The latest issue of Precipitate: Journal of the New Environmental Imagination — which looks like an excellent issue — includes a review of Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” that reminds me how important it is to pay attention to the dialogical and heteroglossic texture of Malick’s films, and how easy it is to lose the path when one puts too much weight on a single line of text.
Posted in Cinema, Philosophy | Tagged Bakhtin, film, life, Malick, nature, Peirce | 2 Comments »
In response to my Dharma of file sharing post, visual artist Tom Gokey, whose work readers may know from Speculations journal, shared a link to his video on “Public Libraries, 3D Printing, FabLabs, and Hackerspaces.” It is… stunning in its implications. Just watch.
The democratization of production? The total plasticization of the world?
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged Ontology, epistemology, plasticity, reality, technoculture, virtual reality, virtuality | 6 Comments »
After a brief hiatus, the Integral Ecology reading group is back in action here. (Antonio at Mediacology combined two chapters – 5 and 6 – in his post of two weeks ago, and I’m running a little late with this one.)
What follows is my summary and response to Chapter 7, “Ecological Selves: The Who That Is Examining.” Since the research literature pertaining to psychological development and ecology is not my particular field of expertise, I’ve asked my friend Andy Fisher to comment on that section of the chapter and am including his comments below. Andy is the author of Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life (SUNY Press, 2002) and a practicing clinical therapist who lives in Perth, Ontario.
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Esbjorn-Hargens, flat ontology, Integral Ecology, Ontology, epistemology, Wilber, Zimmerman | 9 Comments »
The same issues I have blogged about in relation to academic file sharing site aaaaarg.org have been (predictably) arising elsewhere, including most recently — and a little less predictably — in the world of online Buddhism.
This particular discussion got started by an announcement at Buddha Torrents that they have been asked (rather politely) to stop sharing files of books online. In reply, Justin Whitaker at American Buddhist Perspective posted a thoughtful rumination on the ethics of downloading dharma books, with a call for a new business model and a nod to the experience of the music industry. A further post goes into more depth.
Posted in Academe | Tagged AAAAARG, Buddhism, dharma, file sharing, open access, Thich Nhat Hanh | 5 Comments »
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.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Darwin, Deleuze, feminism, Grosz | 5 Comments »
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.
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged findings, mysticism, spirituality | 2 Comments »
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…
Posted in Cinema, Process-relational thought | Tagged film, flow, life, Malick, nature | 3 Comments »
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 »
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.
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged religion, self-help, spirituality | 1 Comment »
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:
Posted in Academe | Tagged environmental studies, grad student advice, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity | 2 Comments »
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
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).
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged paganism, solstice | 2 Comments »