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Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

Thinking forests & animals

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , , on December 1, 2013 | 2 Comments »

Here’s one of the participants at the AAA’s ontology panel, McGill anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, applying ontological speculation — including Peirce and biosemiotics — to animals and forests:

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Lava lampy Whitehead?

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , on November 30, 2013 | 1 Comment »

While I find much to admire in Tim Morton’s writings (and in him personally, as I’ve recently related), I’m sure he knows that his writing on what he calls “lava lampy materialism” leaves me unconvinced. (I’ve discussed that topic here, here, and elsewhere.) I haven’t read his Realist Magic yet, so I can’t comment on […]

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Querying Natural Religion: Responses to Latour

Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , on November 24, 2013 | 10 Comments »

The following are my notes from “Querying Natural Religion: Immanence, Gaia, and the Parliament of Lively Things.” (Live-blogging did not work, as we didn’t have a live internet connection.) These notes are followed by a brief set of post-event summary comments. The setting: an airplane hangar of a hall in the Baltimore Convention Center. This […]

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Imminently in Baltimore

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , , , , on November 20, 2013 | 4 Comments »

Get ready for the lively parliament of immanent Gaianly agents… “Querying Natural Religion: Immanence, Gaia, and the Parliament of Lively Things” will take place this Saturday afternoon in the Baltimore Convention Center (right after Karen Armstrong’s plenary in the same room, on “The Science of Compassion”). The revised speaker line-up is below. Unfortunately, Jane Bennett […]

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Reading AIME

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , on November 8, 2013 | 3 Comments »

I’m just managing to keep up with the Latour/AIME reading groups (both the one on my campus and the online one organized by Adam Robbert et al.), but not so much with the commentaries. Here’s my first brief reflection on the book… 1. You know that a scholar has made it to the top of […]

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What’s real

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 21, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Conversation overheard between an ambitious grad student and a simpleminded process-relational philosopher . . .         Jake Wanano-Everton:   Sir, where do you draw the line between what’s real and what’s not real?       Prof. Noah Fewthings:   The only things that are real are the moments of experienced reality — drops of experience, let’s […]

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Realism & Peirce

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , , , , on October 14, 2013 | 8 Comments »

Levi is out swinging (in the most entertaining way possible; I love it when he gets on a roll, and I do agree with him on much of it). Of course, there’s not much new in what he says (that hasn’t been said by Left-realists for the last few decades, and by Latour more recently). […]

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Objectivity 2.0?

Posted in Philosophy, Science & society, tagged , on October 14, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Continuing on the “sciencey” thread from this post… (I’ll come back to the “14 billion years” issue, since it’s been pointed out to me that my criticism of the concept of measuring time would only apply — if the scientists are correct — to the first few seconds or so of the universe.)     […]

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“14 billion years” (a pet peeve)

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , on September 13, 2013 | 7 Comments »

When people say “the universe began 14 billion years ago,” do they realize that this is not true in the slightest? It’s not true not because they aren’t measuring things accurately. Rather, it’s not true because the standards of measurement cannot have possibly remained unchanged over such a time period. To put it crudely, this […]

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Latourian inquiries

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , , on August 22, 2013 | 3 Comments »

Bruno Latour fans will know that the French anthropologist’s long-awaited follow-up to 1991’s game-changing theoretical provocation We Have Never Been Modern was released in its English translation just a few weeks ago. The book is called An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (and is becoming better known by its acronym “AIME”), and it provides a […]

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First after-thoughts…

Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Visual culture, tagged on July 30, 2013 | 5 Comments »

It arrived a few days ago. Feels good to grasp in the hand: thick, solid, “capacious” (as Steven Shaviro says in one of the cover blurbs). And Tarkovsky has rarely looked as green as on the cover. But I’ve already found an indefensible oversight:

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The conceptual machine

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , on July 13, 2013 | 1 Comment »

I’ve always been more of an improviser than a long-range planner, but my job requires that I occasionally dabble in long-range projections of my work. Here’s one. While a number of concerns have framed my scholarship over the years — ethical, political, cultural, ecological, and theoretical concerns — the philosophical core of it has been […]

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