Recent research about the microbiome points to a picture in which we, humans, are ‘living through’ nature, and nature itself is living in us. Our bodies are hosting—and depend on—the multiple species that constitute human microbiota. This article will discuss current research on the microbiome through the ideas of Japanese ecologist Imanishi Kinji (1902–1992). First, some of Imanishi’s key ideas regarding the world of living beings and multispecies societies are presented. Second, seven types of relationships concerning the human microbiome, human (...) beings, and the environment are explored. Third, inspired by Imanishi’s work, this paper develops the idea of dynamic, porous, and complex multispecies societies in which different living beings or species are codependent on others, including microbiota and human beings. (shrink)

While in the humanities and social sciences at large we can observe posthumanist developments that engage with the microbiome, microbes are still not a major topic of discussion within environmental ethics. That the environmental ethics literature has not engaged extensively with this topic is surprising considering the range of theoretical challenges (and opportunities) it poses for environmental theorising. So, this paper is ‘looking through the microscope’ from an environmental ethics angle in order to see how these little beings challenge what (...) we consider to be ethically relevant and how we conduct moral theorising. Especially interesting is how a focus on microbes can simultaneously support and challenge individualist biocentric intuitions and theories, which attribute moral standing to (some) microbes. Accordingly, the main aim of this paper is to lay out crucial aspects of these challenges and present some initial arguments about why not all of them pose a serious threat to biocentric theorising—including biocentric theories of interspecies justice. The three challenges discussed are (1) the moral significance challenge, (2) the self-defence predicament, and (3) undermining individualist biocentric intuitions. (shrink)

Synthetic biology is often seen as the engineering turn in biology. Philosophically speaking, entities created by synthetic biology, from synthetic cells to xenobots, challenge the ontological divide between the organic and inorganic, as well as between the natural and the artificial. Entities such as synthetic cells can be seen as hybrid or transitory objects, or neo–things. However, what has remained philosophically underexplored so far is the impact these hybrid neo–things will have on (our phenomenological experience of) the living world. By (...) extrapolating from Walter Benjamin’s account of how technological reproducibility affects the aura of art, we embark upon an exploratory inquiry that seeks to fathom how the technological reproducibility of life itself may influence our experience and understanding of the living. We conclude that, much as technologies that enabled reproduction corroded the aura of original artworks (as Benjamin argued), so too will the aura of life be under siege in the era of synthetic lifeforms. This article zooms in on a specific case study, namely the research project Building a Synthetic Cell (BaSyC) and its mission to create a synthetic cell–like entity, as autonomous as possible, focusing on the properties that differentiate organic from synthetic cells. (shrink)