Category: imagination
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Notes on imagination, Poetry as Soul-making
Poetry as soul-making Strictly speaking, what I want to talk about today does not exist, or at least if it does, remains for the most part unconscious to the rational, waking ego’s daylight gaze. Nonetheless, I’m forced to call this unknown phantasm something, and the name ‘imagination’ seems to suit it fine. Imagination is that…
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Images from Occupy SF march on Oct. 15th
I’ve heard estimates from 5,000 to 15,000 people. I’d guess it was somewhere in between. We marched through the financial district and then gathered at City Hall.
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iOccupy: Media Ecology of Protesting in the Age of the iPhone
from Reality Sandwich: iOccupy.
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Cyberpolitics on YouTube: thoughts on the role of the University in the Universe
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A message to the heart of Wall St.
A message to the heart of Wall St.: To the bankers, the executives, the shareholders, and the politicians, I do not want my money back. I will gladly give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. I only want what is the earth’s, what is the sky’s, what is unowned and unownable. I did not invest in…
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Ontology and #OccupySF
Ontology and #OccupySF.
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Corporations are egregores (reflections on #Occupy protests)
Yesterday, I had to decide whether I’d go downtown to protest, or go to class. I ended up going to class. Why? I was confused, and honestly a bit deflated, by ontological questions. Where is Chase? Where is Goldman Sachs? Where is Bank of America? These entites are not located in downtown SF, nor even on…
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Aesthethics: Loving the Beauty of Goodness
I’m still in the planning phase of my dissertation on the ontology of Imagination, and as such am working to ferret out the most interesting aspects of my chosen site of inquiry. My research is focused on the ontology of Imagination, since my guiding thesis is that any perception of or reflection upon reality depends…
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On Oral and Literate Consciousness, from “Becoming Animal” by David Abram
“While persons brought up within literate culture often speak about the natural world, indigenous, oral peoples sometimes speak directly to that world, acknowledging certain animals, plants, and even landforms as expressive subjects with whom they might find themselves in conversation. Obviously these other beings do not speak with a human tongue; they do not speak…
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“We Scientists…” by John Cleese
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“Coleridge and the Science of the Mind” by Chris Rudge
I’m enthralled with this essay by doctoral student at the University of Sydney, Chris Rudge. It opens up precisely the sort of discussion I want to build on in my own dissertation. The first few paragraphs: Not a great deal of literary historical scholarship has been devoted to examining the connections between science during the eighteenth…
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10 years later…
An audio/visual collage, from the days of Wilson when sheep roamed the White House lawn to the days of Bush, when politics had already been fully transformed into pageantry.
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The Universe as a Work of Art: Images of the Cosmos in Plato, Descartes, and Kepler
In his lecture series become book, Art as Experience (1934), John Dewey defines imagination, not as a specific faculty alongside others, but as “that which holds all other elements in solution” (p. 275). Imagination, according to Dewey, is a uniquely human power, rendering experience conscious through the mutually transforming fusion of old meanings with new…
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Terence McKenna on Anthropogenesis
Terence_McKenna
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The Role of Imagination in the Science of the Stars
Is the history of science a continuous progression from less to more accurate theories of physical phenomena? Or, as Thomas Kuhn suggested, is its history characterized by a discontinuous series of paradigm shifts? In the latter case, gradual “progress” occurs only locally within established theoretical frameworks until, through the sudden imaginative leap of a genius…
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Whoever finds this note, please help the earth.
Earlier tonight, while walking home, I came across a folded up piece of paper placed on on the sidewalk beneath a rock:
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Ethopoiesis and Eternity
Following up on my post and Sam’s and Adam’s comments on Monday and Tuesday (6/13-15), Adam sent me a one word text message: ‘Ethopoiesis’ I have a few thoughts on this neologism I’d like to share. This word carries a complex philosophical cargo, part cultural/artistic and part natural/machinic. Ethopoiesis carries the semantic weight of both…
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Cosmotheanthropic Realism: On Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (2011)
Terrence Malick studied philosophy at Harvard before being awarded a Rhodes scholarship. After a short time at Oxford, he left without finishing his dissertation. His adviser there was the behaviorist Gilbert Ryle. Reportedly, he left Oxford because of a disagreement with Ryle concerning how to understand the concept of the “world” in 19th and 20th…
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Stories of Life, Tails of Spirit
A set of videos exchanged this week between Fred (ConferenceReport on YouTube) and myself about the use-value of terms like “life,” “consciousness,” and “matter” in philosophical and scientific discourse:
Footnotes2Plato 