“Ultimately, the thinking of speculative pragmatism that is activist philosophy belongs to nature. Its aesthetico-politics compose a nature philosophy. The occurrent arts in which it exhibits itself are politics of nature. “The one-word summary of its relational-qualitative goings on: ecology. Activist philosophy concerns the ecology of powers of existence. Becomings in the midst. Creative change […]
Posts Tagged ‘Whitehead’
Whitehead’s return, ecology’s boon
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged environmental philosophy, object-oriented philosophy, process philosophy, speculative realism, Whitehead on April 29, 2012 | 12 Comments »
On theism/nihilism & other things
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged cosmology, nihilism, panentheism, pantheism, speculative realism, theism, Whitehead on July 19, 2011 | 2 Comments »
The Speculative Realist blogosphere has recently been alight with debates over the role of religion, God, theism versus nihilism, the secular and the “post-secular,” and other such things. Since these are topics I’m naturally interested, and somewhat invested, in, I ought to participate, but time constraints have made that all but impossible for me recently. […]
Those objects in the rearview mirror…
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged integral theory, object-oriented philosophy, Whitehead on June 17, 2011 | 2 Comments »
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 […]
What a bodymind can do – Part 3
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged aesthetics, Buddhism, ecology, emergence, ethics, flow, logic, Peirce, Shinzen Young, Whitehead, Wilber on May 30, 2011 | 1 Comment »
This is the concluding part of a three-part article. Part 1 can be found here, Part 2 here. They should be read in the sequence in which they were published. The True, the Good, and the Beautiful All of this can be related to the triad of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful […]
What a bodymind can do – Part 2
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, meditation, mindfulness, Peirce, practice, Shinzen Young, Whitehead on May 30, 2011 | 1 Comment »
This continues from the previous post, where Shinzen Young’s model of core mindfulness practices was expanded into a system of classifying what a human bodymind can do. Here the model is deepened following the process-relational insights that are at the core of Shinzen’s system as well as of other (especially Mahayana and Vajrayana) Buddhist systems, […]
What a bodymind can do – Part 1
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, meditation, mindfulness, Peirce, practice, Shinzen Young, Whitehead on May 30, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Working with Shinzen Young‘s system of mindfulness training, which I’ve described here before, and thinking it through in the process-relational logic I’ve been developing on this blog (and elsewhere), is resulting in a certain re-mix of Shinzen’s ideas, and of Buddhism more generally, with Peirce’s, Whitehead’s, Wilber’s, Deleuze’s, and others’. Here’s a crack at where […]
The beatnik brotherhood
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Continental philosophy, Deleuze, Harman, Latour, Stengers, Whitehead on May 25, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Graham Harman’s note reiterating his position that Whitehead, Latour, Deleuze, Bergson, and Simondon (among others) do not make up a coherent philosophical “lump” — “pack” or “tribe” might be more colorful terms here (if philosophers were cats, how herdable would they be?) — makes me want to clarify my own position on these thinkers.
Process integralism
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged integral theory, Whitehead, Wilber on May 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Further on the integral theory front, I wanted to mention another angle on the Wilber-Whitehead conversation. Bonnitta Roy’s article “A Process Model of Integral Theory” (pdf) in the December 2006 issue of Integral Review is a thought-provoking attempt to advance post-metaphysical integral theory further toward process thought and Dzogchen Buddhism (what better combination?).
Thinking with Whitehead
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged beatnik brotherhood, Deleuze, Harman, Stengers, Whitehead on May 23, 2011 | 7 Comments »
Isabelle Stengers’s Thinking With Whitehead arrived in the mail today. The publication of the English translation of this tome, a long nine years after the French original, is a genuine Event in the world of process-relational philosophy (or whatever you’d like to name the “beatnik brotherhood,” as Harman calls it, of philosophers of immanence and […]
The idea of Nature, refigured
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged nature, Whitehead on May 4, 2011 | 6 Comments »
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 […]
Eco-onto-politics 3: Wilber, Integralism, & Whitehead
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged integral theory, integralism, nonduality, object-oriented philosophy, spirituality, transpersonal psychology, Whitehead, Wilber on April 16, 2011 | 5 Comments »
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 […]