The ICI Berlin is an independent research centre dedicated to exploring how diverse cultures can be brought into productive rather than pernicious confrontation.
The Institute enacts an expansive and deliberately dissonant understanding of culture that includes cultural formations (involving categories of class, gender, sexuality, and race) as well as fields of knowledge production (science, art, economics, law, media, politics).
It defines itself through a series of interlocking core projects that are designed to traverse different disciplines and foster theoretical and critical interventions of cultural inquiry. The ICI Berlin understands itself as a catalyst of radical reflection within a larger research landscape in Berlin and beyond, frequently also as a link between scholarship, cultural work, artistic practices, and activism.
Postdoctoral fellows are invited from across the globe to spend two years at the Institute to pursue their individual projects in varied disciplines, but also to shape, advance, and probe the Institute’s core project in a weekly research colloquium as well as by collaboratively organizing workshops, symposia, and conferences.
Fellowships are usually advertised every other year for a particular core project. Applications can only be considered when received during the application period.
Parallel to its ongoing research colloquium, the ICI Berlin organizes a variety of performances, panel discussions, art events, and readings, welcoming diverse audiences living in or passing through Berlin. It also welcomes cooperations with partner institutions and other research projects.
Founded in 2006 as a private non-profit organization, the ICI Berlin is situated in Prenzlauer Berg on the border to Berlin-Mitte within the Pfefferberg Complex, a former brewery turned into a cultural and social centre. It has several private and public spaces for research, conversation, and exchange, including a research library for staff and fellows, which reflects past and present core projects and facilitates the use of other libraries in Berlin.
Further information can be found across our website https://www.ici-berlin.org.
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The ICI Berlin is an independent research centre dedicated to exploring how diverse cultures can be brought into productive rather than pernicious confrontation.
The Institute enacts an expansive and deliberately dissonant understanding of culture that includes cultural formations (involving categories of class, gender, sexuality, and race) as well as fields of knowledge production (science, art, economics, law, media, politics).
It defines itself through a series of interlocking core projects that are designed to traverse different disciplines and foster theoretical and critical interventions of cultural inquiry. The ICI Berlin understands itself as a catalyst of radical reflection within a larger research landscape in Berlin and beyond, frequently also as a link between scholarship, cultural work, artistic practices, and activism.
Postdoctoral fellows are invited from across the globe to spend two years at the Institute to pursue their individual projects in varied disciplines, but also to shape, advance, and probe the Institute’s core project in a weekly research colloquium as well as by collaboratively organizing workshops, symposia, and conferences.
Fellowships are usually advertised every other year for a particular core project. Applications can only be considered when received during the application period.
Parallel to its ongoing research colloquium, the ICI Berlin organizes a variety of performances, panel discussions, art events, and readings, welcoming diverse audiences living in or passing through Berlin. It also welcomes cooperations with partner institutions and other research projects.
Founded in 2006 as a private non-profit organization, the ICI Berlin is situated in Prenzlauer Berg on the border to Berlin-Mitte within the Pfefferberg Complex, a former brewery turned into a cultural and social centre. It has several private and public spaces for research, conversation, and exchange, including a research library for staff and fellows, which reflects past and present core projects and facilitates the use of other libraries in Berlin.
Further information can be found across our website https://www.ici-berlin.org.
Daniel S. Brooks: Scale Ranges - The Variety of Matter’s Forms, and Levels of Organization as Local Maxima
ICI Edition
1 hour 8 minutes 43 seconds
7 months ago
Daniel S. Brooks: Scale Ranges - The Variety of Matter’s Forms, and Levels of Organization as Local Maxima
Originally applied to preserve a materialist worldview that extends beyond physics and chemistry, the notion of levels of organization is one of the most recognizable ideas in biology. Although sometimes (erroneously) used interchangeably, the relationship between ‘levels’ and ‘scale’ presents an exciting (and relatively unexplored) area in theoretical biology and the history and philosophy of science. Here, Brooks will address this lacuna by clarifying how the two notions can inform and enhance one another. To this effect, he links up the idea of levels of organization with the insight that putative levels (e.g., cells, tissue, and ecosystems) exhibit distributed clustering that extends across scale ranges rather than particular part-whole demarcations. This ‘local maxima’ approach suggests that levels should be seen as a spectrum, where attributing discrete identity (as a particular type of, e.g., cell, tissue, ecosystem) is distributed across distinct and moderately localized or regional resolutions in time and space.
Daniel S. Brooks is a professor for theoretical philosophy at the University of Wuppertal. His research interests span the history and philosophy of the life sciences (particularly developmental biology, ecology, and neuroscience), concept usage in science, naturalized epistemology, methodology in philosophy of science, and existentialism. He has held multiple research fellowships, including at the Konrad Lorenz Institute, Ruhr-University Bochum, and the University of Minnesota. His current project focuses on a systematic investigation and analysis of the concept of levels of organization in contemporary and historical biological thought. His edited volume on levels, titled Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences and co-edited with James DiFrisco and William C. Wimsatt, appeared in 2021 at MIT Press. More info can be found at www.danielsbrooks.com.
Full video: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/daniel-s-brooks/
ICI Edition
The ICI Berlin is an independent research centre dedicated to exploring how diverse cultures can be brought into productive rather than pernicious confrontation.
The Institute enacts an expansive and deliberately dissonant understanding of culture that includes cultural formations (involving categories of class, gender, sexuality, and race) as well as fields of knowledge production (science, art, economics, law, media, politics).
It defines itself through a series of interlocking core projects that are designed to traverse different disciplines and foster theoretical and critical interventions of cultural inquiry. The ICI Berlin understands itself as a catalyst of radical reflection within a larger research landscape in Berlin and beyond, frequently also as a link between scholarship, cultural work, artistic practices, and activism.
Postdoctoral fellows are invited from across the globe to spend two years at the Institute to pursue their individual projects in varied disciplines, but also to shape, advance, and probe the Institute’s core project in a weekly research colloquium as well as by collaboratively organizing workshops, symposia, and conferences.
Fellowships are usually advertised every other year for a particular core project. Applications can only be considered when received during the application period.
Parallel to its ongoing research colloquium, the ICI Berlin organizes a variety of performances, panel discussions, art events, and readings, welcoming diverse audiences living in or passing through Berlin. It also welcomes cooperations with partner institutions and other research projects.
Founded in 2006 as a private non-profit organization, the ICI Berlin is situated in Prenzlauer Berg on the border to Berlin-Mitte within the Pfefferberg Complex, a former brewery turned into a cultural and social centre. It has several private and public spaces for research, conversation, and exchange, including a research library for staff and fellows, which reflects past and present core projects and facilitates the use of other libraries in Berlin.
Further information can be found across our website https://www.ici-berlin.org.
