Benjamin Saffell

Ben’s PhD project focuses on the natural philosophy of Gilbert Simondon. It explores how Simondon reshapes the investigations of Aristotle’s Physics in a bid to discover the underlying structure of creation in nature (i.e. phenomena of growth, production, and emergence in matter), and what this implies about the structure of nature in general. In doing so, it extracts and develops a theory of space and time from Simondon’s writings, and asks how this theory relates to the history of space-time conceptions, quantum physics, and the concept of cause. Throughout, it grounds Simondon’s investigations in the history of science and the philosophies of Bergson, Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty. It also shows how Simondon’s thought challenges the phenomenological tradition and rivals Heidegger’s ontological investigations. Once these results are worked out, Ben asks how Simondon’s thinking contributes to the contemporary resurgence of natural philosophy, ontology, and the project of biosemiotics. It shows how Simondon works out an independent theory of how meaning is manifest in matter, rivaling both Peirce and von Uexküll’s more familiar accounts.