1929-30 published under the title, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude – particularly in the second part of that course concerned with the question "what is world." In my presentation I will examine the animal-human distinction advanced by both thinkers. My focus will be limited to the concept of environment (Umwelt/Umgebung) in each, more precisely on the sense in which the animal remains captivated by its environment in a way distinct from the human. In my presentation I set out to demarcate the similarities and the important differences in their understanding of this essential distinction.

In his essay 1917 "The Essence of Philosophy and the Moral Conditions of Philosophical Knowledge," published in On the Eternal in Man, Max Scheler criticizes Husserl's conception of philosophy as rigorous science. There are sciences, Scheler argues, but science as such does not exist. Essentially, philosophy constitutes itself autonomously and in a under a procedure fundamentally distinct from any of the sciences. It is interesting to note that Scheler presents this disagreement as a minor point of terminological clarification. He argues simply that philosophy as a term should be restricted to the evident knowledge of essences whereas the term science can and should refer to the positive formal sciences of ideal objects and the inductive empirical sciences (Scheler 1960, 80f). This seemingly minor point should not obfuscate the central argument in Scheler's essay, which, at its core, expresses a position in substantive discord with Husserl’s understanding of the nature of philosophy. According to Scheler, the idea of philosophy can only be fixed by examining the concrete person of the philosopher herself. Husserl explicitly rejects this view, arguing instead that philosophy is a regulative idea guiding a community of researchers over time. For Scheler, however, philosophy is unlike any other cognitive discipline in that it and it alone requires a spiritual technique by which the human engages her whole being in participation with the primordial essence of all things.
In my presentation I will analyze this disagreement between Max Scheler and Edmund Husserl as to the nature of philosophy. The main focus of my presentation will be Scheler's critique of the Husserlian conception of the phenomenological reduction. I will argue that this disagreement regarding the nature of the reduction is fundamental to the conception of phenomenology as a presuppositionless or autonomous activity.

I hold that Hans Jonas fails to offer an explicit ecological understanding of living entities. In defending this thesis, I will, first, elucidate the conception of metabolism at the heart of his philosophy of life. Second, I will turn to a number of Jonas’s shorter writings to highlight what Jonas, himself, felt to be the central contribution of this existential interpretation of biological facts. Third, I will argue that even though he advances an environmental ethic in his later years, he fails to develop the ecological implications of his earlier philosophy of the organism.

I intend to offer an account of the essence of technology which I see similarly articulated in the works of Wendell Berry and Martin Heidegger. Berry, like Heidegger, is not so much against individual technologies. Rather the essence of technology is the subject of their critique. Both Heidegger and Berry, I hold, seek to prepare a free relationship to technology. In short, the critique of technology by each is not a critique of any particular technology, whether that be a computer or a coal-fired power plant. It is rather a radical putting into question of the manner by which modern technology holds sway over the human being and frames her relation to the natural world. For both Heidegger and Berry, to have a free relationship to technology means to recognize the essence of technology to be a mode of revealing. Insofar as we are held in the sway of technology, it is a revealing that challenges nature in an extractive manner, e.g., in the way that modern industrial farming is extractive. This presentation concerns Heidegger's post-phenomenological thinking, admittedly. However, I believe it has a place in ICNAP, especially considering the theme of sustainability this year. For what is it that needs holding up and support from below? This cannot be answered without a clear conception of that which threatens. The great threat is that we remain unfree in our relation to the essence of technology. This, I will argue, is a view advanced by both Wendell Berry and Martin Heidegger.

