Organisms

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2024

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In episode 107 of Overthink, David and Ellie take up a philosophical perspective on biology’s squirmiest concept: the organism. From Kant’s distinction between organisms and mechanisms, to Deleuze and Guattari’s infamous call for ‘bodies without organs,’ they uncover and question the ontological and metaphorical baggage behind the concept. Their exploration takes them from the bottom of Sea of Naples to the heights of Romantic Idealism, passing through the tensions of contemporary genetics. Plus, in the Patreon bonus, they discuss the unexpected relations between organisms, politics, and reason through the thought of Lukács and Canguilhem.

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed
Georges Canguillhem, Knowledge of Life
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment
Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason
Jennifer Mensch, Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy
Friedrich Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature
Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail
D. M. Walsh, Organisms, Agency, and Evolution

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Overthink.
0:16.4	The podcast where two philosophers take ideas you didn't know were philosophy and show you that philosophy has a lot to say about them.
0:24.3	One discipline to rule them all, baby.
0:27.1	Dr. David Pena Guzman.
0:29.4	Oh, goodness.
0:30.9	I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.
0:33.9	Well, Ellie, today I want to begin by telling you a little story about the biological world.
0:39.9	And it's a story that I'm getting from the biologist Louis Thomas, who writes about it in his book, The Medusa and the Snail.
0:46.7	And it involves two species, two animals that live in the Bay of Naples in southern Italy.
0:55.0	Ooh, prime real estate.
0:56.7	Yeah, so I'm going to call them surly for the snail and Medusa for the jellyfish.
1:02.7	These creatures live in a symbiotic relationship.
1:06.5	And I want you to visualize the following scene because it's a little bit convoluted, and so it will require you to try to picture it.
1:13.4	Okay.
1:13.7	We are at the bottom of the ocean, and we have our little friend Swirley dragging itself around on the ocean floor.
1:21.2	And if you close in on Swirley, you'll realize that he has a little bump attached to the side of his mouth. It could look
1:31.1	like a pimple if he were a human being, but it is in fact a parasite. As somebody who has a
1:36.6	pimple by this head of my mouth right now, this is personal. You're seeing it on Zoom,
1:42.0	aren't you? You are Swirley, my friend. You are Swirley.
1:45.6	So I'm Swirley, you're Medusa. Yeah. So Swirley has a little thing on the side of the mouth that is actually a parasite.
1:52.9	But it is not a typical parasite. It's a little tiny jellyfish that is attached to its body.
2:00.2	Or rather, to be more exact, it is what remains of a jellyfish that the snail has previously
	...

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