UTOPISM. *** In the long run, nothing else is realistic. *** Welcome to the English language blog of Morten Tønnessen, Professor of philosophy at University of Stavanger's Department of Social Studies.
Today I have had half a book writing day, with some 700 words written on my scientific monograph Captured: CCS and the fight for the soul of the environmental movement. So far this Spring I have had 62,5 writing days, including 53,5 book writing days.
By now in 2025 I have logged 52.036 words written. This is more than what I wrote in the entire year of 2024 (51.879 words).
Yesterday I followed a philosophy lecture at undergraduate level at University of Oxford, as part of my "academic updating" here during my visit to Oxford, tied to the university´s Faculty of philosophy. I also attended a public talk at University of Oxford´s China Centre, “China’s Ambitions to Explore the Moon and the Prospects for Lunar Governance”, by Prof. Martin Elvis (Harvard University) and Dr Alanna Krolikowski (Missouri University of Science and Technology).
Today I have attended another public talk, “Triangulating a global view on inequality from secondary data sources” by Joe Hasell at INET Oxford.
The article "Sign-free Biosemantics and Transcendental Phenomenology: a Better Non-Metaphysical Approach to Close the Mind-body Gap" by Zixuan Liu (Department of Philosophy, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China) has just been published in Biosemiotics. It includes criticism of my approach to phenomenology in the context of biosemiotics, and more specifically "Uexküllian phenomenology". Excerpts (in selection):
Tønnessen et al. (2018: 326-327) have argued that “it does likewise not make sense, from a biosemiotic point of view, to say that there are non-semiotic phenomena”, and argue that “a strictly Husserlian concept of mind is much too narrow to capture all biosemiotic phenomena”. ... On an initial reading, the objection is that Husserl’s theory of meaning is based on phenomenal consciousness, yet we lack robust evidence that this form of consciousness is to be found in primitive forms of life. This argument is implicit in Tønnessen (2015) and Tønnessen et al. (2018), where we find the claim that “a bacterium” has only “non-phenomenal Umwelt experience” because it is not “endowed with mind” (2018: 326). If this is right, it is unjustifiably anthropomorphic to apply Husserlian concepts to biosemiotics. I do not intend to provide strong evidence for the existence of phenomenal consciousness in primitive forms of life, but at least a weak form of quasi-mind thinking can be found in our conception of microbiology. (p. 6)
Husserl would have strongly repudiated subsequent work in biosemiotics that identifies his views with anthropocentrism: “Umwelt theory challenges central dogmas in current phenomenology, starting with the misguided idea that all phenomena are human phenomena” (Tønnessen et al., 2018: p. 328). The difficulties discussed so far merely indicate that phenomenology should reform itself while at the same time reforming biosemiotics. In doing so, it will become possible to tackle primitive forms of life in a scientific manner. p. (7)
