Jakob von Uexküll and Philosophy

Francesca Michelini is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Kassel (Germany). Her main fields of research are the antireductionist theories of life and the bridging of continental philosophy and science. She is author of many publications on the topic of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of the life sciences, teleological explanations in nature, and autonomy in biology (among others: The Living and the Deficiency. Essays on Teleology 2011, in Italian). Kristian Köchy is a biologist and Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Kassel (Germany). His research focuses on the areas of philosophy of science and the history of the life sciences, natural philosophy and the philosophy of animal-human relations. He is author of an introduction on Biophilosophy (2008, in German) and co-editor of a three-volume collection on the philosophy of animal research (Philosophie der Tierforschung, 2016-2018).

Introduction. A Foray into Jakob von Uexküll’s Heritage; PART 1. Jakob von Uexküll and His Historical Background; 1. Jakob von Uexküll, an Intellectual History; 2. Kantian Ticks, Uexküllian Melodies and the Transformation of Transcendental Philosophy; 3. Uexküll’s Legacy: Biological Reception and Biophilosophical Impact; PART 2. Jakob von Uexküll’s Relevance for Philosophy; 4. Creative Life and the Ressentiment of Homo Faber. How Max Scheler integrates Uexküll’s Theory of Environment; 5. Closed Environment and Open World: On the Significance of Uexküll’s Biology for Helmuth Plessner’s Natural Philosophy; 6. Ernst Cassirer’s Reading of Jakob von Uexküll: Between Natural Teleology and Anthropology; 7. The Philosopher’s Boredom and the Lizard’s Sun. Martin Heidegger’s Interpretation of Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt Theory; 8. Animal Behavior and the Passage to Culture: Merleau-Ponty’s Remarks on Uexküll; 9. The Organism and its Umwelt: A Counterpoint between the Theories of Uexküll, Goldstein and Canguilhem; 10. From Ontology to Ethology: Uexküll and Deleuze & Guattari; 11. Hans Blumenberg: The Transformation of Uexküll’s Bioepistemology into Phenomenology; 12. Giorgio Agamben: The Political Meaning of Uexküll’s "Sleeping Tick"; 13. Jakob von Uexküll and the Study of Primary Meaning-Making; 14. Jakob von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt Revisited in the Wake of the Third Culture: Staging Reciprocity and Cooperation between Artistic Agents; Afterword. A Future for Jakob von Uexküll.