Life's Pasts and Futures: On Being and Science

It is hard to imagine a question more important than ‘What is life?’ Historically, both philosophy and science made attempts to locate or define the nature/essence of life itself.

But recent thought recognizes that life is not just a thing to study, since ways of thinking about life alter what counts as living which then has ethico-political implications for what and whose lives matter.

This shift from theorizing life itself to framing life as a 'problem' forms the basis of the two books that will be delivered in this project, with a caveat that new modes of knowing life, like epigenetics, present challenges that must be addressed.

The first monograph 'Vital Ontologies: The Facts of Life, Reconsidered' catalogues and critically explores the history of theories of life, shows why new modes of thought are needed, and builds on emerging theories to sketch an original theory of the problem of life.

The second, co-authored monograph 'Future Perfect: Life in an Epigenetic Tense' uses that theoretical basis to reimagine the problem of life through epigenetic science with the aim to offer a novel framework for analyzing the problem of life anew.

These books seek to make substantial contributions to philosophy of science and critical fields that address the problem of life explicitly or implicitly, e.g. gender, sexuality, race, environmental, and animal studies, and to deepen knowledge about what constitutes an individual or a life and the effects that has on possibilities for living.