July 3, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Among the books coming out in this fall’s Duke University Press catalog (pdf) is one I’m particularly looking forward to: Elizabeth Grosz’s Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art.
Grosz is among the most exciting thinkers in the post-Deleuzian landscape — a tremendous synthesist of the biological (especially Darwinian), philosophical (especially “vital materialist”), and feminist (notably drawing on Luce Irigaray here), whose work offers rich insights for bridging the sciences and humanities.
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Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Darwin, Deleuze, feminism, Grosz | 5 Comments »
June 28, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Time magazine’s Healthland supplement summarizes a recent clinical study of 18 healthy, spiritually inclined adults who were administered a certain drug over 5 eight-hour sessions. Among the results:
Fourteen months after participating in the study, 94% of those who received the drug said the experiment was one of the top five most meaningful experiences of their lives; 39% said it was the single most meaningful experience.
Critically, however, the participants themselves were not the only ones who saw the benefit from the insights they gained: their friends, family member and colleagues also reported that [X] had made the participants calmer, happier and kinder.
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Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged findings, mysticism, spirituality | 2 Comments »
June 27, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
It will take some time before I can say anything very intelligible about Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.
But here are some initial thoughts, for what they’re worth.
(1) This is the film in which Malick just lets it go, and lets it flow…
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Posted in Cinema, Process-relational thought | Tagged film, flow, life, Malick, nature | 3 Comments »
June 27, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
So what’s all this anti-vitalism wafting on the (post-) Continental wind? What’s it working from? (Thacker? Others?) Is it anything more than another round of vanguardism (“not enough to revitalize matter, let’s devitalize life while we’re at it” — another version of the old Stalinist jingle about not being able to make an omelet without breaking some eggs)?
Anyone who was at the conference, or with the time (and a strong enough internet connection, which I don’t seem to have at the moment) to listen to the audio recordings from it, care to summarize?
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged anti-vitalism, Continental philosophy, life, vitalism | 3 Comments »
June 23, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The news that self-help guru James Arthur Ray has been found guilty of three counts of negligent homicide brings to an end (of sorts) a saga that began with three deaths and numerous injuries at an October, 2009, sweat lodge ceremony outside Sedona, Arizona. Since I’ve written a handful of articles and half a book about Sedona, and some of the people I wrote about have been indirectly affected by the event, I thought it fitting to comment on it here.
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Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged religion, self-help, spirituality | 1 Comment »
June 22, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The first issue of the new Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences is out and available here. The JESS is the journal of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences, which is meeting this week at the University of Vermont in Burlington (where I live and work, so I’ll be there).
The first issue includes an article on the “Professional development of interdisciplinary environmental scholars,” which includes some excellent advice for aspiring environmental interdisciplinarians, including on graduate study options, job prospects, strengths and weaknesses of interdisciplinary work as opposed to more traditional disciplinarity, and much else.
Here are a few excerpts:
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Posted in Academe | Tagged environmental studies, grad student advice, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity | 2 Comments »
June 22, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
After Nature, the new blog hosted by process-relational ecophilosophical fellow traveler Leon Niemoczynski, now has an RSS feed. That means that I can enthusiastically recommend that philosophically inclined readers of this blog subscribe to it.
Leon is author of Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature. The five most popular tags on his blog give you a good idea of what to expect there: they are “Whitehead,” “Deleuze,” “Peirce,” “process-relational philosophy,” and “speculative realism.” And Leon has already begun posting some excellent field-guide style tutorials: one on Ecstatic Naturalism, another on Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology, and a third is being promised for “Speculative Naturalism,” subtitled “The God of Peirce, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Meillassoux.”
Welcome to the blogosphere, Leon.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Comments Off on After Nature
June 20, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
In its “Best places to celebrate the solstice,” Salon.com urges us to “embrace your inner pagan” — at places like Glastonbury Festival (natch), the Hill of Tara in Ireland, Cusco in Peru, and the desert site of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels in Utah (pictured above).
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Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged paganism, solstice | 2 Comments »
June 19, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
It seems that my first book, Claiming Sacred Ground, which came out ten years ago, is circulating for free online as a PDF. (I just downloaded it myself to see if it’s the real thing; it is. Do a PDF search for it if you want it.)
I don’t mind people downloading it — it’s a good way to look at it before deciding if you want to spend money for a hard copy. The hardcover is pricy — or was when it came out. But it’s also attractive and nice to hold in one’s hands, and you can now find it cheap. (Ask me if you want one for under ten bucks.)
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Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged books, Claiming Sacred Ground, Ivakhiv | 1 Comment »
June 18, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Tim Morton makes the useful point that E/Z’s notion of the “noosphere”
can only be functional if it discriminates between some kinds of thing such as cognizing with neurons versus other kinds of thing such as cognizing with plant hormones, or resting on a table, or spanning a river.
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Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Integral Ecology, noesis, noosphere | 8 Comments »
June 17, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Differences are starting to emerge in our group reading of Integral Ecology, with Tim Morton taking a grumpy stance from the back of the car while others are measured but generally more positive in their assessments. Tim’s main criticism seems to be the Object-Oriented Ontological one that E/Z’s categories “map perfectly onto normal everyday human prejudices,” and specifically prejudices against non-sentient beings. Tim writes:
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Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged integral theory, object-oriented philosophy, Whitehead | 2 Comments »
June 16, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
This continues from the previous post, where I discussed chapter 3 of Integral Ecology. Together these posts make up my summary overviews for Week 3 of the reading group. What follows is less a summary than a response to chapter 4, but I think it covers most of the key concepts in the chapter.
Chapter 4: Developing Interiors
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Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Integral Ecology, integral theory, Wilber | 7 Comments »
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