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Search Results for 'revolutionary moments'

Egypt & everywhere

Posted in Philosophy, Politics, tagged , , , on February 1, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Uprisings, revolutions, and sudden political realignments are perfect subjects for process-relational philosophical reflection. Their causes are always somewhat mysterious; historians may reconstruct the events that led up to them, and may come up with theories to account for them, but these almost always remain highly contestable. They are moments when suddenly much more is at stake than is normally the case.
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But the effort will have been worth it because, as Antonio says, “To behold such a space is a beautiful thing” and “to unlearn it is impossible.” The role of the theory of self-determination and civil disobedience (alongside the practice of social networking) in these uprisings cannot be underestimated. And every time those streams get watered, they deepen.

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when bad things happen (karma running over dogma)

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , on June 26, 2009 | 4 Comments »

We live in a universe of hazard, a place where asteroids strike, where car smash-ups pluck out a life like a boot squashing a centipede, where planes fall out of the sky, a heart attack takes a brother from behind in the middle of a night, a train runs over a friend’s passed out daughter, […]

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affective contagion & the events in Tehran

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , , , on June 16, 2009 | 5 Comments »

I’m sure I’m not the only one following these events with excited trepidation and a feeling of almost wanting to be there (but glad also to be watching it from afar). Which makes me wonder: what is it about revolutionary moments that fires the imagination and keeps us, or me at least, plugged into them […]

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Ontology 101

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 9, 2024 | 5 Comments »

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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Eco-querying The Dawn of Everything

Posted in Eco-theory, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 21, 2022 | Leave a Comment »

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 […]

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Eco-ethico-aesthetics and George Floyd

Posted in Cultural politics, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 4, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

As I explain in Shadowing the Anthropocene, process-relational philosophy in a Peircian-Whiteheadian vein takes aesthetics to be first, ethics to be second, and logic (which, in our time, we need to think of also as eco-logic) to be third. This is not a temporal sequence, but a logical one: aesthetics is found in the response […]

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‘Country under reconstruction’: Ukraine & the society of the provocation

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , , on February 7, 2014 | 14 Comments »

“COUNTRY UNDER RECONSTRUCTION. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.” (from Ukrainian anarchist group Blackmaidan) “It is as if, for a moment, the ‘projection’ of the outside world has stopped working; as if we have been confronted momentarily with the formless grey emptiness of the screen itself…”  (Slavoj Zizek, describing the scene outside a traveling couple’s window in Robert […]

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What’s real

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 21, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Conversation overheard between an ambitious grad student and a simpleminded process-relational philosopher . . .         Jake Wanano-Everton:   Sir, where do you draw the line between what’s real and what’s not real?       Prof. Noah Fewthings:   The only things that are real are the moments of experienced reality — drops of experience, let’s […]

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Life outside the lava lamp

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , on August 17, 2011 | 17 Comments »

Over at Naught Thought, Ben Woodard (sorry, Ben, for the earlier misspell) wants “to know what the Process/Relational folks think” of his thoughts about philosophies of process versus philosophies of objects or substances (or something like that). What follows is one quick and dirty way of thinking of a certain key difference between these two […]

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What a bodymind can do – Part 1

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , 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 […]

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Chernobyl, May Day, & the (r)evolution of risk society

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , on April 26, 2009 | 34 Comments »

Today was the 23rd anniversary of the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine. I had been invited to give a sermon at a nearby Unitarian church connected to both this anniversary and the May Day (Beltane) that’s coming up in a few days, and my thoughts, in preparation, revolved around how both of those dates, along […]

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