It’s what informs my analysis of images, imagination, and the digital in The New Lives of Images. Here is the three-minute version of it. The universe is a living, dynamic, and responsive universe. It is made not of static objects, but of events — events which elicit other events. Its most basic unit is an […]
Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
Process semiotics, in a nutshell
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged A. N. Whitehead, C. S. Peirce, process philosophy, process semiotics, semiotics, The New Lives of Images on September 2, 2025 | Leave a Comment »
What’s the question, again?
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, capitalism, fetishization, Lacanianism, Marxism, process philosophy, process-relational philosophy, psychoanalysis, reification on July 8, 2025 | 1 Comment »
Some sixteen years ago, in the first of a series of pieces that tried to define what my work aimed toward (which at the time I called a “post-anthropocentric political ecology”; see here and here for a few others), I wrote that “what is essential is a collective struggle to wrest a realm of compassionate […]
For a 21st century Logos
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged eco-Stoicism, future religion, Logos, spiritual practices, spirituality, Stoicism on December 20, 2023 | Leave a Comment »
Teaching my course in comparative spiritual practices, I find there is a rationality underpinning each, but that some require lesser leaps of faith (for us twenty-first-century humans) than others. Stoicism is one of the lesser-leap philosophies: it has a pretty systematic account of the nature of things, which resonates with modern science reasonably well, and […]
Sentience, LaMDA-style
Posted in Philosophy, Science & society, tagged artificial intelligence, consciousness, human nature, LaMDA, phenomenology, process-relational theory, sentience on June 13, 2022 | 3 Comments »
If it was science fiction, it would be pretty good. I’m talking about Blake Lemoine’s interview with LaMDA, the Google AI who claims to be sentient. Lemoine was placed on administrative leave last week by Google for going public with trade secrets. He also happens to claim LaMDA is sentient. A few quotes from LaMDA […]
Reimagining religious imagination
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged cognitive theory, image, imaginal, imagination, Jeffrey Kripal, philosophy of imagination, philosophy of religion, religion, religious imagination, T. M. Luhrmann, visual culture, visual theory, Wouter Hanegraaff on December 14, 2021 | 5 Comments »
Wouter Hanegraaff has proposed that we rethink the study of religion as the study of “imaginative formations.” Much of my research has focused on something like that, or at least on the creative role of imagination in mediating the ways people come to live in the world, shape that world, and contest it among each […]
Being beyond experience
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Buddhism, Galen Strawson, Ontology, panexperientialism, panpsychism, process-relational thought, sleep, speculative realism on November 12, 2021 | 3 Comments »
(Warning: This post goes into ontological questions of interest only to philosophers.🙂 I leave aside their potential ecological implications for another time. But see Arne Vetlesen’s Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism for one take on those. I hope to discuss that book in a future post.) One of the […]
The four ontological aces
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged apophaticism, Buddhism, C. S. Peirce, eco-ethico-aesthetics, epistemology, Four Truths, G. I. Gurdjieff, Graham Harman, Heidegger, Nagarjuna, object-oriented ontology, Ontology, Peirce, process-relational ontology, quadrinity, Three Truths, Tiantai, triadism, Two Truths, Zhiyi on May 25, 2021 | 6 Comments »
Buddhism has its “Two Truths” and its “Three Truths“: the “Two” were made famous by Indian philosopher Nagarjuna; the “Three” a little less famous by Chinese philosopher Zhiyi. About a year ago, I offered up four perspectives on mortality, and here I want to make the case that they could be seen as a kind […]
Posthumanist redistributions of the sensible
Posted in Philosophy, tagged alternative humanisms, Chinese humanities journals, critical theory, distribution of the sensible, extinction, humanism, humanities, Jacques Rancière, post-human, posthumanism, posthumanities, theory on March 31, 2021 | 3 Comments »
Theory has a mobile army of metaphors that account for its own importance. The vanguardist notion of a “cutting edge” has long served as a paradigmatic metaphor for theoretical innovation, and it’s one I take issue with in my article “Is the Post- in Posthuman the Post- in Postmodern? Or What Can the Human Be?,” […]
The humors of democracy
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged A. N. Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead, Bakhtin, C. S. Peirce, democracy, eco-egalitarianism, eco-justice, humor, religion, revolution, Whitehead, Whitehead reading group, Whitehead Research Project, wit on March 12, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
I had been avoiding the Whitehead Research Project‘s monthly reading groups because of conflicts with other scheduled activities, but today I joined. The reading was a short, unpublished manuscript somewhat misleadingly titled “Freedom and Order,” as it’s mostly about humor, wit, and imagination. Now I understand why I’ve always been put off by, and a […]
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