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Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

still processing

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , on September 29, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Harman responds to my last post at generous length here. I realize I should have thought this through better before I sent it off, since I don’t really have time to work on a response or an involved dialogue with him at the moment. (And neither does he, as he has said a few times, […]

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still process-relations all the way down

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , , on September 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Keeping up with Graham Harman means continually being tempted to respond to him, and since he doesn’t allow comments on his blog, for reasons I completely understand, I can only hold my tongue or flap it here. (Or I can do the respectful thing and write up a lengthier and more in-depth argument, but that […]

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fairy villages, bowerbird art, & other ambiguous objects

Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , , , on September 20, 2009 | 55 Comments »

One of my (largely dormant) pet projects over the years has been to document and theorize anonymous, self-decomposing artworks made in collaboration with nature and time. These works are creative engagements with environments — often simple rearrangements of physical materials (rocks, wood, found pieces of scrap metal or discarded trash, and the like) — by […]

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relations vs. objects, part x

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on September 18, 2009 | 1 Comment »

I’m glad to see that Steven Shaviro and Levi Bryant have stepped into the fray of the debate over the relative virtues of object-centered versus relation-centered ontologies. (Among others, e.g. kvond, Peter Gratton, Graham Harman of course, and see the commenters to Levi’s posts on Harman and Whitehead). With some of the best blogging philosophers […]

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More on Harman, or what’s outside the system of relations?

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , on September 11, 2009 | 1 Comment »

The level of discussion following my review/critique of Harman’s Prince of Networks, along with Harman’s brief but welcome response, has encouraged me to post a few more thoughts about this difference between “relationalism” and “objectology” (my term for a central part of his object-oriented philosophy or ontology), that is, between a view that holds that […]

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Things slip away… (on Harman’s Latourian object lessons)

Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on September 9, 2009 | 33 Comments »

Continuing from yesterday’s post on Graham Harman… (Warning: This post is long.) Where Tool-Being presented a Heidegger flushed clean of his anthropocentrism, Prince of Networks takes Bruno Latour for a ride on a philosophical adventure toward a world not of actors and networks but of objects, pure if not so simple. The book’s first half […]

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Harman’s object-oriented philosophizing

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , , , on September 8, 2009 | 1 Comment »

I’ve been reading Graham Harman’s Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects and Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. More accurately, I’ve been dipping into and sipping from the first and systematically digesting the second. Given the amount of blogging that goes on under the rising star(s) of ‘object-oriented philosophy,’ ‘speculative realism,’ and Graham […]

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transition culture, ecology, & Bataille’s glorious excesses

Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on September 1, 2009 | 3 Comments »

Reading about the growing “transition towns” movement back to back with a read-through of Design Philosophy Papers’ latest issue on Bataille and “Inefficient Sustainability” has gotten me thinking about some of the unspoken premises that make their way into environmentalists’ prognostications of the future. The transition towns movement began in Totnes, England, home of the […]

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spinning the Earth

Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged , , , , on August 25, 2009 | 5 Comments »

Just by linking Carl Sagan’s eloquent little Pale Blue Dot to the teachings of Gautama Buddha, James Ure’s Buddhist Blog brings out the buddhism inherent both in Sagan’s words and in the imagery of the Earth from space. That imagery (as I’ve discussed before here and here) is multivalent, but Sagan’s spin on it — […]

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prairie dogs & cosmopolitics in Santa Fe

Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 22, 2009 | 3 Comments »

Over the past several days I’ve gone from the cool wetness of Alaska’s southeast coast to the high dryness of north-central New Mexico. The first was pure holiday, accompanied by loved ones (including those who generously funded it) and featuring glaciers, salmon, a black bear (devouring one of the salmon), a ride on one of […]

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Cracks in Charles Taylor’s ‘immanent frame’

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , on August 7, 2009 | 12 Comments »

I recently worked my way through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which, since its publication in 2007, has become one of the most widely reviewed and critically lauded books on religion and secularism — and which, in a tangential way, was one of the provocations that led me to start this blog in the first […]

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Spinoza’s parakeets, sparrows, & roses

Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , on July 28, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Today, my last day in Amsterdam, I finally made it to the monument unveiled last year honoring Baruch de Spinoza. Since the talk I gave at the ISSRNC conference here was on immanence (specifically, Charles Taylor’s concept of the ‘immanent frame’ and William Connolly’s and others’ immanent naturalism), there was no way around visiting the […]

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