1 Heraclitus and the Fire of Life
Introduction
Φύσις and the First Beginning of Western Thinking
Heraclitus’s Doctrine of Logos: Cosmic Λόγος and Human λόγος
Λόγος (the Homologizable One) and λόγος-σοφόν (the Thinkable-Knowable)
Notes
2 The Power of Reason and the Strife for Life
Friedrich Nietzsche: The Being of Life, The Will to Power and the Eternal Recurrence
Michel Foucault: Biopower and the Strategies of Power-in-Knowledge of Life
Dominique Janicaud: The Truth of Being and the Power of the Rational
Notes
3 Biothermodynamics and the Question Concerning Life
The “to be thought of Φύσις” and the “ever emergent Life”
Vladimir Vernadsky: The Biosphere
Sadi Carnot and Rudolpf Clausius: The Classical Theory of the Entropy Law
Ludwig Boltzmann and James Maxwell: Entropy as Disorder and Probability in Statistical Mechanics
Alfred Lotka: The Entropic Law of Maximum Power
Erwin Schrödinger: Life as Negative Entropy
Ilya Prigogine: "Order Out of Chaos": the Dissipative Processes of Far-From-Equilibrium Structures
Arthur Peacocke: The Physico-Chemistry of Biological Organization
Jeffrey Wicken: A Thermodynamic Extension of the Darwinian Program
Steward Kauffman: The Reinvention of Φύσις and the Negentropic Creativity of Life
Paradoxes, Aporias, Dilemmas, and Theoretical Strategies of Life Thermodynamics: Delusions of Entropy in the Entrails of Life
Notes
4 Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s Bioeconomics: The Economic Process and the Entropic Death of the Planet
The Law of Entropy and Economic Value
Entropy, Bioeconomics, and Life Thermodynamics
Entropy and Negentropy in the Metabolism of Ecosystems and the Economic Process
The Τέψνη of a Global Φύσις: A Bioeconomic Paradigm of Negentropic Productivity
Negentropy, Sustainability, and Culture
Time and Entropy. Building a Sustainable Future
Notes
Biography
Enrique Leff is Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Social Research and the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and Emeritus Researcher at the National Council of Humanities, Science, and Technology (CONAHCyT), Mexico. He was the former coordinator of the Environmental Training Network for Latin America and the Caribbean at the United Nations Environment Program. He is the author of Political Ecology: Deconstructing Capital and Territorializing Life (2021) and Green Production: Towards an Environmental Rationality (1995).
