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Realism & Peirce

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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). But of course it still needs to be said (in some circles, like to Left anti-realists) and it’s better said by constructivist realists (like Bryant, Latour, et al.) than by anti-constructivists (on the Right or Left). Constructivist realism — a realism that avows the constructedness (enactedness, emergentness, historicity) of everything, from quarks to civilizations to universes — is where things are at. (Which is why I appreciate Levi’s philosophizing so much.)

The comments that follow his post include some rejoinders from Peircians (like Mark Crosby and Matt Segall), who don’t like Bryant’s seeming characterization of Charles Sanders Peirce as an anti- or non-realist. In response, Levi writes that “we never really see Pierce employed outside the humanities.” Here he needs to be corrected.

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Objectivity 2.0?

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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Here’s a question for all of you:

What does the universe look like to an objective observer?

Let’s unpack some of the assumptions and traps hidden inside this question.

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Under Western Skies: Intersections of Environments, Technologies, and Communities

September 9 – 13, 2014
Mount Royal University
Calgary, AB CANADA

Under Western Skies is a biennial, interdisciplinary conference on the environment. The third conference welcomes academics from across the disciplines as well as members of artistic and activist communities, non- and for-profit organizations, government, labour, and NGOs to address collectively the environmental challenges faced by human and nonhuman actors.

The conference is held on the Mount Royal University campus (Calgary, Alberta, CANADA) in the LEED Gold-certified Roderick Mah Centre for Continuous Learning.

Keynote speakers for the 2014 conference include:

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Mosaïcultures

Some pictures from the Mosaïcultures international exhibition of horticultural arts at Montreal’s Botanical Gardens. The exhibition continues until September 29.

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Lise Cormier’s Mother Earth

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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 is because Continue Reading »

EMI online course

Cross-posting from e2mc:

I’ve begun teaching a course on film and ecology and using my book Ecologies of the Moving Image as the main text.

Since the topic is related to the theme of this blog, and since I’ll be creating reading guides and posting links to film clips and related materials for my students, I thought I might as well share those publicly here.

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It’s the second day of the Digital Environmental Humanities Workshop at McGill University. Yesterday was devoted to the environmental humanities, today to the digital. One of the main goals is to bring the two together in new and productive ways.

Many exciting developments… Geoff Rockwell has been posting his notes from the conference. His list of links to digital humanities tools is particularly useful; scroll down to “Sunday Sept. 8th” on that page.

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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 state-of-the-art summation of Latour’s project of producing an “anthropology of the moderns” — that is, of us.

Most interestingly, it does this as a multi-phase exercise in “interactive metaphysics,” which includes a participatory online web site intended to fill in the details and elicit commentary, debate, and refinement.

Hard-core fans will also likely have heard about Adam Robbert’s online AIME research group, which will be conducting a group reading beginning next week. The group currently involving several dozen participants (including myself — so you will be hearing about it here), but it is open to the public.

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Glandwr councillors, don’t do it. It’s a beautiful, sustainably designed home. Let them live there.

See Couple lose fight to save ‘hobbit house’ eco-home from demolition. And Charley and Meg’s Facebook page for updates.

Then sign the petition.

More pictures here.

 

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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: Continue Reading »

Kochelsee

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I’m at the Vollmar Akademie by Lake Kochel in the Bavarian Alps, just a short train ride beyond the last S-Bahn station south of Munich, for “Studying the Environment – Working Across Disciplines.” The Rachel Carson Center has got a bunch of us together here to hammer out some ideas for inter/trans/disciplinarity in environmental research.

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Nice or what?

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The above is

(a) beautiful,

(b) ugly,

(c) neither beautiful nor ugly in itself (nor anything else in particular), or

(d) _________ (fill in the blank)?

It’s a view (on a particularly hazy day) of the Sheffield wind power project in northeast Vermont, as seen from Crystal Lake State Park beach outside the town of Barton.

The view itself Continue Reading »

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