Recent theoretical developments within the ‘New Biology’, especially evolutionary thought, have shifted the biological framework away from stability, instead preferring change. No longer are biological structures considered in synchronic, ahistorical mathematical rigidity – abandoning DNA’s so-called ‘book of life’ – but rather, as dynamic manifestations of reciprocal causation, wherein interactions take foremost privilege.

The project renders the logic underlying this new paradigm explicit, laying out the resulting consequences: a paradigmatic shift, eschewing ontological reductionism, whilst presenting wholesale reform of concepts of ’emergence’. To frame this, the project will uniquely approach the new biology’s data through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, exposing the inherent constitutive entwinement of the body and world as “communion” – articulated through niche construction’s bidirectional and multivalent causation.

This project’s transdisciplinary method offers a radical reinterpretation of the ancient and contemporary question: what is life? By refocussing on the inescapability of embodiment, whilst eschewing the typical philosophy of science body-world distinction, an ontology of life as experienced is forged – as flesh.