Television guitarist and songwriter Tom Verlaine has passed away. In his honor, I’m reposting something I wrote back in 2010, a version of which made it into Shadowing the Anthropocene. Much of it deals with the objects-versus-relations debate that was occupying the then very active “speculative realist” (“new materialist”) blogosphere. The first video captures Verlaine […]
Search Results for 'process-relational thought'
R.i.p. Tom Verlaine (relationalism & earth jazz redux)
Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged Grateful Dead, improvisation, Marquee Moon, Miles Davis, musicology, object-oriented ontology, relationalism, television, Tom Verlaine on January 29, 2023 | Leave a Comment »
Žižek’s belated reply
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Žižek on January 6, 2023 | 3 Comments »
Slavoj Žižek has “belatedly” replied, in The Philosophical Salon, to some things I wrote in 2009 about his Lacanianism and his understanding (some would say misunderstanding) of Buddhism, and to other critiques of the latter. In his reply, he later mistakes another author — of the blog And Now For Something Completely Different — for […]
Rewiring our capacity for ecocultural change
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, tagged climate archaeology, climate trauma, conversion, eco-anxiety, ecocultural change, ecocultural identity, Ecological Civilization, ecological grief, environmental melancholia, experience, Katimavik, magic mushrooms, neuroplasticity, peak experiences, process-relational theory, psychedelics, Robin Carhart-Harris, solastalgia, youth corps programs on August 10, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Research on the usefulness of psychedelics for treating depression, anxiety, addiction, and post-traumatic stress has been growing steadily. (See here, here, here, and here for glimpses of it, and To the Best of Our Knowledge‘s recent exploration of it for a fascinating in-depth look at the topic.) I’d like to extrapolate from that research for […]
Eco-querying The Dawn of Everything
Posted in Eco-theory, Politics, tagged David Graeber, David Wengrow, environmental politics, freedom, Graeber and Wengrow, ontological turn, Ontology, political theory, state, The Dawn of Everything, The Immanent Frame, three ecologies, visionary experience on July 21, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
The Immanent Frame, the Social Science Research Council’s forum on religion, secularism, and the public sphere, is in the midst of publishing a series of responses to David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. My contribution, entitled “The Dawn of Everything Good?“, appeared last week. The series can be read here. The following […]
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 »
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 […]
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 […]
Being present while screaming
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged askesis, G. I. Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff Work, mindfulness, philosophy as a way of life, philosophy as way of life, practice, presence, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, triune brain, vibrant materialism, Vipassana meditation on October 20, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
One of the things modern humans aren’t very good at is being fully present in a given moment — being here now, as Ram Dass famously put it — and remaining so in the midst of the activities, distractions, and challenges of the day. Meditation apps and mindfulness teachers can train you to do that […]
Eco-humanities seminar
Posted in Academe, Eco-theory, tagged Adrian Ivakhiv, Advanced Environmental Humanities, courses, EcoCultureLab, environmental humanities, readings, University of Vermont on January 29, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
I will be making parts of my “Advanced Environmental Humanities” course open to the EcoCultureLab community and a limited broader public. Technical details remain to be worked out, but I’d like to make our readings and discussions open, so as to include interested participants from outside the university community. The course is a graduate and […]
Emotional practices, part 2: Affective construction, the triune self, & the art of joyful deliberation
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged A. H. Almaas, affect theory, affective neuroscience, affective practice, askesis, C. S. Peirce, constructivism, emotional practice, G. I. Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff, Hadot, inquiry, Jacques Lacan, neo-Spinozism, Paul Maclean, philosophy as way of life, philosophy of the moment, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, Spinoza, spiritual practice, three-body practice, triune brain, triune self on August 25, 2020 | 1 Comment »
In part 1 of this article, I compared two recent books, each of which proclaims a “new paradigm” in the scientific study of emotions and affect: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “constructivist” How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Stephen Asma’s and Rami Gabriel’s “basic emotions”-rooted The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition. In […]