Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Tag: economics

  • 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…

  • Alf Hornborg on Ecology, Economy, and Technology

    A few excerpts from professor of human ecology Alf Hornborg‘s book The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment (2001). “We seem to have difficulties understanding exactly in which sense human ideas and social relations intervene in the material realities of the biosphere. Rather than continuing to appraoch ‘knowledge’ from the Cartesian…

  • A Time to Mourn, A Time to Weep- The Many Faces of Progress

    Great piece by Trevor Malkinson on the state of the planet: A Time to Mourn, A Time to Weep- The Many Faces of Progress. Malkinson quotes the process theologian John Cobb Jr. from this recent interview: If I tried to be very philosophical, and look at things very broadly, I think that the divine experiment on…

  • Climate Change and Schelling’s inversion of Fichte’s “economic-teleological” principle

    Two disappointing tidbits of news from the front lines of the climate war came my way this morning. First, I learned that the US Department of State decided to contract out its recent environmental review of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline to a company called Environmental Resources Management. ERM happens to be “a dues-paying…

  • William Irwin Thompson on Planetary Transformation

    Adam/Knowledge-Ecology and I interviewed the integral philosopher William Irwin Thompson a while back. He recently posted a transcription of part of that encounter on his blog. Here’s a sample: So imagine in a noetic polity that a girl is born, the very fact that she is a member of that polity would empower her to…

  • No one is in control…

    …because power has left the nation-state; politics has been overcome by financial flows. -Zygmunt Bauman

  • David Harvey on Zero Growth Economy (w/ A. N. Whitehead)

  • Poetics of Resistance: Radical Politics in the Waning Years of Capitalism

    Levi Bryant has had a lot to say in the past several months about the relationship between politics and ontology. HERE is his latest. Essentially, he argues that academia is too caught up in symbolic and cultural forms of resistance to capitalism, when in reality what changes history are not shifts in consciousness but transformations…

  • [Rough Draft] “The Re-Emergence of Schelling” – The nature of human freedom

    For a PDF of the entire essay, click The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency. The Nature of Human Freedom The Naturphilosoph comes to understand “Nature as subject.”232 This does not imply that nature necessarily conforms to the transcendental structure of the human mind (a form of anthropomorphism), but rather that human consciousness…

  • “From Kant to Schelling to Process Metaphysics: On the Way to Ecological Civilization” by Arran Gare

    I stumbled upon this great essay on Schelling and process metaphysics recently published in the journal Cosmos and History by Prof. Arran Gare. He really makes it clear how compatible Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is with Whitehead’s cosmological scheme. “From Kant to Schelling to Process Metaphysics: On the Way to Ecological Civilization” Here is a sample: Schelling’s work…

  • Philosophy, society, politics and the decline of America

    Jason/Immanence Transcendence brought my attention to this critique of Graham Harman‘s Object-Oriented Ontology. The critique, written by Alexander Galloway, complains that OOO’s lack of a political dimension makes it a nonstarter as a groundwork for philosophizing in public. In today’s global context, where neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism have collided (and colluded) to bring Starbucks to Baghdad,…

  • Cosmopolitical Reflections on Economy, Society, and Religion

      When was the day that money became an idol instead of an instrument? Was it August 15, 1971, when to pay for the Vietnam War Nixon shocked the world by erasing the Gold Standard, thereby unilaterally making the value of the US Dollar the reserve currency of the world economy? Or was it in the…

  • Work and Play in Human Evolution

    At the center of Robert Bellah‘s 700 page account of the axial turn in the evolution of religion (Religion in Human Evolution, 2011) is a theory of play. The relaxed field generated by playfulness, according to Bellah’s richly empirical story, is the source of all human ritual and religion, and indeed of culture more generally. Play is…

  • Anarchy of the Heart

    I am still struggling to understand what motivates the black bloc vandalism of the anarchists. I gather that they believe the big banks of the world have lost the ability to communicate with anything but monetary ammunition. It’s true, the bank’s way of transacting with the world is inherently violent, since their modus operandi is…

  • Žižek on the worldlessness of global capitalism

    He nails it (from a recent column in the London Review of Books about the UK riots): “Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless’: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of…

  • Ecology of Mind, Economy of Play, Energy of Delight

    Meaning is infinite because language is indefinitely recursive, because “world” is a word, such that “word” has no world to refer to. Words refer only to themselves, except Yours, your Name, who is the Word but mustn’t know it. “Reality” is a word referring to a set of alphanumeric-audiovisual symbols inherited from an ancient alchemical cult. Sense is infinite…

  • From Means to Ends, From Work to Play, From Number to Pneuma

    When was the day that money became an idol instead of an instrument? Was it August 15, 1971, when Nixon shocked the world by erasing the Gold Standard, thereby unilaterally making the value of the US Dollar the standard of the world economy? Or was it in the waning months of 2008, when the central banks…

  • Public Philosophy (via Hyper tiling)

    Here are some really well developed (and highly agreeable!) thoughts by a graduate student in the UK (researching the science v. religion culture war) about the place of philosophy in society and academia. I just discovered his blog and have a lot more reading to do. Give it a look. On Wednesday, I attended the…

  • On the Matter of Life: Towards an Integral Biology of Economics

    On the Matter of Life: Towards an Integral Biology of Economics Table of Contents Preface Introduction: What is Life? I. The Irruption of Time II. Ancient Biology III. Modern Biology IV. Teleology as a Regulative Principle of Living Organization V. Autopoiesis: Teleology as Constitutive of Living Organization VI. Concrescence and Bodily Perception VII. Concrescence and Autopoiesis…

  • Correspondence on Earth and Economy

    The following is a series of emails exchanged between Mat Wilson and I over the course of the last several months (my messages will be in bold, Mr. Wilson’s not): ——————————— Mat, First, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that just yesterday I watched a video where an objectivist read something Rand…