In Context




At 20-24 pages in length and highlighting the work of our staff, In Context is produced twice yearly in-house. There is no subscription fee, although we do encourage voluntary donations. We also ask for postage and handling costs from overseas subscribers. Shortly after publication of the hard-copy version, we place its contents online. If you would like to receive either the hard-copy version or an email linking to the online version, please join our mailing list. In either case you will also receive occasional notifications about Institute activities.

Currently In Context is a strictly in-house publication; we do not accept manuscript submissions. We do, however, welcome your comments. Please email the editor, Ryan Shea, or the authors of articles.


Current Issue

In Context #54 (Fall 2025)

  • Why We Cannot Explain the Form of Organisms

  • Is the Earth Alive?

  • Two New Books

Back Issues

In Context #53 (Spring 2025)

  • Beyond Intelligence: Life in a Relational World

  • Autumn Colors: Continuing a Study

  • Teaching Toward an Understanding of Climate Change

In Context #52 (Fall 2024)

  • The Trouble With Factors

  • Teaching to Understand

  • Collaborative Practice: Bringing Plant Families to Appearance

  • Unintended Consequences

In Context #51 (Spring 2024)

  • Are Plants Intelligent?

  • How Do Biomolecules Know What To Do?

  • Organisms and the Phenomena of Life

  • Springing Into Color

In Context #50 (Fall 2023)

  • Putting Goethean Ideas to Work

  • A Project on “Intelligence in Nature”

  • Addressing Climate Change in Education

  • Dialogical Knowing

  • Plant Observation: Enhancing Our Capacities to Perceive and Understand

In Context #49 (Spring 2023)

  • Preface to a Thirteen-Year Project

  • Recalling What We Have Hidden

  • Being Hydra

  • Generative Knowing in Education: An Example

In Context #48 (Fall, 2022)

  • How Does the World Lend Itself to Our Knowing?

  • Learning and the Experience of Meaning

  • Shadows and Sun

  • An Enchanted Universe

  • From Mechanism to Organism

In Context #47 (Spring, 2022)

  • Being With the World

  • Why Is the Sky Blue?

  • Qualities of Number

  • Attending to Warmth

In Context #46 (Fall, 2021)

  • Genes and the Single Organism

  • Resonant Space

  • Suzanne Simard’s Journey

  • Exercises With Polarity

  • Living Perenniality

In Context #45 (Spring, 2021)

  • Where Does an Animal End? — The American Bison

  • Being With Buds

  • Once Upon A Night

In Context #44 (Fall, 2020)

  • Meeting Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis)

  • Natural Selection and the Purposes of Life

  • Jochen Bockemühl: A Remembrance

  • Awakening to Landscape

In Context #43 (Spring, 2020)

  • Two Questions

  • The Intertwined Worlds of Zebra and Lion

In Context #42 (Fall, 2019)

  • The Return of the Bald Eagle

  • Do Flowers Hear Bees?

  • Our Bodies Are Formed Streams

In Context #41 (Spring, 2019)

  • Understanding Mammals: Threefoldness and Diversity

  • Out of the Life of the Dairy Cow

  • The Sensitive, Muscular Cell

In Context #40 (Fall, 2018)

  • Animals in Their World

  • Our Encounter with Institutionalized Dogmatism in Biology

  • A Fresh Take on the Goethean Approach

  • Scenes of Life

  • Goal-Directed Activity in Life

In Context #39 (Spring, 2018)

  • Do We Have a Home in the Vast Cosmos?

  • Form and Forming

  • Nature Playful

In Context #38 (Fall, 2017)

  • Why Can’t Evolutionary Biologists Quit Believing in Intelligent Design?

  • Nature’s Revealing Surprises

  • When Our Way of Knowing Matters

In Context #37 (Spring, 2017)

  • Why Does a Zebra Have Stripes?

