About

Henry Dicks

Introducing Myself

My name is Henry Dicks. I obtained a D.Phil from the University of Oxford, studied as a postdoc at the Institute of Philosophical Research at the University of Lyon, and now teach environmental philosophy at University Jean Moulin Lyon 3 and Shanghai University. I am currently a visiting fellow at the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) at the University of Leeds, where I am writing a book, The Biomimicry Revolution: Foundations of a New Philosophy. I created this website to stimulate interest in thinking about the relation between philosophy and biomimicry, to provide access to academic research on the subject (see Resources), and to publicize and discuss upcoming events on this topic (see Blog).

Philosophy and Biomimicry: A Brief History

Biomimicry strikes a lot of people as an entirely recent phenomenon, but the idea that technology imitates nature goes back at least as far as the philosophers of Ancient Greece.

Democritus, the founder of atomism, thought that houses first arose from imitating the nests of swallows, and weaving from imitating the webs of spiders. And in their own different ways, Plato and Aristotle also saw technology (techne) as imitation (mimesis) of nature (physis). Despite the ideological upheavals of the Medieval and Modern periods, the idea remained in vigour until approximately the end of the 18th century.

This classical view of techne was then directly attacked by Hegel in the early 19th century, and the first “philosophers of technology” rejected nature imitation, affirming instead what Max Eyth called the “spiritual autonomy” of technology: the view of technology as a discovery or invention of the human mind, and thus radically different from anything found in nature.

After two hundred years of developing technologies that work very differently from nature, and which, in doing so, have brought us to the brink of ecological apocalypse, humans are once again looking to nature as a profound source of inspiration, both for technological innovation and for other aspects of human life (society, business, ethics, etc.). And in recent years, philosophers have once again started taking an interest in biomimicry too.

Contemporary Philosophy of Biomimicry

Probably the first philosophical study of the contemporary biomimicry movement was Freya Mathews’ 2011 article, “Towards a Deeper Philosophy of Biomimicry”. Over the following decade, a number of other philosophers have published on the subject – Vincent Blok, Hub Zwart, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, and myself (to name just a few) – including in a recent special issue of the journal, Environmental Values, edited by Vincent Blok and myself on the topic (see Resources for the articles from this SI). The key questions addressed in contemporary philosophy of biomimicry include:

  • What understanding of nature underpins, or should underpin, biomimicry?
  • How does biomimetic innovation work? What exactly falls under its scope? And how is it different from conventional innovation?
  • Can nature provide not just models for our technologies, but also the basis of an ethics? And, if so, what sort of ethics would that be?
  • How exactly are we to understand and put into practice the biomimetic view of nature as a source of knowledge and wisdom?
  • What is the place of the “Biomimicry Revolution” in history? Is it a new Industrial Revolution, a new Renaissance, or something else again?

My Take on the Relation between Philosophy and Biomimicry

Personally, I do not see biomimicry as just one object of philosophical inquiry amongst others, but rather as itself a new philosophy. It is in this respect that I think biomimicry differs from the related fields of biomimetics, bio-inspiration, and bionics, which are better understood as just design approaches or strategies.

The philosophical nature of biomimicry is visible above all, I believe, in its foundational principles, as set out by Janine Benyus in the epigraph to her seminal 1997 book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. I see these principles as providing biomimicry with ‘technical’, ‘ethical’, and ‘epistemological’ principles that together provide the Biomimicry Revolution with its philosophical foundations:

1. Nature as Model: Technical Principle

2. Nature as Measure: Ethical Principle

3. Nature as Mentor: Epistemological Principle

When combined with philosophical reflection into the nature of nature, thoughtful reflection and implementation of these principles amounts to the adoption of a new philosophy, a new way of understanding and relating to nature – one that, I believe, contains many of the key elements needed if global ecological catastrophe is to be averted.

Dedication

This site is dedicated to Philip Ginsberg (RIP), who first encouraged me to set up a website about philosophy and biomimicry.