William Connolly’s A World of Becoming arrived in the mail yesterday. It looks wonderful, and only two chapters appear to include material that has been previously published in any form (both very recent), which means this is all quite new. If I had the time and the energy, I would try to organize a cross-blog […]
Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
A world of becoming
Posted in Philosophy, tagged Connolly on January 19, 2011 | 4 Comments »
End of an ear…
Posted in Philosophy, tagged object-oriented philosophy, OOO on January 16, 2011 | 1 Comment »
I’ve added a menu of links to some of the key posts on this blog in process-relational theory: see “P-R Theory 101” in the right-hand column (scroll down). This is a somewhat random sample, and readers with the patience for it can find much more by following other links and tags on this blog. A […]
Paradigms, productivity, perspective
Posted in Blog stuff, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged object-oriented philosophy on January 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Levi Bryant responds to my last post (and by extension to Chris Vitale’s) here. I agree with him that he and Graham Harman have made worthy efforts at addressing concerns that are central to process-relational philosophical communities (e.g., in Bryant’s Difference and Givenness and in the books of Harman’s that I’ve lauded on this blog); […]
Vitale throws down the gauntlet…
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged object-oriented philosophy on January 14, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Chris Vitale has “thrown down the gauntlet,” as he puts it, to the object-oriented ontologists to finally respond in a satisfactory way to process-relational critiques. (I admire his Sicilian bravado!) Chris is obviously writing in a somewhat feverish mode, blogging at the speed of thought rather than in the tempered and cautious tone written philosophy […]
Reply to Harman
Posted in Philosophy, tagged Harman on January 14, 2011 | 9 Comments »
Graham Harman has written a post about me in which he says that I was trying to “refute” OOO in my “2 cheers” post, and that I “claim[ed] quite frankly that OOO is wrong.” I thought it worth pointing out that nowhere in that post did I mention OOO, or Graham’s philosophy under any other name. […]
Puzzles
Posted in Philosophy on January 13, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Graham is “puzzled that Ivakhiv thinks OOO can be refuted by the fact that objects have histories.” I’m puzzled why Graham would think that I think that. I’m also puzzled why my brief comment (on Tim’s blog) about stability and instability, and about stability as an achievement rather than a default mode, should have set […]
2 cheers for lava lamps & Lego blocks
Posted in Music & soundscape, Philosophy, tagged lava lamps, minimalism, music, Ontology, epistemology on January 11, 2011 | 6 Comments »
Tim Morton seems not to have liked my comment suggesting that reality is a mix of stability and instability, and that stability is an achievement rather than a default position. The universe, I would say, is an achievement as well. His much-loved (?) lava lamps are achievements, as are Graham Harman‘s Lego blocks. They don’t […]
On animism, multinaturalism, & cosmopolitics
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged animism, anthropomorphism, biosemiotics, cosmopolitics, Descola, Latour, panpsychism, Peirce, Stengers, Whitehead on January 10, 2011 | 15 Comments »
Since there isn’t much available in English about Philippe Descola’s writings on animism, I thought I would share a piece of the cosmopolitics argument I mentioned in my last post. It will appear, in modified form, in the concluding chapter of the SAR Press volume mentioned there. Most of the volume will consist of ethnographic […]
Planes of immanence
Posted in Philosophy, Visual culture on January 3, 2011 | 1 Comment »
“Concepts are like multiple waves, rising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them. … Concepts are the archipelago or skeletal frame, a spinal column rather than a skull, whereas the plane is the breath that suffuses the separate parts.” “it is a [the?] plane […]
…& beginnings (a toast to this moment)
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter on December 31, 2010 | 5 Comments »
A process-relational buddhontology sees every moment as a moment of grasping, or prehension, that begins with an open, spacious cognizance, gathers/feels/responds to what has arisen before it, and ends in the satisfaction of its own concrescence. When the object of that satisfaction is unrecognized as what it is — as the immanent flow of desiring-production, […]
On anthropomorphism: making humans, pencils, & souls
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged animism, anthropomorphism, Jung, Latour, object-oriented philosophy, Whitehead on December 29, 2010 | 8 Comments »
Tim Morton has recently been suggesting that just as humans anthropomorph (that’s a verb), so pencils pencilmorph. I love this idea, though I’m not sure about its implications, which I want to think through here. Anthropomorphism #1 (traditional, & its extensions) The traditional definition of anthropomorphism is something like “the attribution of human characteristics to […]