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Search Results for 'process-relational'

Part Two of my book Shadowing the Anthropocene (open access to all) outlines a system of “bodymindfulness” practice rooted in the mindfulness meditation system of Shinzen Young, but extended triadically to account for the active nature of living. Here are a couple of comments on and tweaks to that system, which I’ll refer to as […]

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It’s wonderful to see that process-relational theory is getting noticed in the study of social-ecological systems. A new article in Ecology and Society, Garcia et al’s “Adopting process-relational perspectives to tackle the challenges of social-ecological systems research,” argues that a process-relational perspective, “which focuses on nonequilibrium dynamics and relations between processes,” can help the field […]

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A very helpful analytical review of the “relational paradigm in sustainability research, practice, and education” has just been published online by Ambio. While it’s limited to a certain selection of key publications, the article, by European sustainabililty researchers Zack Walsh, Jessica Bohme, and Christine Wamsler, covers the terrain of “relational approaches” to ontology, epistemology, and […]

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I originally presented a “primer” to process-relational philosophy on this blog back in 2010. A substantially updated version of it is part of my book, Shadowing the Anthropocene. Here it is as a stand-alone, 10-page PDF file.

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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 “process-relational.” This is a theoretical paradigm and an ontology that takes the basic nature of the world to be that of relational process: that is, it understands the basic […]

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The following are some working notes following up on my previous post on the relationship between Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, specifically on Peirce’s logical/relational/phenomenological categories (firstness, secondness, thirdness) and Whitehead’s notion of prehension and the “actual occasion.” It’s become clear to me since writing that post that any rapprochement between the two requires going through Charles Hartshorne (which is something I had been resisting due to the theological cast of many of Hartshorne’s writings, but I’ve come to see that it’s unavoidable). [. . .]

This asymmetry is what gives process-relational ontology, at least the kind exemplified by these three thinkers, its evolutionary character and forward momentum. It is also what makes it different from relational philosophies for which all things are symmetrically related to all other things, resulting in the kind of formless, changeless “ontological stew” that Graham Harman (and sometimes Levi Bryant) has critiqued (to which I’ve responded in posts like these).

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The study of so-called “near-death experiences” is fascinating, as it is one of those areas that remain most mysterious to science, yet which empirical evidence suggests is very consequential to those who undergo it. By now we’ve all likely heard of the countless reports of people journeying through tunnels toward sources of light, being greeted […]

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A lot has been written about music and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze: for instance, on Deleuze and music theory, on music after Deleuze, and on Deleuze’s “Thought-Music,” and there’ve been some valiant efforts to put Deleuze to music, like this one, this one, and this one, and several related to Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand […]

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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 […]

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These thoughts, written in the aftermath of a half-day conference on race-shifting (first part viewable here) and influenced by Kim TallBear’s critique of identity, have me going out on a limb, for reasons that are likely pretty obvious. But I will persevere with them, and ask that you read them through to the end before reacting to isolated parts of the […]

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Television guitarist and songwriter Tom Verlaine has passed away. In his honor, I’m reposting something I wrote back in 2010, a version of which made it into Shadowing the Anthropocene. Much of it deals with the objects-versus-relations debate that was occupying the then very active “speculative realist” (“new materialist”) blogosphere. The first video captures Verlaine […]

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Slavoj Žižek has “belatedly” replied, in The Philosophical Salon, to some things I wrote in 2009 about his Lacanianism and his understanding (some would say misunderstanding) of Buddhism, and to other critiques of the latter. In his reply, he later mistakes another author — of the blog And Now For Something Completely Different — for […]

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