Thacker's brilliant essay on biophilosophy is an attempt to go beyond simple dichotomies such as the one/ the many, mind/matter, nature/culture, human/machine to conceive of life as not simply the center of self-organization but also as constituting its peripheries.

"Today a similar process is happening with studies in self-organization and emergence. The question has changed, but its form of the problem is the same: 'how do simple local actions produce complex global patterns?' The effects of self-organization can be analyzed forever (e.g. 'ant colony optimization') and they can be applied to computer science (e.g. CG in film, telecommunications routing). But a central mysticism is produced at its core, for if there is no external, controlling factor (environment, genes, blueprints) then how can there be control at all? Again, 'life itself' the ineffable, the absent center. In this sense life follows the laws of thought: it is self-identical (whatever is living continues to be so until it ceases to be living), non-contradictory (something cannot both be living and non-living), and either is or is not (something either is or is not living, there is no grey zone to life). It is in this sense that 'life' and 'thought' find their common meeting point.

Clearly inspired by Deleuze, Thacker contrasts biophilosophy to the discipline called the philosophy of biology:

"Whereas the philosophy of biology (especially in the 20th century) is increasingly concerned with reducing life to number (from mechanism to genetics), biophilosophy sees a different kind of number, one that runs through life (a combinatoric, proliferating number, the number of graphs, groups, and sets). Whereas the philosophy of biology renews mechanism in order to purge itself of all vitalism ('vitalism' is one of the curse words of biology...), biophilosophy renews vitalism in order to purge it of all theology (and in this sense number is vitalistic).    more »