Cosmos Editor's Intro of Paper:What is Life
Cosmos Editor's Intro of Paper:What is Life
Hirst’s paper, which is partly autobiographical, describes an intellectual adventure to find a place in a scientific world for values and meaning. What this adventure revealed was that mainstream science, mathematics, logic and philosophy mutually support each other to promote a comprehensive materialist world-view that has no place for meaning for creativity. In this journey Hirst discovered the work of Rosen, and concluded, as Rosen had, that a new metaphysics is required. In this paper he uses Peirce’s notion of ‘abduction’ to justify the speculative presentation of an alternative, process organismic world-view, a form of process metaphysics. While strongly influenced by Alfred North Whitehead and scientists influenced by him (especially the biophysicist Mae-Wan Ho), it is an original synthesis. This synthesis is then contrasted with ‘materialism’. This highlights the way diverse ideas cohere to display the real alternatives, revealing thereby that what are often regarded as obvious, theoretically neutral ideas actually provide the foundations for a particular perspective of the world. Against the background of the account of materialism, Hirst argues that advances in biology herald the move towards a process organismic world-view. However, this is being blocked not only by mathematical ideas, but more fundamentally by mainstream ideas in logic. In identifying blockages to this revolution in thought Hirst is particularly concerned with the influence of extensional logic, which, like the mathematical formalism attacked by Rosen, effectively eliminates meaning and creativity. What is called for, he argues, is a new logic adequate to the creativity of life.
The Peircian semiotician floyd merrell has recognized in Rosen’s and Hirst’s critique of mainsteam thought justification for his own philosophy as a solution to problems they have revealed. In a massive trilogy (Signs Becoming Signs, Semiosis in the Postmodern Age, and Signs Grow), merrell developed a coherent Peircian cosmology advancing Peirce’s most radical ideas on the semiotic nature of all reality, fusing the customary distinctions between life and non-life, mind and matter, self and other, appearance and ‘reality’. In his contribution Merrell further explicates Peirce’s philosophy, revealing how radical his ideas really were, and in doing so, offers the basis for the development of the kind of logic Hirst argued is required to understand life.
Norm's paper What Is Life? published in Cosmos and History - The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy