Year: 2011
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God and the Chaosmos: Thinking with Catherine Keller
Several months ago, a discussion erupted across the SR/OOO blogosphere concerning the implications of various forms of nihilistic and theistic realism. Some of my critiques have since ended up in a Wikipedia article. In one of my responses to Graham Harman and Levi Bryant, I toyed with the idea of Whitehead’s panentheism as a kind…
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Integral Imaginings: Essays on Earth, Soul, and Spirit
The essays in this are all available free on my blog, but in an effort to preserve library ecologies (and design a sweet cover!)… ——————————————————————— Integral Imaginings cover astrophotography by Peter A. Suchsland
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The Spirit of Integral Poetry: “Waring” the Symbolism of Organism
The Spirit of Integral Poetry: “Waring” the Symbolism of Organism Introduction In the preface of his magisterial account of the evolution of consciousness, The Ever-Present Origin (1985), Jean Gebser warns of a crisis “of decisive finality for life on earth and for humanity,” a spiritual crisis heralding the end of the deficient mentality of the…
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Poet Drew Dellinger w/ Cosmologist Brian Swimme
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Occasionalism in Whitehead and Harman
An important discussion continues to unfold in the comment section of this post over at Knowledge-Ecology. We are trying to figure out what metaphysical work Whitehead’s eternal objects do, among other things. Here is my last comment: I think Whitehead gives you withdrawal without returning to an ontology of substances. Adam and I have been…
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Bruno Latour – “Waiting for Gaia: composing a common world through political art”
Via Knowledge-Ecology, who linked to a barely audible mp3 of Latour’s recent talk at the French Institute in the UK recorded by Tim Morton. Thanks for the guerrilla media effort, Tim! I wish the Institute would release their high quality video for free!! We should be absolutely floored by what Latour has to say here, in…
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The Difficulty of Christianity (a response to ProfessorAnton)
Professor Anton will probably respond to my response, as is his kind habit. I’ll post it here when he does. (Be sure to visit the YouTube link so you can read the comment threads beneath my video. The dialogue is getting rather interesting…)
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More on Myth, Panentheism, and Participation…
Levi Bryant has posted a few more reflections on myth. I’ve pasted some of our discussion over on Larval Subjects below. Bryant also recently posted on what he calls “a-theism,” and I’m more inclined to follow him at least part way in what he suggests. I have a few caveats, however. I do interpret the…
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Andrew Pickering on Cybernetics
Philosopher Andrew Pickering on Cybernetics.
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Thinking in media res.
My Muse’s ideas remain mute to the world until given voice by the poet who courts her. For this I use my mouth, my tongue, my teeth, and my lungs. As I inhale and prepare to name the world, it dawns on me that I have lost the ability to tell the difference between my…
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William Irwin Thompson on the transformation of our economy
COLUMN – THINKING OTHERWISE – The Digital Economy of W. Brian Arthur | Wild River Review. It would now appear that industrial and service economy “jobs” are disappearing at the same time that national currencies are in crisis and public universities and community colleges are being stripped of funds, so that they cannot take up…
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American Academy of Religion in San Francisco: My schedule
The AAR is here in San Francisco this year. It has been difficult to weed out my schedule this weekend, since there are very few weeds! There are at least 5 events I’d like to attend in every time slot. But here is what I’ve been able to single out: Friday at 4pm Theme: Homo…
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Comic Reality
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Reich speaks at #Occupy Cal
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich speaks at Occupy Cal in Berkeley yesterday (Nov. 15th): One thing that really sunk in: if the Supreme Court ruled that money is speech and corporations are people, then our government must also protect the rights of ordinary Americans to speak, and indeed, to speak in non-traditional ways (i.e., with…
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Thinking with Latour and Bellah: Religion beyond Nature and Culture
I’m giving a brief presentation in a course on Christianity and Ecology with Prof. Jacob Sherman on Thursday. In what follows, I’ll try to sketch out what I’d like to say. I plan to briefly summarize the cosmotheandric potential of Robert N. Bellah’s recent tome, Religion and Human Evolution (2011). Bellah develops an account of the…
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Conversations about consciousness…
…with John Searle last night. Related articles Consciousness: Problem, Paradox, or Practice? (footnotes2plato.com) The Mystery of Consciousness (samharris.org)
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research papers for graduate courses on Ernst Cassirer and Jean Gebser, and Christianity and Ecology
I’m enrolled in two courses this semester here at CIIS. The first is taught by Prof. Eric Weiss; the second by Prof. Jacob Sherman. We’re well into the second week of November already, so its time to start fleshing out my term papers. Weiss’ course is on the evolutionary schemes of the 20th century cultural…
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What is Enlightenment? – a response to Levi Bryant
Bryant posted recently about how he would define the notion of “Enlightenment.” I agree with part of what he has to say, in that clearly Enlightenment does concern the bursting forth of critique. Where we seem to disagree is on the extent to which critique can ever lift itself entirely above the mythopoietic structure of the…
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Further evidence that Whitehead was already object-oriented…
From his 1927 lectures published as Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. While speaking about the way ordinary language can mislead us about the nature of reality, Whitehead begins reflecting on the common term “wall.” “This so-called ‘wall,’ disclosed in the pure modes of presentational immediacy, contributes itself to our experience only under the guise of…
Footnotes2Plato 