Jos De Mul

One of the most striking developments in the history of the science over the past 50 years has been the gradual moving toward each other of biology and computer science, and their increasing tendency to overlap. Two things may be held responsible for this. Th e first is the tempestuous development of molecular biology that followed the first adequate description, in 1953, of the structure of the double helix of DNA, the carrier of hereditary information. Biologists subsequently became increasingly interested in computer science, the science that focuses on, among other things, the question of what information really is and how it is encoded and transferred. No less important was that it would have been impossible to sequence and decipher the human genome without the use of ever stronger computers. Th is resulted in a fundamental digitalization of biology. Th is phenomenon is particularly visible in molecular biology, where DNA-research increasingly moves from the analogical world of biology to the digital world of the computer. In turn, computer scientists have become increasingly interested in biology. One of the highly promising branches of computer science that has developed since the 1950s was the research into artifi cial intelligence and artifi cial life. Although the expectations were high—it was predicted that within decades computers and robots would exist whose intelligence would exceed by far that of man—success remained limited to some specifi c areas, despite the spectacular developments realized in information technologies. It is true that more than 50 years later we have computers that can defeat the chess world champion, but in many areas toddlers and beetles still perform better than the most advanced computers. Top-down programming of artifi cial intelligence and artifi cial life turned out to be much more complex than expected. Th is not only resulted in the 9781441123534_Ch07_Fpp_txt_prf.indd 93 9781441123534_Ch07_Fpp_txt_prf.indd 93

DoesDilthey’shermeneuticsoflife(Lebensphilosophie)haveanyrelevance for contemporary discussions in the philosophy of biology? In this contribution, I will argue that it does. In order to substantiate this claim, I will relate Dilthey’s hermeneutic philosophy of life to contemporary developments in biosemiotics. In this context, I will focus in particular on the specific space the life sciences (Lebenswissenschaften) occupy in-between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften)andthehumansciences(Geisteswissenschaften).

Abstract  The notion of the sublime, which since the nineteenth century is one of the dominant aesthetic categories, is strongly connected with (the artistic representation of) overwhelming nature. In this article it is argued that in the course of the 20th century the sublime increasingly becomes entangled with the experience of technology. However, in the age of biotechnologies, such as genetic modification and synthetic biology, the sublime regains a natural dimension. Taking Eduard Kac’s Alba fluo rabbit (a ‘transgenic’ bunny, that resulted from the injection of green fluorescent protein of a Pacific jellyfish into the egg of an Albino rabbit) as an example, it will be argued that in the age of biotechnology the difference between nature, technology and art will gradually vanish, and new dimensions of the sublime will become manifest.

Various authors, including Friedrich Nietzsche and George Steiner, have argued that the tragic worldview, as we find it expressed in Greek tragedy, has become an entirely incomprehensible phenomenon for (post)modern man. The claim defended in this article radically opposes this view. It is argued that tragedy can still teach us something today, and maybe even more so now than in the many intervening centuries that separate us from her days of glory in the fifth century bce. The tragic reveals itself once more in (post)modern society, and nowhere more clearly than in technology, the domain in which we believed the tragic had been domesticated or even eliminated. Referring to the tragic humanism in Michel Houellebecq’s novels The Elementary Particles and The Possibility of an Island it is argued that it is precisely in (post)modern (bio)technologies that we experience the rebirth of the tragic.

Keywords: tragedy, technology, humanism, transhumanism, Michel Houellebecq, Friedrich Nietzsche

Kim Viborg Andersen, Associate Professor, PhD is a researcher in organizational and policy aspects of IT. Dr Andersen is vice-chair of the IFIP WG 8.4 on interdisciplinary e-business. He is head of the recently established Center for Research on Information Technology in Policy Settings (CIPS) at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. More information is available at http:// www.cbs.dk/~andersen. ... Lance Bennett is Professor of Political Science and Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor of Communication at the University of Washington, USA. He ...

We are living in a globalizing world, characterized by constant and rapid innovation. As we are inclined to go with this flow and its accompanying discourse of mobility, there is a danger that we overlook the persistence of cultural traditions. However, this paper argues that ...

Poet after the Death of God Jos de Mul Erasmus University Rotterdam This article offers a philosophical interpretation of the poetry and the implicit poetics of the Dutch poet Gerrit Kouwenaar (1923), who became well-known in Holland as a member of a group of experimental ...

