Jakob von Uexküll: A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds (1934–) [DE, EN, FR]

22 March 2014, dusan

““Is the tick a machine or a machine operator? Is it a mere object or a subject?” With these questions, the pioneering biophilosopher Jakob von Uexküll embarks on a remarkable exploration of the unique social and physical environments that individual animal species, as well as individuals within species, build and inhabit. This concept of the umwelt has become enormously important within posthumanist philosophy, influencing such figures as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, and, most recently, Giorgio Agamben, who has called Uexküll “a high point of modern antihumanism.”

A key document in the genealogy of posthumanist thought, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans advances Uexküll’s revolutionary belief that nonhuman perceptions must be accounted for in any biology worth its name; it also contains his arguments against natural selection as an adequate explanation for the present orientation of a species’ morphology and behavior. A Theory of Meaning extends his thinking on the umwelt, while also identifying an overarching and perceptible unity in nature. Those coming to Uexküll’s work for the first time will find that his concept of the umwelt holds new possibilities for the terms of animality, life, and the framework of biopolitics.”

German edition
With illustrations by George Kriszat
Publisher J. Springer, Berlin, 1934, 102 pages
New edition, with the essay “Bedeutungslehre”, with a Foreword by Adolf Portmann, Rowohlt, Hamburg, 1956, 182 pages

English edition
Translated by Claire H. Schiller
In Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, pp 5-80
Publisher International Universities Press, New York, 1957
Reprinted in Semiotica 89(4), 1992, pp 319-391

New English edition, with the essay “A Theory of Meaning”
Translated by Joseph D. O’Neil
Introduction by Dorion Sagan
Afterword by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Posthumanities series, 12
ISBN 9780816658992
272 pages

Reviews and commentaries: Levi R. Bryant (2010), Robert Geroux (Humanimalia, 2012), Franklin Ginn (Science as Culture, 2013).

Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (German, 1934)
Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen. Bedeutungslehre (German, 1934/1956)
A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men (English, trans. Claire H. Schiller, 1957)
A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men (English, trans. Claire H. Schiller, 1957/1992)
Mondes animaux et monde humain suivi de La théorie de la signification (French, trans. Philippe Muller, 1965)
A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, with a Theory of Meaning (English, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil, 2010)

See also chapters 10-11 of Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal: Umwelt; Tick (2002/2004)

Vladimir Vernadsky: The Biosphere (1926–) [RU, ES, EN]

21 March 2014, dusan

“First published in 1926 but long neglected in the West, Vladimir I. Vernadsky’s The Biosphere revolutionized our view of Earth. Vernadsky teaches us that life has been the transforming geological force on our planet. He illuminates the difference between an inanimate, mineralogical view of Earth’s history, and an endlessly dynamic picture of Earth as the domain and product of living matter to a degree still poorly understood.

The 1998 edition, which is the first English translation of the entire text, features contributions by Mark A. S. McMenamin, Professor of Geology at Mount Holyoke College, who has written extensive annotations to explain the structure of Vernadsky’s arguments and their modern relevance, and Jacques Grinevald, an authority on the idea of the biosphere, who penned an introduction that places the book in historical context.”

English edition
Foreword by Lynn Margulis, Mauro Ceruti, Stjepko Golubic, Ricardo Guerrero, Nubuo Ikeda, Natsuki Ikezawa, Wolfgang E. Krumbein, Andrei Lapo, Antonio Lazcano, David Suzuki, Crispin Tickell, Malcolm Walter, Peter Westbroek
Introduction by Jacques Grinevald
Translated by David B. Langmuir
Revised and Annotated by Mark A.S. McMenamin
Publisher Copernicus Books, 1998
A Peter N. Nevraumont book
ISBN 9781461272649
192 pages

Commentary on the concept (Alexej M. Ghilarov, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 1995)
Commentary on the translations (Mercè Piqueras, International Microbiology, 1998)

Publisher (EN)

Biosfera i noosfera (Russian, 1926/1989)
La Biosfera (Spanish, trans. María Victoria López Paño and Luis Gutiérrez Andrés, 1997)
The Biosphere (English, trans. David B. Langmuir, 1998)

David Freedberg: The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (2002)

21 February 2014, dusan

“Some years ago, David Freedberg opened a dusty cupboard at Windsor Castle and discovered hundreds of vividly colored, masterfully precise drawings of all sorts of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds. Coming upon thousands more drawings like them across Europe, Freedberg finally traced them all back to a little-known scientific organization from seventeenth-century Italy called the Academy of Linceans (or Lynxes).

Founded by Prince Federico Cesi in 1603, the Linceans took as their task nothing less than the documentation and classification of all of nature in pictorial form. In this first book-length study of the Linceans to appear in English, Freedberg focuses especially on their unprecedented use of drawings based on microscopic observation and other new techniques of visualization. Where previous thinkers had classified objects based mainly on similarities of external appearance, the Linceans instead turned increasingly to sectioning, dissection, and observation of internal structures. They applied their new research techniques to an incredible variety of subjects, from the objects in the heavens studied by their most famous (and infamous) member Galileo Galilei—whom they supported at the most critical moments of his career—to the flora and fauna of Mexico, bees, fossils, and the reproduction of plants and fungi. But by demonstrating the inadequacy of surface structures for ordering the world, the Linceans unwittingly planted the seeds for the demise of their own favorite method—visual description-as a mode of scientific classification.

Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, Eye of the Lynx uncovers a crucial episode in the development of visual representation and natural history. And perhaps as important, it offers readers a dazzling array of early modern drawings, from magnificently depicted birds and flowers to frogs in amber, monstrously misshapen citrus fruits, and more.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2002
ISBN 0226261476, 9780226261478
513 pages

Review (Peter Campbell, London Review of Books)
Review (Eileen Reeves, The Art Bulletin)
Review (Pamela O. Long, Technology and Culture)
Review (Steven F. Ostrow, The International History Review)
Review (The New York Review of Books)
Review (PD Smith, The Guardian)

Publisher

PDF (134 MB, updated on 2016-9-18)