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Archive for the ‘Process-relational thought’ Category

SR, Whitehead, etc.

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , on June 29, 2010 | 4 Comments »

I’m just catching up with this interesting exchange between Gary Williams (Minds and Brains), Graham Harman, and Tom Sparrow (Plastic Bodies). Williams takes issue with Harman’s and others’ portrayal of Speculative Realism as “revolutionary.” “The narrative of ‘finally’ moving beyond the ‘Kantian nightmare’”, he writes, “is tired and overplayed.” He argues that it’s not a […]

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actual occasions

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , on June 27, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Glancing through a recent issue of the journal Subjectivity, I noticed that their very first issue — an impressive debut that featured an all-star cast of relational thinkers including Isabelle Stengers, Annemarie Mol, and Nigel Thrift — is freely available online (to non-subscribers). The issue also included an article by Paul Stenner that provides an […]

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Bennett’s conatus

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , on June 25, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Just as I was getting ready to wind up the Bennett discussions yesterday, Scu posted a substantial piece about chapter 7, and promised more to come on chapter 8. I’m glad to see it, since I thought there could have been more discussion about both (and about some general issues throughout the book). Picking up […]

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half-way house

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , on June 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

The further I have gotten into Vibrant Matter, the more I have been thinking of it as a kind of half-way house on the route to a process-relational ontology. (I’ll admit I’ve read the whole book now, but I’m trying to defer my comments on the final chapter till next week. And I also strongly […]

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daughter objects (& processes)

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , on June 14, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Levi has a nice post on pedagogy, objects, and his daughter. His conclusions, I think, can be rephrased in terms more amenable to an objects-relations dialogue. [. . .] Since Graham has set out a challenge (“Take that, relationists!”), I’ll take a very quick stab at a process-relational reply:

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Peirce-Whitehead-Hartshorne & process-relational ontology

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , on June 9, 2010 | 6 Comments »

The following are some working notes following up on my previous post on the relationship between Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, specifically on Peirce’s logical/relational/phenomenological categories (firstness, secondness, thirdness) and Whitehead’s notion of prehension and the “actual occasion.” It’s become clear to me since writing that post that any rapprochement between the two requires going through Charles Hartshorne (which is something I had been resisting due to the theological cast of many of Hartshorne’s writings, but I’ve come to see that it’s unavoidable). [. . .]

This asymmetry is what gives process-relational ontology, at least the kind exemplified by these three thinkers, its evolutionary character and forward momentum. It is also what makes it different from relational philosophies for which all things are symmetrically related to all other things, resulting in the kind of formless, changeless “ontological stew” that Graham Harman (and sometimes Levi Bryant) has critiqued (to which I’ve responded in posts like these).

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vibrant food & energy matters

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , on May 31, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Just a few quick notes on chapters 2 and 3 of Vibrant Matter. See Critical Animal for the continuing cross-blog discussion of the book (to be resumed after the Memorial Day holiday, no doubt), and Philosophy in a Time of Error for what’s been said so far. These two previously published chapters seem to me […]

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Vibrant Matter reading group

Posted in Blog stuff, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , on May 15, 2010 | 5 Comments »

The previously announced ‘Vibrant Matter’ reading group will take place across five blogs over five weeks, beginning May 23 and ending June 26. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things is the latest book by Johns Hopkins University political theorist Jane Bennett. Philosophy in a Time of Error has posted a very useful overview of […]

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between Whitehead & Peirce

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , on May 12, 2010 | 9 Comments »

The case has often been made — by John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, and others — that Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics provides an account of the universe that is, or could be, foundational to an ecological worldview. This is because it is an account that is naturalist (or realist), relational, evolutionary, and non-dualistic in […]

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ontologizing

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , on May 4, 2010 | 7 Comments »

I’m looking forward to Graham Harman’s forthcoming review of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, and I’m glad to see that this discussion between object-oriented philosophy and Bennett’s vibrant materialism (and, by extension, the other theoretical impulses she draws on, which this blog, for the most part, enthusiastically shares) is getting underway. That discussion will no doubt […]

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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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