  • Children and Nature

  • What Is Life? (Let’s Take Living Things on Their Own Terms)

In Context #36 (Fall, 2016)

  • Aldo Leopold and the Deeper Nature of Nature

  • Reviving the organism

  • An Anomalous Fraxinus anomala

  • Soil, Culture, and Human Responsibility

  • In Gratitude: Georg Maier (1933-2016)

In Context #35 (Spring, 2016)

  • What Frog Evolution Can Teach Us

  • A Day in the Life of a Chicory Flower

  • Of Machines, Organisms, and Agency

In Context #34 (Fall, 2015)

  • Is a Science of Beings Possible?

  • DNA and the Whole Organism

  • Amazonian Impressions

  • Portraying Soils and Compost: Color, Form, and Pattern

In Context #33 (Spring, 2015)

  • Do Frogs Come from Tadpoles?

  • Evolution: A Third Way?

  • An Open Secret — The Calyx of Ipomoea purpurea

In Context #32 (Fall, 2014)

  • When Engineers Take Hold of Life: Synthetic Biology

  • Exploring the Exploratorium in San Francisco

  • Evolution as a Movement Toward Autonomy

  • Let’s Loosen Up Biological Thinking!

In Context #31 (Spring, 2014)

  • Goethe and the Evolution of Science

  • Of Weeds, Milkweed, and Monarchs

  • A New Book on the Heart and Circulation

In Context #30 (Fall, 2013)

  • From Mechanistic to Organismal Biology

  • Shattering the Genome

  • Rebirth of the Type

In Context #29 (Spring, 2013)

  • Rooted in the World (excerpt from book, Thinking Like a Plant

  • Plasticity, Stability, and Whole-Organism Inheritance Unity

  • Light in the Dark

  • The Form of Wholeness: Henri Bortoft on Multiplicity and Unity

In Context #28 (Fall, 2012)

  • Education and the Presence of the Unknown

  • Toward a Biology Worthy of Life

  • Eat to Regulate Your Genes?

In Context #27 (Spring, 2012)

  • Context-Sensitive Action

  • Form and the Electrified Organism

  • Holding Gently: A Story of Social Practice

In Context #26 (Fall, 2011)

  • Phenomenon Illuminates Phenomenon

  • Promising Themes in Molecular Biology

  • Contamination of Honey with GM Pollen

  • Genetically Modified Corn Is Leading to Insect Resistance

In Context #25 (Spring, 2011)

  • Mirror Images

  • Biological Engineering for Fun and Profit

  • A Modest Champion of the Whole Organism: Paul Weiss, Scientist of Distinction

In Context #24 (Fall, 2010)

  • The Experiment as Mediator of Object and Subject

  • A Shared Experience: Milkweed and Its Myriad Companions

  • An Unexpected, Submicroscopic Journey

In Context #23 (Spring, 2010)

  • Context Matters — the Epigenetics Revolution

  • The Drama of Milkweed Pollination

  • Goethe at MIT

  • More Unintended Effects of Genetic Manipulation

In Context #22 (Fall, 2009)

  • When Holism Was the Future

  • A Critique of the Modern Gene — From 1930

  • Can Biologists Speak of the “Whole Organism”?

  • Milkweed: A Brief Photoessay

In Context #21 (Spring, 2009)

  • Evolution Evolving

  • Form and Color in the Animal Kingdom

In Context #20 (Fall, 2008)

  • Save the Phenomena: The Primacy of Unmediated Experience

  • Ants, Acacias, and Herbivores

  • Digital Evolution?

  • A South African Initiative

In Context #19 (Spring, 2008)

  • Understanding the Nontarget Effects of Genetic Manipulation

  • Some Examples of Nontarget Effects of Genetic Manipulation

  • Toward a More Informed GMO Debate

In Context #18 (Fall, 2007)

  • Transformation in Adult Learning

  • Two Moons?

