Category: Bruno Latour
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Schedule for our track at next week’s Whitehead/Ecological Civilization Conference
Section III: Alienation from Nature, How it Arose Track 3: Late Modernity and Its Re-Imagining (Lebus Hall, 201) Friday, June 5 2:00 PM – 2:45 PM Track Session #1a – Tam Hunt “Absent-minded science and the ‘deep science’ antidote” 2:45 PM – 3:30 PM Track Session #1b – Christian de Quincey “A Radical Science of…
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Whitehead’s Non-Modern Philosophy: Cosmos and Polis in the Pluriverse (draft)
The following was an early draft of a talk I gave in my own track at the Whitehead/Ecological Civilization conference in Claremont, CA. For video of the actual talk, click HERE. This track has been given the task of re-imagining late modernity, and in particular, of re-imagining what John Cobb has called late modernity’s reductive monism. In my…
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War of the Worlds: Cosmos and Polis in the Pluriverse
What is reality? Seasoned metaphysicians will be quick to point out that the phrasing of this question already assumes too much. The copula “is” implies that reality is a species of being or existence. Does this mean reality excludes nonbeing, nonexistence? That, in other words, reality includes only what is already actual and nothing of…
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Towards an abstract for my presentation at the International Whitehead Conference, “Re-imagining Late Modernity’s Reductive Monism”
My track at this year’s International Whitehead Conference is titled “Re-imagining Late Modernity’s Reductive Monism” and is situated within the umbrella section called “Alienation from Nature: How It Arose.” Other participants in my track include Elizabeth Allison, Sean Kelly, Richard Tarnas, and Brian Swimme. I hope to have the schedule and abstracts for everyone’s contributions posted by the…
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Bruno Latour and Rowan Williams on Religion and Ecology
A very wide-ranging and far-reaching conversation. Economics, the “ownership theory” made and sold to students at the London School of Economics and many other Universities around the neoliberal globe, is put on trial by both Latour and Williams. Latour goes so far as to stick a poison label on it. About 10 minutes in, Williams’…
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The Religion of Reason (with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)
Hard to disagree with too much of what Pinker and Goldstein say about Reason. Yay Reason, right?! They also make a very persuasive case for (neo)liberal capitalism. Pinker’s bit about empathy was a nice reprieve, but Goldstein shut him up fast by recounting Reason’s historical march toward the Good. In the end, I prefer Schelling’s, Hegel’s,…
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The Ecology of Ideas: Enacting Worlds Worth Living In
“Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized.” -Alfred North Whitehead Over at Knowledge-Ecology, Adam Robbert has thrown a few fantastic posts up unpacking his vision of the ecology of ideas. Concepts are capacities skillfully enacted in ecological contexts.…
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Distilling my dissertation topic—>Etheric Imagination in an Ontology of Organism: Towards a Planetary Philosophy
First, a few orientating quotations from the thinkers I will be boiling together in the alchemical vessel of my dissertation. “…if we had the choice between empiricism and the all-oppressing necessity of thought of a rationalism which had been driven to the highest point, no free spirit would be able to object to deciding in favor of…
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The Pluralism Wars Return: Towards a Diplomatic Ontology of Organism
I was wondering how long the cease fire would last… The pluralism wars flared up again this afternoon over on FaceBook (this link may not work for everyone). Misunderstandings abound, or so it seems to me. My position–which is greatly indebted to thinkers like James and Whitehead, and more recently, Bruno Latour–is that of ontological pluralism. What is finally real…
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“Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic” by Whitney Bauman
“From a planetary perspective, truth is seen as the coconstruction of truth regimes. Our understandings of the world and the technologies of those understandings begin to create those worlds that we are persuaded most toward. In other words, one of the reasons modern science became so pervasive is that its truth regime–including the medical, communication,…
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Notes for a Sunday Evening Cosmology Salon
