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The philosophy of Raymond Ruyer was an important if subterranean influence on twentieth-century French thought, and explicitly engaged with by figures such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze. The Genesis of Living Forms is Ruyer's most focussed and forceful analysis of a central but apparently paradoxical biological phenomenon that also presents serious problems for philosophy: embryogenesis. When a cat develops from the early stages of fertilization to an adult, what is it that makes it the same cat? How is it that a living being can at once be the same and constantly changing? Ruyer's answer to these questions unfolds through a detailed set of encounters with major scientific fields, from particle physics to social psychology, arguing that the paradox can only be dissolved by seeing the role that form plays in the ongoing development of living beings. In Ruyer's view, embryogenesis is a central problem not just in the life sciences/every thing must possess a relation to a form that is characteristic of it, from carbon atoms to embryos, and to embryologists themselves.
List of contents
Translator's Preface / Introduction / 1. Verticalism and Thematism / 2. From the Molecule to the Organism / 3. Internal Reproduction / 4. The Division and Socialisation of Development / 5. Signals-Stimuli / 6. 'Competence' / 7. Autonomous Procedures and Regulated Behaviour / 8. Open Formations and Markovian Jargon / 9. 'Crossword' Formations / 10. The 'Spectacle-Spectator' Complex / 11. I-Forms, II-Forms, III-Forms / 12. The Philosophy of Morphogenesis / Further Reading / Index
About the author
Raymond Ruyer (1902–1987) was professor of philosophy at the Université de Nancy. A highly original and prolific philosopher, he sought to provide a metaphysics adequate to the discoveries of science. Today his works are being rediscovered by a new generation, both in France and beyond. Cybernetics and the Origin of Information is his third book to appear in English translation, after Neofinalism and The Genesis of Living Forms. Amélie Berger-Soraruff is research project manager at the Maison Française d’Oxford. Jon Roffe is Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales, and a founding editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy. The co-editor of a number of volumes on twentieth-century French philosophy, he is the author of Badiou’s Deleuze (2012), Abstract Market Theory (forthcoming), Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity (forthcoming), and the co-author of Lacan Deleuze Badiou (2014, with AJ Bartlett and Justin Clemens).Nicholas B. de Weydenthal is a doctoral candidate based in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies and the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne.
Summary
The Genesis of Living Forms represents the first English-language translation of a key work by Raymond Ruyer, an important yet neglected figure in the history of twentieth century French thought.
