Category: Isabelle Stengers
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Politics and Pluralism in the Anthropocene
Notes from a talk I gave at CIIS this past March titled “Politics and Pluralism in the Anthropocene” Here’s the video of the whole panel: https://youtu.be/sgoAZV4VVsc Foucault on Hegel: “[T]ruly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the…
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Whitehead’s Quantum of Explanation: Thinking with Auxier and Herstein
“Our central idea is that concrete existence explains the abstract aspects of experience and not vice-versa.” -Auxier and Herstein “So long as necessity is taken to be the guarantor of rationality, the conception of rationality advocated will be as useless to science as it is to practical life.” -Auxier and Herstein Below I offer some…
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Whitehead’s Way Beyond Postmodernism
Based on this paper delivered at the 2015 International Whitehead Conference.
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Lectures on Timothy Morton’s “Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People”
Process and Difference in the Pluriverse (opening lecture) My Spring course at CIIS.edu finishes up this week with a set of modules on Timothy Morton’s book Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017). Earlier in the semester, we read works by Plato, William James, Catherine Keller, William Connolly, Bruno Latour, Anne Pomeroy, and Donna Haraway. Below, I…
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Process & Difference in the Pluriverse, an online course at CIIS.edu
A trailer for my course being offered this Spring at CIIS.edu. PARP 6135 Process and Difference in the Pluriverse will explore the ethical, social, political, and ecological implications of process-relational philosophy. You could call it a course in applied or experimental metaphysics. We will read and discuss texts by radical empiricist William James, revolutionary sociologist WEB…
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Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead and Cosmology (2nd edition)
I decided to revise and republish a second edition of my 2013 monograph on the relevance of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism to contemporary scientific cosmology. It should be available in paperback in a few weeks. Here is a PDF if you prefer an electronic version.
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Video of my presentations at the 10th International Whitehead Conference on Friday (6/5) and Saturday (6/6)
Conference website. Friday, June 5th at 4:45pm: Whitehead’s Non-Modern Philosophy: Cosmos and Polis in the Pluriverse Saturday June 6th at 2:30pm: Religion in Human and Cosmic Evolution: Whitehead’s Alternative Vision I have a lot to say about some of the questions that came up during the discussion (~58 minutes into the video), especially the issues…
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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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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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Pluralism as the Choreography of Coexistence, with William James and Co.
There’s been quite an uproar recently across the philosophy blogosphere regarding the possibility of a pluralist ontology (see Critical Animal’s recap of this cross-blog event). The multitude of angles being offered got me thinking, and eventually sent me back to William James’ A Pluralistic Universe, from which I quote below (lecture 1): The theological machinery…
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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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Soul-Making vs the Blind Brain Theory
Steven Craig Hickman recently posted a fascinating commentary on the fantasy writer R. Scott Bakker’s “Blind Brain Theory.” I’ve offered several of my own commentaries in the past (see HERE). My general sense of unease seems to be shared by Hickman, who ponders towards the end of his post whether Bakker’s BBT might be more…
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Audio from International Whitehead Conference in Krakow
Here is the audio of my presentation at the IWC last week in the philosophy of religion section: Here is a PDF of the paper I read, titled “Worldly Religion in Whitehead and Deleuze: Steps Toward an Incarnational Philosophy” Related articles 9th Annual International Whitehead Conference in Kracow, Poland (footnotes2plato.com) Also, thanks to Leon over…
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Money, Ecology, and Burning Man: Inquiries into the Thermodynamics of Capitalism
I’m headed back to Black Rock City for the 3rd time in 4 years later this week. I’ll be camping with Cosmicopia at 7:15 J if you want to stop by. I’ll be giving a brief talk on the need to ecologize economics on Tuesday at 11am. The title of the talk is actually a…
Footnotes2Plato 