2 In order to understand the discussion concerning the status of the historical biography, we have to view it within the broader context of the debate on the status of historiography. This debate has accompanied modern historiography from its birth in the early nineteenth century. ...

The emergence of the hominids, more than five million years ago, marked the start of the human odyssey through space and time. This book deals with the last stage of this fascinating journey: the exploration of cyberspace and cybertime. Through the rapid global ...

In this article I will give an exposition of Dilthey's narrative model of human development and defend this model against some points of critique Gadamer (inspired by Heidegger's philosophical interpretation of her-meneutics) in Wahrheit und Methode has directed towards this ...

In recent decades narrative has assumed such a prominent place in the life of humankind as well as in cultural creations that we can even say there is a narrative turn in the human sciences. The notion of narrative identity developed from such narrative turn. Ricoeur ...

As a visionary project of architectural design,the "New Babylon" of Constant Nieuwenhuys has an important discovery in the theory of cyberspace,is a paradigmatic example of "recombinant urbanism" or "database architecture" today.The "database architecture" is not only a ...

Abstract: <b>TRANSHUMANISM : the convergence of evolution, humanism and information technology</b> <br>The aim of this article is to deconstruct the hierarchical opposition between 'good' (antimodern) and 'bad' (hypermodern) postmodernism in order to critically examine ...

irst edition: 2004.
ISBN: 780300097733
Cloth: US $52.00 (Order); €33,99 (Bestel)
One of the founders of modern hermeneutics, German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) confronted the question of how modern, postmetaphysical human beings can cope with the ambivalence, contingency, and finitude that fundamentally characterize their lives. This book offers a reevaluation and fresh analysis of Dilthey’s hermeneutics of life against the background of the development of philosophy during the past two centuries.
Jos de Mul relates Dilthey’s work to other philosophers who influenced or were influenced by him, including Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Comte, Mill, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida. Weaving together systematic analysis and historical investigation, de Mul begins the book with an account of the horizon on which Dilthey developed his unfinished masterwork, Critique of Historical Reason. The author then elaborates a systematic reconstruction of Dilthey’s ontology of life, relates the ontology to the work of other twentieth-century philosophers, and positions Dilthey’s thought within current philosophical debate.

Jos de Mul is full professor in philosophical anthropology, Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Winner of the Praemium Erasmianum Research Prize.
"A thorough, insightful account of Dilthey's philosophy, this book offers many valuable new contributions. De Mul argues effectively for Dilthey's relevance today"
Rudolf Makkreel, Emory University, Atlanta
"De Mul is an ambitious commentator. He reconstructs both biography and cultural context, and he interprets virtually all of Dilthey's more substantial writings while seeking to engage with his critics. In addition to extensive discussions of Dilthey's own writings, there are long sections on Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Gadamer, and Derrida. In a book that may stand as one of the best and most thorough in the recent critical literature on Dilthey, de Mul successfully tackles all of these challenges"
Espen Hammer, The Review of Metaphysics 60:4 (2007)  Read entire review
In an era of heightened existential vulnerability and awareness of finitude there is a correspondingly heightened need for new contexts of human understanding. Here we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to de Mul for providing us with a superb explication of the thought of Wilhelm Dilthey, whose precocious insights into the finitude and historical contingency of human understanding promise to contribute immeasurably to the widening of its horizons.
Robert D. Stolorow, Human Studies. A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences (2012) Read entire review
Amazon.com: Most Helpful Customer Reviews
This work by de Mul is the definitive synthesis on Dilthey available in English. It not only develops the thought of Dilthey chronologically, it also sets his thought in an overall structure that he terms the Critique. This structure solves one of the major problems of Dilthey studies - how to organize his disparate thoughts when no definitive work of his exists. Until this book, most other treatments, while helpful and informative, have not managed to rise to the precision and clarity of this work.
One of most helpful aspects to this book is the author's ability to locate and identify the tensions in Dilthey and provide the structure that is needed to understand them. By describing how ambivalence, contingency, and finitude serve as structuring ideas to Dilthey's thought, the author saves a reader from finding Dilthey contradictory and incomprehensible.
One final aspect of praise for this work is the clarity of thought and writing. A helpful and detailed Table of Contents allows any reader to quickly discover the argument and structure of the book.In addition, most esoteric and technical terms and ideas (including many 19th Century German philosophical concepts) are explained quickly and understandably in a way that allows one unfamiliar with these ideas to follow. These explanations, however, do not sidetrack the argument from its purpose and therefore do not prove distracting to one more familiar with the history and ideas referenced.In conclusion, after having read many works on Dilthey, I find this to be the clearest, most informative, and best written of them all. Not only will it introduce one to a great philosopher, it will also provide a synthesis of his thought that is invaluable.

