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Posts Tagged ‘biosemiotics’

For a moratorium on “constructivism”

Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , on April 30, 2011 | 8 Comments »

I’d like to call a moratorium on the use of the word “constructivism” (or “constructionism”) to refer only to social constructivism. (This post was prompted by Tim  Morton’s Object-Oriented Strategies for Ecological Art, but his point there is somewhat differently directed and mine addresses a more general issue that can still be found in a […]

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On animism, multinaturalism, & cosmopolitics

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 10, 2011 | 15 Comments »

Since there isn’t much available in English about Philippe Descola’s writings on animism, I thought I would share a piece of the cosmopolitics argument I mentioned in my last post. It will appear, in modified form, in the concluding chapter of the SAR Press volume mentioned there. Most of the volume will consist of ethnographic […]

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biosemiotics news

Posted in Philosophy, tagged on August 26, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

New Scientist has a nice article (“Searching for meanings in a meadow“) on the state of the field of biosemiotics, which I’ve mentioned here on a number of occasions (e.g., here and, in passing, here). The new Springer anthology Essential Readings in Biosemiotics looks like a very good overview of all things biosemiotic. The 77-page […]

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toward a post-constructivist synthesis

Posted in Philosophy, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 12, 2010 | 7 Comments »

I recently mentioned my belief, or hope, that the humanities and sciences are working their ways toward a post-constructivist synthesis, a paradigm in the making with the potential to become a powerful player in twenty-first century public discourse. “Post-constructivism” says little, and “post-representationalism”, “post-anthropocentric humanism,” and “post-Kantianism” — the other terms I used there — […]

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visualizing immanence

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged , , , on January 30, 2010 | 6 Comments »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnTH4VSIQZw?fs=1&hl=en_US This beautifully photographed new BBC documentary, The Secret Life of Chaos, evocatively illustrates one way of thinking about immanence, i.e., the spontaneous emergence of beauty and complexity from natural process. Morphogenesis, self-organization, the collapse of Newtonian physics (into chaos/complexity theory, etc.), the “butterfly effect,” fractal geometry, delicious little biographical details about Alan Turing, Edward […]

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cultural studies’ biosemiotic turn?

Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 13, 2009 | 4 Comments »

One of the impressive recent efforts to bring the physical sciences and the social sciences and humanities back onto “consilient” speaking terms (to use E. O. Wilson’s terminology, though his own efforts at this have been unimpressive) is Wendy Wheeler’s The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture. Wheeler is a humanist, an […]

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