If you’re a San Francisco local, I’ll be speaking with a few friends at Cyprian’s Episcopal Church on Turk and Lyon this Sunday (4/27) at 7pm about community-building and the cosmopolitical importance of play in the aftermath of capitalism. Our salon-style panel discussion is part of a larger community festival in the Panhandle neighborhood. Here…
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Latour’s Space-Time Experiment: Thinking with Whitehead
Watch Olafur Eliasson and Bruno Latour re-enact the debate between Einstein and Bergson about space-time and the polarity between art and science. Though I first heard about Latour’s re-enactment of the Einstein-Bergson debate several years ago, I only uncovered the videos of this conversation while engaging in a FaceBook thread yesterday about Einstein’s bloc universe. Einstein famously claimed that time as we experience…
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10th International Whitehead Conference – “Seizing an Alternative: Towards an Ecological Civilization”
After speaking at the 9th International Whitehead Conference last fall in Krakow, Poland, I was invited to help organize a track for the 2015 IWC in Claremont, CA next summer (June 4-7). The 2015 conference is called “Seizing an Alternative: Towards an Ecological Civilization” and is largely the brain child of process theologian and environmental philosopher John Cobb, Jr.…
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Building Shared Environments: Towards a Pluriversal Theory and Practice
The videos below are philosophical dialogues, first with the artist and YouTuber Mike Vahl and second with Professor Corey Anton. Both a relevant preface for the third video on pluralism and process-relational cosmology, which is largely a response to the recent blogosphere pluralism wars:
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Knowledge-Ecology on Three Pluralisms
Adam Robbert of Knowledge-Ecology has summarized some of the distinctions that emerged these past few weeks in the ongoing discussion on pluralism. Adam warns against collapsing the three sorts of pluralism (worldview pluralism, epistemological pluralism, and ontological pluralism), as to do so would result in the nastiest sort of relativism (“reality is whatever you make…
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Life in the Pluriverse: Towards a Realistic Pluralism
Levi Bryant recently called for a cross-blog discussion concerning what he perceives to be the problematic relationship between ethnographic pluralism and ontological realism. His call was instigated by Jeremy Trombley’s post on the so-called “ontological turn” in contemporary anthropology and ethnography. Trombley articulated what might be described as an ontology of the concept, wherein concepts…
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Disenchantment, Misenchantment, and Re-Enchantment: A Dialogue with Richard Tarnas
This dialogue took place in October 2013 at Esalen in Big Sur, CA.
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Reflections on Bruno Latour’s “An Inquiry into Modes of Existence,” Ch. 4: Learning to Make Room
I’m participating in a reading group with about 40 other scholars focusing on Bruno Latour‘s recently published book An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (2013). This week it is my turn to comment on Ch. 4, which is titled “Learning to Make Room.” I’m going to cross-post my comments here,…
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Is Physicalism Enough? Can Consciousness be Naturalized? – Owen Flanagan in dialogue with Evan Thompson
Check out the video from their exchange at Northwestern earlier this year. Below are some of my notes and reflections after watching… Owen Flanagan argues that physicalism is the only feasible view. Naturalism is the inference to the best explanation. Conscious states are brain states. At some point in evolutionary history, somehow dead matter came to…
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Latour annunciating his religion…
“Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame, or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate” (2004) by Bruno Latour There is nothing extravagant, spiritual, or mysterious in beginning to describe religious talk in this way.We are used to other, perfectly mundane forms of speech that are evaluated not by their correspondence with any state of affairs either, but by the quality…
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More on Latour and Tarnas – Networks, Technology, and the Transformation of Western Culture
Grant Maxwell has responded to my reflections on Richard Tarnas, Bruno Latour, and the Re-Enchantment Project. Grant wonders what I meant by referring to Tarnas’ archetypal cosmology as a “middle up” approach to transforming culture, and to Latour’s anthropology of the moderns as a “top down” approach to the same. I appreciate Grant’s use of Latour’s own network…
Footnotes2Plato 