Category: imagination
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The Psychedelic Eucharist: Is there an Alchemical Solution to the Ecological Crisis?
Some notes toward a talk I’m giving at Burning Man next week. I’ll be at camp Cosmicopia (located at 3:45 and Ephesus). The talk is on Wednesday at 4pm. http://playaevents.burningman.com/playa_event/13197/ …………………… The word “psychedelic” was coined in the 1950s by the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in a letter exchanged with the famed author and philosopher…
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The Philosophy of Big History
Sam Mickey on Big History.
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No Newton of the Grass Blade: On the impossibility of scientific genius in Kant’s “Critique of Judgment”
In preparation for a lecture on mind and nature in German Idealism, I’m working my way through Kant’s third of three critiques, the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). Prior to this sitting, I’ve only ever spent time with small sections of this text. For example, sections 75 and 76 in the second part…
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On reading Philip K. Dick for the first time…
“…mental illness. It was like a plague. No one could discern how much was due to drugs. This time in America–1960 to 1970–and this place, the Bay Area of Northern California, was totally fucked. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that’s the truth. Fancy terms and ornate theories cannot cover this fact up (Valis,…
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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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Traditions of Unknowing
Adam Robbert on the ecology of ideas…
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My dissertation as a Detective Novel and a work of Science Fiction
Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy: Towards a Physics of the World-Soul/an Ontology of Organism My dissertation examines the cognitive role of imagination in modern philosophies of nature since Descartes, focusing in particular on the nature philosophies of Schelling, Steiner, and Whitehead. I argue that the cognitive organ of etheric imagination grants the nature philosopher epistemic…
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Philosophizing on YouTube with Pyrrho314
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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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Tomorrow @ CIIS: Rick Tarnas and Brian Swimme – “Radical Mythospeculation and a Second Axial Age”
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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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Transcendental Earth: Thinking Horizontally with Deleuze and Guattari
Some other bloggers (AGENT SWARM and Time’s Flow Stemmed, for example) have been been ruminating over this beautiful string of sentences from Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?: Thinking provokes general indifference. It is a dangerous exercise nevertheless. Indeed, it is only when the dangers become obvious that indifference ceases, but they often remain hidden and…
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Big History and Cosmopolitics
Some friends of mine presenting at the upcoming Big History conference at Dominican University.
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Soul-Making with Iain McGilchrist
Iain McGilchrist is the author of several books, most recently The Master and His Emissary. What if we are not born with fully formed eternal souls, but must each grow our own in time? What if psyche, like physis, is a relational process, and not an independent substance? McGilchrist quotes James Hillman: “The soul is…
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Schelling & Whitehead inheriting Spinoza & Leibniz: God and the Modern World
I’ve just finished Matthew Stewart’s popular book The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (2006). I was hoping to fill out my own understanding of the historical context surrounding these two thinkers. I was not disappointed on this front. Stewart combed the archives and stitched together…
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Thinking Through Atheism in a Religious Cosmos (response to professoranton)
Like Professor Anton, I would also want to pose the existential problematic of self-consciousness to those atheists who reject religion outright. If religion arose naturally as a result of humanity’s gradually increasing capacity for self-consciousness, and by implication, for conscience, then what are we secular folks supposed to replace it with? We cannot simply expect…
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What is Religion? (a YouTube discussion)
A string of videos pondering the essence of religion, beginning with suicideforcelluloid and anekantavad. Professoranton and I then exchanged a few responses (below).
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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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Lee Smolin’s Process-Relational Cosmology
I’ve not yet read Smolin’s books, but his sense for the social, political, and economic implications of process-relational cosmology have definitely gotten my attention. I’ll be reading his most recent book Time Reborn as soon as possible. I’ll also need to get my hands on the papers Smolin has written with the philosopher Roberto Unger.…
Footnotes2Plato 