The word ontology comes up a lot in the fields I work in (loosely speaking, the environmental humanities and social sciences), especially among scholars grappling with cultural differences and “decolonial” thinking. Here’s a crack at a 5-minute introduction to it for newbies. Ontology is commonly defined as something like “the philosophical study of being” or […]
Posts Tagged ‘Ontology’
Eco-querying The Dawn of Everything
Posted in Eco-theory, Politics, tagged David Graeber, David Wengrow, environmental politics, freedom, Graeber and Wengrow, ontological turn, Ontology, political theory, state, The Dawn of Everything, The Immanent Frame, three ecologies, visionary experience on July 21, 2022 | 2 Comments »
The Immanent Frame, the Social Science Research Council’s forum on religion, secularism, and the public sphere, is in the midst of publishing a series of responses to David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. My contribution, entitled “The Dawn of Everything Good?“, appeared last week. The series can be read here. The following […]
Eco+Deco, a manifesto in progress
Posted in Cultural politics, Eco-theory, Manifestos & auguries, Science & society, tagged colonialism, coloniality, decolonialism, Decolonization, ecological science, ecologization, ecology, indigeneity, indigenization, land, Latour, manifestos, Ontology, postcolonialism, reindigenization, Toronto Biennale of Art on May 31, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Some of the best art exhibitions today show that the socially engaged art world is undergoing two shifts that some of us in the environmental humanities have been advocating for some time: they ecologize and they decolonize. An excellent example of this is the second edition of the Toronto Biennale of Art, currently wrapping up […]
Being beyond experience
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Buddhism, Galen Strawson, Ontology, panexperientialism, panpsychism, process-relational thought, sleep, speculative realism on November 12, 2021 | 3 Comments »
(Warning: This post goes into ontological questions of interest only to philosophers.🙂 I leave aside their potential ecological implications for another time. But see Arne Vetlesen’s Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism for one take on those. I hope to discuss that book in a future post.) One of the […]
The four ontological aces
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged apophaticism, Buddhism, C. S. Peirce, eco-ethico-aesthetics, epistemology, Four Truths, G. I. Gurdjieff, Graham Harman, Heidegger, Nagarjuna, object-oriented ontology, Ontology, Peirce, process-relational ontology, quadrinity, Three Truths, Tiantai, triadism, Two Truths, Zhiyi on May 25, 2021 | 6 Comments »
Buddhism has its “Two Truths” and its “Three Truths“: the “Two” were made famous by Indian philosopher Nagarjuna; the “Three” a little less famous by Chinese philosopher Zhiyi. About a year ago, I offered up four perspectives on mortality, and here I want to make the case that they could be seen as a kind […]
The second ontological twist
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Buddhism, C. S. Peirce, epistemology, Huayan Buddhism, Mind-Only Buddhism, Ontology, Peirce, process philosophy, process-relational thought, semiotics, Y, Yogacara philosophy on July 10, 2019 | 2 Comments »
I keep trying to rephrase the second piece of the “double insight” — or two ontological “twists” — around which the philosophical argument of Shadowing the Anthropocene (and Ecologies of the Moving Image) is woven. The first insight is the process-relational one, which is at the core of both A. N. Whitehead’s metaphysics and many variations […]
Shadowing the Anthropocene: a reader’s guide
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Adrian Ivakhiv, Alfred North Whitehead, Anthropocene, books, Charles Sanders Peirce, epistemology, Ontology, process-relational thought, Shadowing the Anthropocene, writing on October 13, 2018 | 8 Comments »
Here’s the “reader’s guide” I promised for Shadowing the Anthropocene. It begins with a quick summary of the book’s main contribution — a kind of “master key” to what it tries to do. It then lays out a set of paths one can take through the book, which would be useful for readers with an […]
Rethinking the ‘three ecologies’
Posted in Eco-theory, tagged ecocriticism, Ecologies of the Moving Image, epistemology, Guattari, music, Ontology, Peirce, three ecologies, visual art on March 8, 2014 | 10 Comments »
Or, process-relational ecocriticism 2.0 Two of the courses I’m currently teaching — the intermediate-level “Environmental Literature, Art, and Media” and the senior-level “The Culture of Nature” — require introducing an eco-critical framework appropriate to a wide range of artistic forms, from literature to visual art, music, film and new media. The process-relational framework developed in […]
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