The following post elaborates on some comments I made this week at the Ritual Creativity conference at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Deep thanks to conference organizers Katri Ratia and François Gauthier for inviting me to what turned out to be an immensely rewarding event, and to my co-panelists Graham Harvey, Sarah Pike, and Susannah […]
Archive for the ‘Process-relational thought’ Category
Ways to inhabit the world
Posted in Eco-theory, Process-relational thought, tagged bioregionalism, Fribourg, Hanegraaff, imaginal practices, imagination, inhabitory practices, placemaking, prehension, reinhabitation, religion, religious imagination, ritual, Ritual Creativity, ritual studies, Whitehead on June 24, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Thay passing
Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, death, Heart Sutra, Mahayana Buddhism, Prajnaparamita, process-relational theory, Thich Nhat Hanh on January 22, 2022 | 1 Comment »
Readers of Shadowing the Anthropocene will know that Buddhist thought has influenced my own thinking in profound ways. To be more precise, Buddhist thought, feeling, and practice has influenced my own thought, feeling, and practice. But there are many forms of Buddhism; like all philosophical and religious systems, it is a long and complex historical […]
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 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 The reading was a short, unpublished manuscript somewhat misleadingly titled “Freedom and Order,” as it’s mostly about humor, wit, and imagination.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 […]
Eco-ethico-aesthetics and George Floyd
Posted in Cultural politics, Process-relational thought, tagged A. N. Whitehead, aesthetics, C. S. Peirce, eco-ethico-aesthetics, ecology, ethics, firstness, George Floyd, George Floyd protests, logic, object-oriented ontology, revolutionary moments, secondness, Shadowing the Anthropocene, systemic racism, U.S. cultural politics, Whitehead on June 4, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
As I explain in Shadowing the Anthropocene, process-relational philosophy in a Peircian-Whiteheadian vein takes aesthetics to be first, ethics to be second, and logic (which, in our time, we need to think of also as eco-logic) to be third. This is not a temporal sequence, but a logical one: aesthetics is found in the response […]
Comments on process-relational meditation
Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, experience, meditation, mindfulness, pre-G, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, spiritual practice on April 17, 2020 | 4 Comments »
Part Two of my book Shadowing the Anthropocene (open access to all) outlines a system of “bodymindfulness” practice rooted in the mindfulness meditation system of Shinzen Young, but extended triadically to account for the active nature of living. Here are a couple of comments on and tweaks to that system, which I’ll refer to as […]
Process-relational readings
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged new materialism, Ontology, epistemology, organization studies, process research, process-relational thought, relational theories, relationalism, speculative realism, sustainability science, sustainability studies, Whitehead on March 21, 2020 | 1 Comment »
A very helpful analytical review of the “relational paradigm in sustainability research, practice, and education” has just been published online by Ambio. While it’s limited to a certain selection of key publications, the article, by European sustainabililty researchers Zack Walsh, Jessica Bohme, and Christine Wamsler, covers the terrain of “relational approaches” to ontology, epistemology, and […]
Sobering up…
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Anthropocene, anthropocentrism, Buddhism, C. S. Peirce, Ecozoic, love, Neocene, Shadowing the Anthropocene, sustainability on August 22, 2019 | 5 Comments »
Peter Brannen’s Atlantic article “The Anthropocene is a Joke” provides a helpful cold shower for those who’ve gotten a little too drunk on the concept of the Anthropocene. The entire article is worth reading. Here are a few snippets:
The second ontological twist
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Buddhism, C. S. Peirce, epistemology, Huayan Buddhism, Mind-Only Buddhism, Ontology, Peirce, process philosophy, process-relational thought, semiotics, Y, Yogacara philosophy on July 10, 2019 | 2 Comments »
I keep trying to rephrase the second piece of the “double insight” — or two ontological “twists” — around which the philosophical argument of Shadowing the Anthropocene (and Ecologies of the Moving Image) is woven. The first insight is the process-relational one, which is at the core of both A. N. Whitehead’s metaphysics and many variations […]