Review
xviii + 423pp. Cloth, $48.00-Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) is a difficult thinker to come to terms with. His lifelong project of writing a "critique of historical reason" was never completed and is handed down to us in fragments. Although his influence on the development of hermeneutics and the philosophy of the human sciences has been vast, his work was heavily criticized by several prominent neo-Kantians as well as Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, and today he is not widely read. Finally, as Jos de Mul remarks in this excellent study, Dilthey was not averse to ambivalence or even contradiction, and his writing may be seen as the unstable meeting-point of many of the most consequential trends in nineteenth-century philosophy: "Dilthey's philosophy is the reaction of a nineteenth-century thinker, torn between romanticism and positivism, to the social, cultural, and spiritual upheavals of his time. His thinking is a reflection on the Industrial Revolution and the transformations of nature and mankind that went with it, on conservative Prussian politics, on the rise of the empirical human sciences, and-above all-on the growth of historical consciousness" (p. 366). De Mul is an ambitious commentator. He reconstructs both biography and cultural context, and he interprets virtually all of Dilthey's more substantial writings while seeking to engage with his critics. In addition to extensive discussions of Dilthey's own writings, there are long sections on Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Gadamer, and Derrida. In a book that may stand as one of the best and most thorough in the recent critical literature on Dilthey, de Mul successfully tackles all of these challenges. Like Rudolf Makreel, though with a somewhat different twist, de Mul situates Dilthey's project in relation to Kant's transcendental idealism. Dilthey agrees with Kant that objective knowledge (and reason in general) should be analyzed in terms of the structural conditions of possibility that both enable and set limits to it. However, Dilthey reacts against Kant's commitment to the ahistorical nature of these conditions, arguing that rather than pure a priori categories and concepts, what ultimately makes human knowledge possible is life (Leben), from which any possible categorical structure emerges. Dilthey's philosophy, de Mul claims, is best understood as a "transcendental-historical life philosophy." Like much of the contemporary philosophy (Brandom, Habermas, McDowell and others) it anticipates, it emphasizes the need to situate the human subject in historical and cultural contexts of meaning that exceed its full explicit grasp while at the same time insisting that historicism does not necessarily imply relativism. The "life-categories," derived from life itself, make up what Dilthey refers to as the historical a priori of those who belong to our life-form. It is perfectly possible, Dilthey claims, to acknowledge the essential finitude of the human orientation in the world-the impossibility of going beyond the boundaries of our own historical meaning-horizons-without thereby holding that the life-categories somehow must be arbitrary or irrationally adopted. De Mul sees Dilthey moving from an epistemological (and, to some degree, psychological) type of argumentation to one that is decidedly ontological. Dilthey's Leben or Lebensform precedes the formation of the epistemic subject with its objectified object and forms a kind of pretheoretical world that recedes into the background but can never be bypassed when engaging scientifically. When dealing with Husserl's and Heidegger's critiques, de Mul invokes this point. Both Husserl's attribution of psychologism and Heidegger's critique of the failure to respect the ontological difference fail to take into account the later Dilthey's deep-seated orientation toward ontology. One of de Mul's most prominent theses is that Dilthey in almost all relevant respects should be regarded as a philosopher of finitude. As a result of his "being-limited" in time and space as well the impossibility of retrieving a traditional transcendental metaphysics, there is for Dilthey a tragic dimension to man-and to modern man in particular. While Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger have always been regarded as thinkers who have attributed a certain tragic dimension to human life, it is surprising but interesting to be told that Dilthey can be included in this group as well. Sounding almost Nietzschean, for Dilthey one of the tasks of hermeneutics, by offering understanding and form, is to transform the sense of limitation into "representations with which we can live" (p. 372). De Mul's book serves as a poignant reminder that despite its many internal tensions and difficulties, Dilthey's thinking is still alive and relevant. Whether or not we can hope for a renewed scholarly interest of the same scope and intensity as has recently been seen with regard to figures such as Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, this is a book that has the potential to spark off further research in Dilthey's many writings.-Espen Hammer, University of Essex.

