Tag: ecology
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EcoCiv podcast on Whitehead, Marx, and Ecological Civilization
Andrew Schwartz and I discussed Marx and Whitehead last week. Have a listen.
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Whitehead and Marx: A Cosmopolitical Approach to Ecological Civilization
Below is a recording of my talk (a video first, then audio only that includes the discussion afterwards). I’ve also included an extended draft of some notes I took to prepare my talk. Finally, I’ve included my notes taken while listening to Jason Moore during yesterday’s opening lecture. Fifth annual conference of the World-Ecology Research…
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Economics as though life on Earth depended on it
Some related essays on integral economics, a Christian ecological worldview, and slavery and capitalism.
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On the Matter of Life: Towards an Integral Economics
I’m posting a revised version of a long essay I wrote a decade ago. It draws on thinkers including Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, William Irwin Thompson, Francisco Varela, Alfred North Whitehead, and Alf Hornborg in search of a more integral approach to economics. I had not yet encountered the social ecology…
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Cosmopolitics and Decentralizing the Movement
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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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INTERSECT: Science & Spirituality (more conference reflections)
John Hausdoerffer Brian Thomas Swimme
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Living in a Complex World (a trialogue)
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Evolution & Spirituality Course at Schumacher College This Summer
If you live in the UK, or if you are traveling there this summer, I’ll be teaching for one of Schumacher College’s 3-week intensive courses Monday, June 18th through Friday, June 22nd on the topic of evolution and spirituality. The description of my week is below. Also teaching week-long modules in this course are the…
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What is Life? (Response to Joe Norman)
Sharing my reply below to a brilliant series of thoughts concerning the essence of life at Joseph W. Norman’s blog (CLICK HERE TO READ IT). Joe, Thanks for pointing out the relevance of N. Taleb’s distinction between randomness and an agent’s exposure to randomness for the question of “life.” Much to ponder here… My friendship with…
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Bruno Latour’s Gaian Political Aesthetics
Excerpted from Waiting for Gaia. “…it became possible for scholars to follow with the same instruments that allow us to trace the production of science (search engines, scientometrics and bibliometric tools, maps of the blogospheres), the people, lobbies, credentials, and money flows of those who insisted on making it a controversy. I am thinking here…
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Facing Gaia with Bruno Latour
“…there is nothing about the Earth as Earth that we don’t know through the disciplines, instruments, mediations, and expansion of scientific networks: its size, its composition, its long history and so on. Even farmers depend on the special knowledge of agronomists, soil scientists and others. And this is even truer of the global climate: the…
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Organic Science in Schelling and Whitehead
A lecture from last week’s class Brief History of Western Thought on Romanticism and the crisis of modern science as it played out in the organic nature philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead.
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Slavery and Capitalism in America
I’m about halfway through The Half has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014) by Edward Baptist. Baptist’s book embeds an economic history of post-revolutionary America in the personal stories of slaves. He brings into question the still dominant version of American history, “the half that has ever been told,” which argues that slavery…
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The Ecology of Capitalism
This post is largely in response to this interview with the ecological Marxist John Bellamy Foster. Foster spends most of his time responding to criticisms of his work by Jason W. Moore. I haven’t read Moore’s work, so I’m not sure whether the misunderstanding of Latour arose with him or with Foster’s characterization of the latters “constructionism”…
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A talk on Ecodelic Philosophy at the Symbiosis Gathering
I’m headed back to the Symbiosis Gathering later this year. I’ll be offering a talk on the role of psychedelics–or “ecodelics” as author Richard Doyle refers to them–and the philosophical insights they engender that may be of service to steering through our planetary crisis. When ingested in carefully crafted ceremonial containers, ecodelics reveal the deeper connections and interpenetration of…
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CIIS Commencement Speech 5/22
Thank you, President Subbiondo. Thanks also to our Academic Vice President Judie Wexler, to our honorary degree recipients Angela Davis and Josef Brinckmann, and to all CIIS faculty and staff for the work you have done to make this day possible for me and for my fellow graduates. I am a philosopher, which is not to…
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In defense of other possibilities…
I always try to ration myself early in the month since I only get 10 free articles, but Charles Blow’s op-ed in the New York Times this morning–“A Trump-Sanders Coalition? Nah”–seemed worth the read. Blow rightly points out why Trump’s campaign manager is sorely mistaken about the prospects of winning over Bernie’s supporters in the general…
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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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Latour building on Whitehead’s critique of substance
In Latour’s words, Whitehead replaced the concept of substance with that of subsistence. I appreciate Latour’s insistence on the need for the creation of institutions that encourage and sustain themselves through transformation. Question is, what would such institutions look like?
Footnotes2Plato 