Category: Modern Philosophy
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PCC Forum – Jamie Socci, MA – “Ceci n’ est pas Michel Foucault”
If you’re in the Bay Area, join us at CIIS on December 11th @ 6:30pm on the 5th floor/room 565 for this talk by the brilliant and always entertaining Jamie Socci. She’s been deeply immersing herself in Foucault’s work for several years now and I for one am excited to hear about the fruits of…
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A White Guy Talking About Race
Figured I should start talking about this stuff. Please join me. Enlighten me. Endarken me. Whatever you feel needs to be added, corrected, etc. We just really need to start talking about it… A response to me by the YouTube user Rorschach Romanov: And my response to him:
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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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2015 Whitehead Conference Poster – “Seizing an Alternative: Towards an Ecological Civilization”
More about the conference, and my track, can be found HERE and HERE.
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Panpsychism and Speculative Realism: Reviewing Shaviro’s “The Universe of Things”
“The progress of philosophy does not primarily involve reactions of agreement or dissent. It essentially consists in the enlargement of thought, whereby contradictions and agreements are transformed into partial aspects of wider points of view.” -Alfred North Whitehead, September 10, 1941 It is in this spirit that I believe Shaviro wrote The Universe of Things.…
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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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Nietzsche’s and Whitehead’s post-nihilist pluralistic process philosophies (part 2)
Since my post a few days ago (“The ‘innocence of becoming’: Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Nihilism as a Pathological Transitional Stage between Monism and Pluralism“), I’ve re-read chapter 4 of William Connolly’s The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (2013). Here is his summation of that chapter, which compared Nietzsche’s and Whitehead’s process philosophies: “It…
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The “innocence of becoming”: Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Nihilism as a Pathological Transitional Stage between Monism and Pluralism
It is remarkable how similar Nietzsche’s musings on perspectivism are to Whitehead’s process-relational ontology. I was reminded of their congruence while re-reading excerpts from Nietzsche’s The Will to Power (published in Mark Taylor’s Deconstruction in Context). Of course, one might read Whitehead’s somewhat Platonic cosmological scheme (which includes reformed conceptions of teleology, god, eternal objects, and so on) as directly opposed…
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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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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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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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Process, Relationality, and Individuality: Graham Harman and Alfred Norht Whitehead (response to Jonathan Cobb)
Relevant links to the argument between me, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman: Levi Bryant Mis-reading Whitehead? Harman’s response to me Whitehead’s Process Atomism (Response to Graham Harman) Object as subject-superject, or why Harman is wrong about Whitehead Occasionalism in Whitehead and Harman Harman’s Crucified Objects and Whitehead’s God: More on Withdrawal
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Letters on Cosmology and Theodicy
Below, I’ve copied an email thread with Dan Dettloff, who blogs at Re(-)petitions. I thought some of our other readers might want to chime in. Actually, I’d really like to hear other people’s responses to Dan’s question. I’ve not arrived at a satisfying answer to it, but I do think getting past “the problem of evil” will require a far…
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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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Online course this Fall: “Mind and Nature in German Idealism”
Below is the introductory lecture of a 10-week undergraduate course called “Mind and Nature in German Idealism” that I’m hoping will run this coming Fall (2014) for the University of Philosophical Research. If you’re an undergrad looking for an independent study, let me know.
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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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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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More on Bill Nye’s market-based defense of science
Someone started a reddit thread about my post last week on the Ken Ham v. Bill Nye debate. The user hpyhpyjoyjoy brought to my attention that Nye has promoted Bill Gates’ philanthropic projects, in particular his Foundation’s effort to eradicate disease among poor people. Hpyhpyjoyjoy writes: “Nye was shilling for Bill Gates in his Gates…
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