Tag: cosmology
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Mercury Transits the Sun
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1st draft of dissertation submitted
I submitted the first draft of my dissertation to my committee a couple of weeks ago. I’m aiming to defend in March. Here’s a sneak peak of the table of contents. I still need to fill out the introduction and conclusions. Originally, I had no intention of writing so much about Kant, but he proved…
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Essay republished in “Center for Ecozoic Studies Musings”
I forgot to link to this back in July, but Herman Greene, editor of the CES Musings newsletter, republished my essay Physics of the World-Soul: The Relevance of Alfred North Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism to Contemporary Scientific Cosmology (2013) in their December 2014 issue. You can find the PDF of the issue by clicking here. Or…
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Critique of Pure Feeling: Whitehead on Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic
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Cosmic Pessimism: Response to a post by S.C. Hickman
The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed perceptions, Are become weak Visions of Time & Space, fix’d into furrows of death. -William Blake Read the engaging and wide-ranging post here: The Cosmology of Nick Land: Bataille, Gnosticism, and Contemporary Physics I have noticed my own tendency to waver between a less extreme version of the cosmic pessimism Hickman describes…
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The Interrupted Irruption of Time: Towards an Integral Cosmology, with Help From Bergson and Whitehead
Above is my talk for the Jean Gebser Society conference held at the California Institute of Integral Studies the weekend of October 16th. Title: The Interrupted Irruption of Time: Towards an Integral Cosmology, with Help from Bergson and Whitehead Abstract: Gebser suggests that the world-constituting reality of time first irrupted into Western consciousness with the publication…
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The Universe Story, and/or A Pluriverse Story?
Sideris’ article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion Lisa Sideris and Mary Evelyn Tucker speak at a conference about The Journey of the Universe Brian Swimme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Swimme Lisa Sideris: http://indiana.edu/~relstud/people/profiles/sideris_lisa
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response to R. Scott Bakker on transcendental phenomenology and BBT
Anyone who posits some form of efficacy or constraint outside the natural order on the basis of some kind of interpretation of ‘experience’ has the same argumentative burden to discharge: How do you know? What justifies such an extraordinary (supernatural) posit?…What makes the question so pressing now is that their instrument, reflection, has finally found…
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War of the Worlds: Love and Strife in the Pluriverse
Another one for the ontological pluralism file. Delivered a few months back at the Cosmology of Love conference at CIIS.
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Space and Time in an Ontology of Organism
I’m thoroughly enjoying Jimena Canales social, scientific, and philosophical history of the Einstein-Bergson debate in The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time. There are quite a few pages on Whitehead’s alternative rendering of relativity theory. There is one place (198-99) where Canales, while commenting on George Herbert…
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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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Minding Time: Chronos, Kairos, and Aion in an Archetypal Cosmos
Notes for a brief talk I gave today at CIIS. [Update (July 15, 2016): This talk was expanded into an article published in Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology] ……………………………………………………………………………….. “…what is time? Who can give that a brief or easy answer? Who can even form a conception of it to be put into words? Yet…
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Religion in Human and Cosmic Evolution: Whitehead’s Alternative Vision
This was an early draft of a paper I presented at the 10th International Whitehead Conference. For video of the actual presentation, click HERE. ——————————— Abstract: This talk compares several approaches to the emergence of religion in human evolution. I contrast Robert Bellah’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s pluralistic, cosmologically oriented accounts to Daniel Dennett’s reductionistic,…
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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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Cosmology b/w Science and Philosophy: riffing on my dissertation research…
From Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas:
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Video of “The Psychedelic Eucharist: Toward a Pharmacological Philosophy of Religion”
A lecture I delivered yesterday (Sept. 29th, 2014) at CIIS for ERIE. Lecture notes
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New Hubble Telescope Deep Field of our Galactic neighborhood.
“I am convinced…that the story of the universe that has come out of three centuries of modern scientific work will be recognized as a supreme human achievement, the scientific enterprise’s central gift to humanity, a revelation having a status equal to that of the great religious revelations of the past” -Brian Swimme
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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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Agency in the Universe: Towards a Physics of the World-Soul
My book on Whitehead’s relevance to scientific cosmology.
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Reflections on Bruno Latour’s 3rd Gifford Lecture – “The Puzzling Face of a Secular Gaia”
Latour marvels at the reverse symmetry of the discoveries of Galileo and Lovelock. Both transformed humanity’s perspective of the Earth (and itself) by pointing cheap instruments to the sky. In the 17th century, Galileo dissolved the lunar membrane that had separated heaven and earth. He expanded the laws of nature into the distant reaches of space, dislodging Earth…
Footnotes2Plato 