BioInspired! So What? Now What!

2022/12/09 The link to the event website below was broken and has been corrected.  The Zoom link is available as an attachment to this document or by clicking here. 

We are happy to welcome Henry Dicks in our series of online seminars on the philosophy of biomimetics on Monday, 12. December 2022, 8 pm CET / 7pm UCT / 2 pm EST.

The Zoom link will be posted on this list before the event, and published on https://biomimetics.hypotheses.org/events

Abstract: Implicit in Janine Benyus’s influential exposition of biomimicry is the idea that it embodies a new epistemological relation to nature. Nature is no longer simply what we learn about, the object of our knowledge, but what we learn from, the source of our knowledge. As it stands, however, this insight remains under-theorized and has yet to be brought into sustained dialogue with contemporary epistemology. In this talk, I will first develop the contrast between conventional epistemology (learning about nature) and what I propose to call “biomimetic epistemology” (learning from nature), before comparing and contrasting biomimetic epistemology with various different alternative epistemologies, including naturalized epistemology, externalist epistemology, social epistemology, feminist epistemology, environmental epistemology, and indigenous epistemology. By way of conclusion, I will spell out the various ways in which I think biomimetic epistemology is significant.

Henry Dicks is an environmental philosopher, currently teaching environmental ethics and environmental political philosophy at University Jean Moulin Lyon 3. His research focuses on the philosophy of biomimicry, which he analyses in its ontological, technological, ethical and epistemological dimensions. Following the completion of a DPhil at the University of Oxford on Heidegger and environmental philosophy, he has held two post-docs at the Institute of Philosophical Research of the University of Lyon, the most recent one in a collaborative research project of the University of Lyon’s urban studies research centre, IMU (Intelligence des Mondes Urbains), on the emerging concept of “biomimetic cities”.

His new book, The Biomimicry Revolution: Learning from Nature How to Inhabit the Earth, will be published with Columbia University Press in March 2023.