Jos de Mul. Destiny Domesticated. The Rebirth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Technology. State University of New York (SUNY) Press, 2014.
Destiny Domesticated investigates three approaches Western civilization has tried to tame fate: the heroic affirmation of fate in the tragic culture of the Greeks, the humble acceptance of divine providence in Christianity, and the abolition of fate in modern technological society. Against this background, Jos de Mul argues that the uncontrollability of technology introduces its own tragic dimension to our culture. Considering a range of literary texts and contemporary events, and drawing on twenty-five centuries of tragedy interpretation from philosophers such as Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, literary critics George Steiner and Terry Eagleton, and others, de Mul articulates a contemporary perspective on the tragic, shedding new light on philosophical topics such as free will, determinism, and the contingency of life.
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Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985) was one of the founders of philosophical anthropology, and his book The Levels of the Organic and Man [Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch], first published in 1928, has inspired generations of philosophers, biologists, social scientists, and humanities scholars. This volume offers the first substantial introduction to Plessner’s philosophical anthropology in English, not only setting it in context with such familiar figures as Bergson, Cassirer, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze, but also showing Plessner’s relevance to contemporary discussions in a wide variety of fields in the humanities and sciences, such as biology, neurosciences, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, philosophy of mind, and technology studies. Jos de Mul is full professor Philosophy of Man and Culture at the Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has also taught at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Fudan University (Shanghai), and stayed as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His book publications include: Romantic Desire in (Post)Modern Art and Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 1999), The Tragedy of Finitude. Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life (Yale University Press, 2004), Cyberspace Odyssey.  Towards a Virtual Ontology and Anthropology (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), and Destiny Domesticated. The Rebirth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Technology (State University of New York Press, 2014).

Gimme Shelter: Global Discourses in Aesthetics contains a series of reflections on the impact of globalization on the arts and the aesthetic reflection on the arts. The authors – fifteen distinguished aestheticians from all over the world – discuss a variety of aesthetic questions brought forth by the aforementioned process of globalization. How do artistic practices and aesthetic experiences change in response to these developments? How should we articulate these changes on the theoretical level? When reflections on the significance of art and aesthetic experiences can no longer pretend to be universal, is it still possible to lay claim to a wider validity than merely that of one’s own particular culture? What type of vocabulary allows for mutual – dialogical or even polylogical – exchanges and understandings when different traditions meet, without obliterating local differences? Is there a possibility for a creative redescription of globalization? And is there a meaning of ‘the global’ that cannot be reduced to universalism and unification? Can we seek shelter in a legitimate way?
Vol. 15 | 2011  International Yearbook of Aesthetics

Digital media technologies increasingly shape how people relate to the world, to other people and to themselves. This prompts questions about present-day mediations of identity. This book explores the notion of play as a heuristic lens to look at changing media practices and identity construction. Playful media culture is analyzed far beyond its apparent manifestation in computer games. The central argument of the book is that play and games nowadays are not only appropriate metaphors to capture post-modern human identities, but also the very means by which people reflexively construct their identity.
Playful Identities presents academic research at the intersection of media theory, play and games studies, social sciences and philosophy. The book carves out a cross-disciplinary domain that connects the most recent insights from play and game studies, media research, and identity studies.
Valerie Frissen is ceo of the SIDN Fund and professor of ict & Social Change at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Sybille Lammes is associate professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick.
Michiel de Lange is a part-time lecturer New Media Studies at Utrecht University.
Jos de Mul is full professor of Philosophy of Man and Culture at the Faculty of Philosophy of Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Joost Raessens is full professor of Media Theory at the Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University.
“An illuminating study on the increasingly complexity of ludic media and technologies of the self.”
– Prof. Dr. Mathias Fuchs, Leuphana University Lüneburg
“What a brilliant, refreshing, and positively playful approach to the ludic imperative. These are the smartest, most articulate, and up-to-date essays on this subject, by the very people creating this field of study.”
– Douglas Rushkoff, author, Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, and Playing the Future.
Thanks to a  grant from The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) this book can be downloaded for free in the OApen Library (Open Access Publishing in European Networks).