Nicole C. Karafyllis

Nicole C. Karafyllis (born 22 April 1970 in Lüdinghausen, West Germany), is a German-Greek philosopher and biologist. Since 2010, she is Department Chair and Philosophy Professor at the TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig/Brunswick Institute of Technology (Germany).

Biography

Nicole Christine Karafyllis was born in Germany as the child of a German mother and a Greek father. From 1989 to 1994, she studied biology and philosophy at the Universities of Erlangen and Tübingen. In 1991, she was a visiting student at the University of Stirling in Scotland (UK). She received a doctorate at the University of Tübingen in 1999 at the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities. Her Habilitation in philosophy was completed at the University of Stuttgart in 2006, dealing with the topic Phenomenology of Growth. Philosophy and scientific History of productive Life between Nature and Technology. For ten years, 1998–2008, she has been working at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany and was a scholar of Günter Ropohl. In 2007 she has been a Visiting Professor for Applied Philosophy of Science at Vienna University (Austria). 2008 - 2010, she moved to the United Arab Emirates and was Full Professor of Philosophy at the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU). In fall 2010 she was senior research fellow of the International Centre for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna (Austria).[1] She returned to Germany in summer 2010 to become Department Chair of the Philosophy Department at Technische Universität Braunschweig. Since 2013, she regularly visits the philosophy department (arts+science-group)[2] at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City for research purposes (projects on Spanisch-German philosophy in the early 20th century and beyond).

Her 2013 book entitled "Cleaning as Passion" (German orig. Putzen als Passion) became a philosophy bestseller in Germany.[3] It is both an introduction into philosophical problems and an ironic version of a self-help book on cleaning and related techniques. In addition, a calendar for 2015 is produced, including 52 postcards with philosophical sentences about cleaning (entitled: Putzen ist nichts für Feiglinge / Cleaning is not for cowards).

Philosophy

Karafyllis is engaged in a cultural philosophy of science and technology, making use of a history of ideas perspective without compromising the idea of manual and material culture. She is particularly known for her philosophical works on the modeling interfaces between biology and technology (the concept of biofact), and for her union of phenomenology and philosophy of technology. She also works on the "spirit of craftsmanship".[4] Her philosophical fields of work are phenomenology, anthropology, bioethics, philosophy of technology, philosophy of science, history of science, technology assessment, in which she develops a theory of biofacticity. She introduced the term biofact in philosophy in 2001, to stress the shifting borders between the concepts of nature, biology and technology. Other main topics of her work are the philosophy of plants, situated in a phenomenology of growth, and the philosophy of emotions in light of the neurosciences.

Selected publications

Books (in English)

Books (in German)

Karafyllis is co-editor of the newly (2012) launched book series PHYSIS on Naturphilosophie/Philosophy of Nature at the German publishing house of Karl Alber in Freiburg.

Articles in English

References

  1. See the website of the IFK at http://www.ifk.ac.at
  2. See the webpage of the Arts+Science group at UNAM http://www.artemasciencia.com/news.html
  3. See for example the interview in Germany's daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 2014, on the webpage of the journalist Anne Haeming http://www.annehaeming.de/interviews/interview-mit-nicole-karafyllis-fas/
  4. See also Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, 2008; Hans Blumenberg: Geistesgeschichte der Technik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2009 (in German)

External links

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