{"id":1032,"date":"2009-02-23T21:26:23","date_gmt":"2009-02-24T02:26:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/23\/kauffman-shaviro-goodwin-et-al\/"},"modified":"2009-02-23T21:26:23","modified_gmt":"2009-02-24T02:26:23","slug":"kauffman-shaviro-goodwin-et-al","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/23\/kauffman-shaviro-goodwin-et-al\/","title":{"rendered":"Kauffman, Shaviro, Goodwin, et al."},"content":{"rendered":"

Complexity theorist Stuart Kaufmann recently gave a talk here from his book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion<\/a>, which is getting more press these days than most books with a Spinozian\/Whiteheadian take on the emergent nature of intelligence, complexity, spirituality, and all that. Talking to him afterwards, I was a bit disappointed to find out that he had never heard of Deleuze, had only just heard of Whitehead as someone he should look into, and knew probably a modicum about Spinoza (he cites him a few times in the book). Not that I should expect that kind of intellectual cross-fertilization to be the norm — it’s not, especially across the Continental-analytical divide (though Kauffman does have a background in philosophy; and it’s also possible that he was being humble). But there’s an obvious resonance and potential alliance to be built here. I’m starting to read Kauffman’s book to confirm or disconfirm Steven Shaviro’s critiques of it<\/a>. Shaviro is a Deleuzian-Whiteheadian (post)poststructuralist whose excellent forthcoming book on Kant, Whitehead, and Deleuze<\/a> can be previewed in snippets on his web site<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More “out there” among leading biologists who lean this way (toward emergence, immanence, self-organization, mind-body non-dualism, etc.) is Brian Goodwin, whose book Nature’s Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture<\/a>, is being touted as his “biological testament.” It seems unfortunate that he chose such a relatively unknown, or at least non-academic, press to publish it with (Floris Books in England; it’s distributed here by the Rudolf Steiner folks). I haven’t seen it yet, but Arturo Escobar’s review <\/a>is enough to make me order and eagerly await its arrival. Escobar’s own Territories of Difference <\/a>is, incidentally, one of those landmark books (a long time in the making) that I expect will redefine environmental scholarship in important ways. I’ll post more about it at some point.<\/p>\n

Both Kauffman and Goodwin are profiled in John Brockman’s 1994 book The Third Culture<\/a>, which can be read on-line.<\/a> The book also includes chapters on Francesco Varela and Lynn Margulis, alongside the usual Darwinist and computationalist-cognitivist heavies like Dawkins, Pinker, Dennett, Minsky, et al., and the more likeable Gould and Eldridge types — the whole left, right, and center, if you will, of the then-current (circa early-1990s) scientific star circuit. Brockman’s profiles\/interviews are a great way of getting some familiarity with these folks; they include them commenting on each other’s work and ideas, so you get a kind of three-dimensional mapping of who’s who in relation to who else. It could use some updating, though, which Brockman’s Edge.org <\/a>does, in a dizzy, all-over-the-place kind of way…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Complexity theorist Stuart Kaufmann recently gave a talk here from his book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, which is getting more press these days than most books with a Spinozian\/Whiteheadian take on the emergent nature of intelligence, complexity, spirituality, and all that. Talking to him afterwards, I was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688977,4437,691847],"tags":[4434,4435,4436,201],"class_list":["post-1032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","category-science","category-religion-spirituality","tag-biology","tag-complexity","tag-emergence","tag-immanence"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-gE","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1153,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/11\/14\/stuart-kauffman-coming-to-vermont\/","url_meta":{"origin":1032,"position":0},"title":"Stuart Kauffman coming to Vermont","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 14, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm happy to share the news (a little belatedly) that complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman will be leaving his position as director of the University of Calgary's Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics to take a position here with the University of Vermont's Complex Systems Center, which, according to Grad College dean\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1293,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/06\/14\/potentially-real\/","url_meta":{"origin":1032,"position":1},"title":"potentially real…","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 14, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"It's just a blog post, but Stuart Kauffman is drawing on Whitehead and Peirce to propose a view of reality that sounds intriguingly like Deleuze's distinction between the Virtual and the Actual. He folds over Descartes to make a new dualism: Res extensa and Res potentia. In other words, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1366,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/11\/05\/process-relational-theory-primer\/","url_meta":{"origin":1032,"position":2},"title":"Process-relational theory primer","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the tasks of this blog, since its inception in late 2008, has been to articulate a theoretical-philosophical perspective that I have come to call \u201cprocess-relational.\u201d This is a theoretical paradigm and an ontology that takes the basic nature of the world to be that of relational process: that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3008,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/03\/21\/enchantments-to-come\/","url_meta":{"origin":1032,"position":3},"title":"Enchantments to come","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 21, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Thoughts for a spring equinox... Complexity theorist (and colleague of mine here at the University of Vermont) Stuart Kauffman takes stock here of the Enlightenment and sings of a re-enchantment to come. Disenchantment and re-enchantment are long-running tropes in the intellectual currents of modernity, which I've frequently explored in my\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Spirit matter"","block_context":{"text":"Spirit matter","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/religion-spirituality\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/03\/global-warming-hokusai-revisited-jean-louis-lassez-275x183.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1188,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/01\/30\/visualizing-immanence\/","url_meta":{"origin":1032,"position":4},"title":"visualizing immanence","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 30, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/QnTH4VSIQZw\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1201,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/02\/18\/readings\/","url_meta":{"origin":1032,"position":5},"title":"readings","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 18, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm reading, and being very impressed by, John Protevi's recent book Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. The book brings together a lot of recent work on affect with the best of the cognitive sciences (embodied\/embedded\/distributive\/enactive cognition), complexity and nonlinear dynamical systems theories, and a strong grounding in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}