Phenomenology, biology, and the human sciences combine in this work to support an original systematic philosophy of nature, organic life, and human existence. A sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary relations—or relations between the insides and outsides of a thing—is presented and analyzed. The sequence supports distinctions between living and nonliving things, plants and animals, lower animals and higher ones, and nonhuman animals and humans. “Organic life” is defined and its characteristic features—the “organic modals”—are elucidated. The boundary relations of living things can ... More

Phenomenology, biology, and the human sciences combine in this work to support an original systematic philosophy of nature, organic life, and human existence. A sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary relations—or relations between the insides and outsides of a thing—is presented and analyzed. The sequence supports distinctions between living and nonliving things, plants and animals, lower animals and higher ones, and nonhuman animals and humans. “Organic life” is defined and its characteristic features—the “organic modals”—are elucidated. The boundary relations of living things can be understood as “positionality”—that is, orientation to and within an environment. Human positionality is both centric (as in many animals) and excentric insofar as the relation between inside and outside is something to which the human being is “positioned.” This excentric positionality enables human beings to stand outside of the boundaries of their own body, a possibility with significant implications for human knowledge, culture, religion, and technology. Through articulation of the essential features of organic life, its distinction from and relation within nonliving nature, and the distinctions among living things, including between the nonhuman and human, the work provides foundations for a philosophical anthropology.