  • Toward a Participative Science

  • The Earth as Seen from the Moon

  • The Poorly Targeted Gene

In Context #17 (Spring, 2007)

  • Putting Genetic Miscalculation on the Record

  • Morphological Effects of Genetic Manipulation

  • E. coli and a Sick Food System

  • Stepping Out of Old Ruts

  • Purple Trillium (Trillium erectum)

  • Remembering Ourselves

In Context #16 (Fall, 2006)

  • Can We See with Fresh Eyes: Beyond a Culture of Abstraction

  • Light and Objects

  • Direct Experience

  • The Other End of the Cow

In Context #15 (Spring, 2006)

  • Understanding Infection: Not a Battle, But a Housecleaning

  • Conversation Between Friends: An Inspiration for Goethe’s Phenomenological Method

  • Will Biotech Feed the Hungry? — Looking Closer to Home

  • The Light of Sense Experience

In Context #14 (Fall, 2005)

  • The Gene: A Needed Revolution

  • The Forming Tree

  • Wildlife Observations

  • Commentary on DNA Barcoding in Bioscience

  • Aristotle’s Opinion of Modern Physics

  • The Paradox of Physics Envy: The Mental Universe

In Context #13 (Spring, 2005)

  • From Two Cultures to One: On the Relation Between Science and Art

  • Brain Activity and Conscious Experience

  • Waitomo: New Zealand’s Glow-worm Caves

In Context #12 (Fall, 2004)

  • Genes Are Not Immune to Context — Examples from Bacteria

  • The Giraffe in Its World

  • Quantum Puzzles

  • The Building-Block Universe

In Context #11 (Spring, 2004)

  • From Wonder Bread to GM Lettuce

  • Science and the Child

  • The Trouble with Genetically Modified Crops

  • Widespread GM Contamination of Seed Supply

  • Genesis of the Gene

In Context #10 (Fall, 2003)

  • The Giraffe’s Short Neck

  • Qualities

  • Words, Mechanisms, and Life

  • The Form of Evolution

  • Assessing a Pig’s Life

In Context #9 (Spring, 2003)

  • How Does a Mole View the World?

  • To Explain or Portray

  • The Case of Mexican Maize

  • African Impressions (Part 2)

In Context #8 (Fall, 2002)

  • Portraying a Meadow

  • Love and Detachment: How We Can Reconnect with Nature

  • Do Organisms Merely Survive?

  • African Impressions (Part 1)

  • The Tyranny of a Concept

In Context #7 (Spring, 2002)

  • The Dynamic Heart and Circulation

  • The Lure of Complexity (Part 2)

  • Of Ideas and Essences

  • Seeing the Rainforest

  • Small Manipulation — Big Effect

In Context #6 (Fall, 2001)

  • What Forms an Animal?

  • The Lure of Complexity (Part 1)

  • The Trouble with Qualities

  • The Great Green Hype

In Context #5 (Spring, 2001)

  • Elephantine Intelligence

  • Life Beyond Genes — Reflections on the Human Genome Project

  • Why Not Globalization?

In Context #4 (Fall, 2000)

  • Skunk Cabbage

  • The Ghostly Machine

  • About SENSRI

  • Water’s Obstinate Meanderings

In Context #3 (Spring, 2000)

  • Where Do Organisms End

  • The Straitening of Science

  • Toward a “Final Theory” of the Sloth?

  • What Do Experiments Prove?

  • Experiential Physics

In Context #2 (Fall, 1999)

  • The Implications of Kurt Goldstein’s Holism

  • Can Phenomena Be Saved?

  • Where Shall the Mind Look for Itself?

  • Killing to Understand

  • Bloodroot through the Year

In Context #1 (Spring, 1999)

  • Genes and Life: The Need for Qualitative Understanding

  • Are Animals Robots?

  • The Obscure Wisdom of the Potter Wasp

  • A Way of Knowing as a Way of Healing

  • Words of Dedication at the Founding Celebration

  • Goethean Science

  • Ecological Agriculture Enters the Mainstream

  • Seduced by Abstractions