Ch. 1. All the colors of a rainbow in a worm or: what is life? / Reinhard Eichelbeck -- ch. 2. Life - a problem inherent in the research context / Franz-Theo Gottwald -- ch. 3. Truth and knowledge / Wolfram Schommers -- ch. 4. The formative powers of developing organisms / Lev V. Beloussov -- ch. 5. Electromagnetic, symbiotic and informational interactions in the kingdom of organisms / Gunter M. Rothe -- ch. 6. Dead molecules and the live organism / Roeland Van Wijk -- ch. 7. Inanimate and animate matter: orderings of immaterial connectedness - the physical basis of life / Hans-Peter Dürr -- ch. 8. Communication - basis of life / Lebrecht von Klitzing -- ch. 9. Can biological effects emerge from inorganic nano-systems? / Michael Rieth and Wolfram Schommers -- ch. 10. Substantial and non-substantial structure in living systems / Jiin-Ju Chang (Jinzhu Zhang) -- ch. 11. On the essence of life - a physical but nonreductionistic examination / Hans-Jürgen Fischbeck -- ch. 12. Coherent excitations in living biosystems and their implications: a qualitative overview / G.J. Hyland -- ch. 13. Biophotonics - a powerful tool for investigating and understanding life / Fritz-Albert Popp -- ch. 14. Biophoton and the quantum vision of life / R.P. Bajpai -- ch. 15. Quantum mechanics, computability theory and life / John Swain -- ch. 16. Bose-Einstein condensation of photons, does it play a vital role in the understanding of life? / Eberhard Müller

Introduces a broad range of scientific and philosophical issues about life through the original historical and contemporary sources.

The book of Erwin Schrödinger about life evokes a variety of basic questions concerning the understanding of life in terms of modern physics rather than biochemistry. Problems of organization and regulation of biological systems cannot be understood by revealing only the chemical processes of the living state. A group of reputable physicists — among them the followers of Heisenberg and Fröhlich — and biologists came to this same conclusion through several workshops on this topic. This book contains their contributions, written from different viewpoints of theoretical physics and modern biology. These articles are valuable not only for understanding life, but also for creating new and non-invasive diagnostic and therapeutic tools in medicine; they also contribute importantly to a deeper understanding of evolutionary processes, including the development of consciousness.

This book makes four bold claims: 1) life is an ultimate datum, open to philosophical analysis and irreducible to physical reality; hence all materialist-reductionist explanations - most current theories - of life are false. 2) All life presupposes soul (entelechy) without which a being would at best fake life. 3) The concept of life is analogous and the most direct access to life in its irreducibility is gained through consciousness; 4) All life possesses an objective and intrinsic value that needs to be respected, human life possesses beyond this an inviolable dignity. Life and personal life are pure perfections, it being absolutely better to possess (personal) life than not to possess it. Chapter 1: the metaphysical essence and the many meanings of 'life,' as well as its 'transcendental' character. Chapter 2: the irreducibility of biological life, its amazing empirical and philosophically intelligible essential features, and the ways of knowing them. Chapter 3: the immediate evidence and indubitable givenness of mental, conscious life as well as questions of (brain-) death and immortality. Chapter 4: the inviolable objective dignity of personal life and its self-transcendence; a new theory of the fourfold source of human dignity and rights. Chapter 5 (in dialogue-form): methods and results of philosophy versus those of empirical life-sciences.

This book integrates philosophy of biology and philosophy of medicine with the purpose of making philosophy practical for students and scientists. It contains many exercises and examples from live science. Much attention is given to the translation of scientific reasoning into the language of philosophy. The author shows that philosophical models can be used to evaluate science, if the limitations of the models are recognized so they can be applied in the proper context. On the other hand, some philosophical views of science need to be corrected by science. The book puts philosophy and science in a broader perspective. It integrates practical philosophy and ethics in applications to live science and uncovers limitations of current ethical theory.

This book explores the concept of Life from a range of perspectives. Divided into three parts, it first examines the concept of Life from physics to biology. It then presents insights on the concept from the perspectives of philosophy, theology, and ethics. The book concludes with chapters on the hermeneutics of Life, and pays special attention to the Biosemiotics approach to the concept. The question ‘What is Life?’ has been deliberated by the greatest minds throughout human history. Life as we know it is not a substance or fundamental property, but a complex process. It is not an easy task to develop an unequivocal approach towards Life combining scientific, semiotic, philosophical, theological, and ethical perspectives. In its combination of these perspectives, and its wide-ranging scope, this book opens up levels and identifies issues which can serve as intersections for meaningful interdisciplinary discussions of Life in its different aspects. The book includes the four plenary lectures and selected, revised and extended papers from workshops of the 14th European Conference on Science and Theology (ECST XIV) held in Tartu, Estonia, April 2012.

First published in 1931, this volume represents the culmination of twenty years’ of the study on the principles of science. Noticing a widespread craving for philosophical light at a time of scant such offerings, Morris R. Cohen aimed to demonstrate here the fundamental and ancient connection between nature and science - between hearts and minds – in an attempt to salve the developing mutual hostility between the two in the 1920s. The volume bears particular relation to George Santayana’s Life of Reason and Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics and explores areas including the character of the insurgence against reason and reason in the contexts of the natural and social sciences.