In defiance of the idea that Nature — the thing, or the idea (capitalized or not), or both — is either dead or unnecessary, I feel like posting some favorite passages from “Nature Alive,” the second of A. N. Whitehead’s two 1933 lectures on nature, published in Modes of Thought (1938/1968), which you can read the full text of online.
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged nature, Whitehead | 6 Comments »
Whatever one may think of Brian Leiter as a philosopher (and I have no strong opinions, not having read any of his books), he has to be commended for having what may be the best philosopher’s blog for conversations on yesterday’s Canadian election.
Canadian election, you ask? The comments on his brief post on The Canadian Election: What the Heck Happened? have been extremely perceptive.
Posted in Politics | Tagged Canada, Politics | 1 Comment »
The comments on this previous post resulted in my doing a bit of quick research (methodology: googling) on how often the terms “constructivism” and “constructionism” get used in relation to certain theorists and theoretical terms.
Here are the results. I’ve put the “winning” terms in bold:
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged constructionism, constructivism, Latour, postmodernism | 1 Comment »
Chris Vitale at Networkologies has a great series going on Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books. It’s rich with insights and video clips. It starts here and continues for several lengthy posts. Or scroll down the right here to the “Mini-Essays” links on “Reading Deleuze’s Cinema Books.”
Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Visual culture | Tagged Deleuze, Vitale | 1 Comment »
Here’s a version of something that comes late in Chapter One of my Ecologies of the Moving Image manuscript. This follows a description of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (USSR, 1979), which I take as a kind of paradigmatic model for the process-relational framework the book develops. Here I discuss the film in its relationship to its social and material contexts, including that of the Chernobyl accident, which occurred seven years after the film was released, but which the film might just have anticipated.
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Visual culture | Tagged Chernobyl, Tarkovsky | 2 Comments »
I was going to post something to mark the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, but Sarah Phillips has already posted something so good, saying many of the things I would have wanted to say, that I will simply link to her article at Somatosphere and add some personal notes of my own. The result reads more like a love letter to post-Chernobyl Ukraine than a lament. So be it.
First, a couple of choice bits from Sarah’s article:
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged Chernobyl, ecology, environmental movement, nuclear politics, Tarkovsky, Ukraine, Vapniaky | 1 Comment »
Today’s link dump is devoted to sound, earth, religion, language, and the creativity of friends…
First the sounds. Here’s Science Friday’s Earth Day episode on the origins of music in the Great Animal Orchestra; and what American English sounds like to non-English speakers (hilarious):
Posted in Media ecology, Music & soundscape, Spirit matter | 2 Comments »
Happy Earth Day, and many thanks to those of you who’ve written me kind and appreciative emails in reply to my last comment.
I try to reply to emails individually, but just in case I don’t get around to it, your thoughts are always welcome and very appreciated.
Gone to Earth (Haida Gwaii series, A. Ivakhiv)
Posted in Blog stuff, Eco-culture | 1 Comment »
Substantive posts on this blog will be more sporadic for the coming little while, since I really need to focus on wrapping up my cinema book.
But do let me know (by private email or public comment) if you’ve been finding the “Ecology-Ontology-Politics” series, or any of the other lengthier recent posts, useful. Those may eventually work their way into publications, but that’s such a slow process (and its results so inaccessible, compared to online publishing) that I wonder how worthwhile it is to expend the energy for it.
At the same time, while I’m happy to post more like those pieces, the price you pay for having them here should be at least the occasional comment (or even just an email)! 😉
Posted in Blog stuff | 2 Comments »
Both Oxford and Indiana university presses are having their annual spring sales. Among other things, my own Claiming Sacred Ground is selling at Indiana for $12.
Also of possible interest to readers of this blog, at Indiana, are Jesper Hoffmeyer’s Signs of Meaning in the Universe, Foltz and Frodeman’s Rethinking Nature, and bunches of books by Peirce, Heidegger, and a posse of U.S. Continental philosophers (Sallis, Caputo, Lawlor, de Bestegui, et al.), as well as a good selection of cinema studies titles. The deals aren’t as good this year as they have been in past years, and unfortunately Peirce’s Essential Writings are not on sale this year; but John Sallis’s Topographies is a good deal.
Among the deals at Oxford are the following (note that the sale prices aren’t listed on the book pages, but go back to the sale page and you’ll find them – 50% or 65% off for all of those below): Hal Restivo’s Science, Technology & Society encyclopedia, Bill Edelglass’s and Jay Garfield’s excellent volume on Buddhist Philosophy, Jay Garfield’s highly regarded translation of Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika (The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way), Roger Gottlieb’s A Greener Faith, and David Orr’s The Nature of Design.
Posted in Academe | 1 Comment »
This post continues from the previous in this series, which looked at integral ecophilosopher Sean Esbjorn-Hargens’s writing on the ontology of climate change. Here I examine the relationship between leading integral theorist Ken Wilber, integralist Esbjorn-Hargens, and process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
It’s a little difficult to separate Wilber’s and Esbjorn-Hargens’s views on Whitehead. I will simply refer to “IT” (Integral Theory) in speaking of both their views, though these are generally ascribable to Wilber. (And I should note that identification of the term “Integral Theory” with Wilber himself is not uncontested.) I will use “KW” (Wilber) or “EH” (Esbjorn-Hargens) when quoting from specific written sources. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes attributed to EH will be from his article “Integrating Whitehead: Towards an Environmental Ethic,” which is found online, undated and unpaginated, at the integralworld.net website. Most of the Wilber references are either from “Appendix A: My Criticism of Whitehead as True but Partial,” found here, or from printed sources, especially The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad (1997) and Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (orig. 1995, revised 2000).
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter | Tagged integral theory, integralism, nonduality, object-oriented philosophy, spirituality, transpersonal psychology, Whitehead, Wilber | 5 Comments »