Research Project
Vital Normativity
Metanoia is pleased to announce the Vital Normativity: Beyond the Is/Ought Divide research project, headed by assoc. prof. Sebastjan Vörös (Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana) and organised jointly with Metanoia.
Exploring the idea and implications of vital normativity as a key feature of living beings, the project will encompass a symposium and workshop taking place in Fall 2023, an international conference in 2024, as well as a series of related online articles, including papers, reports, and interviews, intended both for academic and wider audiences. On this website, you may find general information, announcements, and articles concerning project activities.
Learn more about the project
The purpose of this project is to explore the idea of vital normativity and its scientific and philosophical implications. This concept seeks to capture the inherent normative capacities of living beings to determine their own conditions of viability and to engage dynamically and meaningfully with their environments in ways that are conducive to their preservation and development. Drawing on a number of thinkers, schools of thought, and disciplines, we will challenge reductionist and mechanicist views prevalent in the life sciences, compare vital normativity with related ideas, such as autonomy, emergence, and teleology, and explore the important bearings it has on how we understand both the relation of the objective and phenomenal worlds as well as the is/ought gap.
This project is supported by a grant from the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford made possible by funding from the John Templeton Foundation.
Events
24.-25.
NOV
2023
“What Is Life” Symposium
Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Recent Posts
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One of the speakers at the What Is Life symposium taking place between the 24th and 25th November 2023 is going to be Konrad Werner, a philosopher based…
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Not by structures alone: Can the immune system recognize microbial functions? (Gregor P. Greslehner)
One of the speakers at the “What Is Life?” symposium is going to be Gregor P. Greslehner, a philosopher of science, trained in philosophy and molecular biology. Currently,…
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In our last post we presented an illustrative example of normative value arising out of a self-sustaining life form. We saw that the normative dimension, which differentiates between…
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Welcome to the Vital Normativity Project Blog! We are delighted that you share our enthusiasm for exploring alternative ways of understanding life. In this post, I will try…
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The paper investigates the phenomenon of vitalism through the lens of vital normativity as expounded by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Canguilhem. I argue that the two authors independently…