Max Scheler was a philosopher of intuition who rarely worked out his ideas systematically. Consequently, his philosophical writings present something of a challenge for the reader. There is little unifying his disparate studies. In this paper, I suggest that a distinction between life and spirit which Scheler formulated early and held onto throughout his career can provide a heuristic principle by which to study his works. This paper is a clarification of this distinction. In the first part of the paper, I show that Scheler's dualistic metaphysics has its roots in Rudolf Eucken's idealistic philosophy. In the second and third parts of this essay, I clarify Scheler's concept of spirit as he develops it in confrontation with Edmund Husserl's phenomenological philosophy. Particularly, in the second part, I show that as he confronts Husserl's conception of philosophy as rigorous science he postulates a radically different idea of the nature of philosophy, an idea that is rooted in this distinction between life and spirit. I explicate in the next section the unique theory of the phenomenological reduction Scheler develops on the basis of this distinction. In the last part, I briefly present how this conception of life and spirit are worked out in Scheler's philosophical anthropology, particularly in his last work, The Human Place in the Cosmos. This present essay concerns the conception of spirit and its relation to life as articulated by the German philosopher, Max Scheler. It has been said that Scheler was a philosopher of great philosophical intuition but with little will for the systematic articulation of his ideas. This is indeed the case. Given the breadth and range of his writings, a coherent survey of the main body of his works remains out of reach in this brief essay. Hence, I focus here on the distinction between life and spirit as a heuristic by which one may study Scheler's body of writings. Scheler, himself, suggested that this distinction is a central motif underlying his most important philosophical writings (Scheler 2009: 3-4). Unfortunately, he did not clearly work out this idea before he died. Manfred Frings, editor of many of Scheler's collected works and perhaps the most important interpreter of his writings, tells us that Scheler was working on three large writing projects at the time of his death: (i) a philosophical anthropology, (ii) a work on metaphysics, and (iii) a work on the theory of cognition (Frings 2). These comprehensive studies were to bring unity to the many essays and fragments Scheler had written and ⁄ or published over his lifetime. His sudden death left these works, whose themes articulate the basic contours of his thought, unfinished. This brief essay thus offers a sketch of a single basic motif at work in the variegated anthropological, metaphysical, and epistemological writings of Max Scheler. This essay is divided into four sections. In the first, I briefly discuss his major works as biographical background. In the second, I argue that the life ⁄ spirit distinction articulated by Scheler exhibits prominent similarities to that advocated by his mentor at Jena, Rudolf Eucken. In the third, I turn to Scheler's engagement with Edmund Husserl in order to highlight a genuine disagreement between the two on the nature of philosophy, itself, rooted in the former's spiritual concept of the human person. This disagreement informs Scheler's unique spiritual conception of the phenomenological reduction, which I present

Max Scheler was a philosopher of intuition who rarely worked out his ideas systematically. Consequently, his philosophical writings present something of a challenge for the reader. There is little unifying his disparate studies. In this paper, I suggest that a distinction between life and spirit which Scheler formulated early and held onto throughout his career can provide a heuristic principle by which to study his works. This paper is a clarification of this distinction. In the first part of the paper, I show that Scheler's dualistic metaphysics has its roots in Rudolf Eucken's idealistic philosophy. In the second and third parts of this essay, I clarify Scheler's concept of spirit as he develops it in confrontation with Edmund Husserl's phenomenological philosophy. Particularly, in the second part, I show that as he confronts Husserl's conception of philosophy as rigorous science he postulates a radically different idea of the nature of philosophy, an idea that is rooted in this distinction between life and spirit. I explicate in the next section the unique theory of the phenomenological reduction Scheler develops on the basis of this distinction. In the last part, I briefly present how this conception of life and spirit are worked out in Scheler's philosophical anthropology, particularly in his last work, The Human Place in the Cosmos. This present essay concerns the conception of spirit and its relation to life as articulated by the German philosopher, Max Scheler. It has been said that Scheler was a philosopher of great philosophical intuition but with little will for the systematic articulation of his ideas. This is indeed the case. Given the breadth and range of his writings, a coherent survey of the main body of his works remains out of reach in this brief essay. Hence, I focus here on the distinction between life and spirit as a heuristic by which one may study Scheler's body of writings. Scheler, himself, suggested that this distinction is a central motif underlying his most important philosophical writings (Scheler 2009: 3-4). Unfortunately, he did not clearly work out this idea before he died. Manfred Frings, editor of many of Scheler's collected works and perhaps the most important interpreter of his writings, tells us that Scheler was working on three large writing projects at the time of his death: (i) a philosophical anthropology, (ii) a work on metaphysics, and (iii) a work on the theory of cognition (Frings 2). These comprehensive studies were to bring unity to the many essays and fragments Scheler had written and ⁄ or published over his lifetime. His sudden death left these works, whose themes articulate the basic contours of his thought, unfinished. This brief essay thus offers a sketch of a single basic motif at work in the variegated anthropological, metaphysical, and epistemological writings of Max Scheler. This essay is divided into four sections. In the first, I briefly discuss his major works as biographical background. In the second, I argue that the life ⁄ spirit distinction articulated by Scheler exhibits prominent similarities to that advocated by his mentor at Jena, Rudolf Eucken. In the third, I turn to Scheler's engagement with Edmund Husserl in order to highlight a genuine disagreement between the two on the nature of philosophy, itself, rooted in the former's spiritual concept of the human person. This disagreement informs Scheler's unique spiritual conception of the phenomenological reduction, which I present