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Search Results for 'triadism'

Being present while screaming

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 20, 2021 | Leave a Comment »

One of the things modern humans aren’t very good at is being fully present in a given moment — being here now, as Ram Dass famously put it — and remaining so in the midst of the activities, distractions, and challenges of the day. Meditation apps and mindfulness teachers can train you to do that […]

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The four ontological aces

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 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 […]

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Emotional practices, part 2: Affective construction, the triune self, & the art of joyful deliberation

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 25, 2020 | 1 Comment »

In part 1 of this article, I compared two recent books, each of which proclaims a “new paradigm” in the scientific study of emotions and affect: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “constructivist” How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Stephen Asma’s and Rami Gabriel’s “basic emotions”-rooted The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition. In […]

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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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The second ontological twist

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

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Rethinking the 3 categories

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 9, 2016 | 4 Comments »

I’ve been struggling with how my triadic framework for interpreting art works relates to C. S. Peirce’s categories. When I first developed my triadism (fleshed out in Ecologies of the Moving Image) into the non-Peircian terms of materiality, experience, and representation — which I did in the context of teaching a course on the environmental arts — […]

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EMI’s cinematic materialism (a response to reviews)

Posted in Cinema, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , on December 29, 2014 | Leave a Comment »

The latest issue of the open-access Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, an issue devoted to “Gilles Deleuze and Moving Images,” includes a review by Niall Flynn of my book Ecologies of the Moving Image. Another recent review of EMI can be found in the The Journal of Ecocriticism. And I’ve mentioned the Environmental Humanities […]

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Thinking through threes (& deities)

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , on March 14, 2012 | 14 Comments »

  One of the things that Ecologies of the Moving Image has left unresolved, and left me needing to think more about, is the extent to which my Peircian “triadism” holds up. Philosophically, the case for some sort of triadism as a way of getting around dualisms is, at first blush, appealing. But there are […]

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Eco-onto-politics 3: Wilber, Integralism, & Whitehead

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

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the model (Peirce+Whitehead): films, dogs, worlds

Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , on December 2, 2010 | 4 Comments »

Here’s a version of the theoretical model I develop in Ecologies of the Moving Image. (An earlier version can be found here.) Following Peircian phenomenology (or “phaneroscopy”) and Whiteheadian ontology, that model is process-relational and triadic. (*See Note at bottom for more on the relationship between Peirce, Whitehead, and their leading synthesist, Hartshorne.)

This means:

Everything is three. Or, everything there is can be thought of in terms of three relational processes:

(1) The thing itself, which is a qualitatively distinctive phenomenon. Let’s call it the thing-world, since it is an unfolding of a particular kind, which sets up a formal structure of internal relations and (externally) interactive potentials as it unfolds, and since our relationship to it is generally from its ‘outside,’ though we can enter into a relationship with it.

(2) The interaction of that thing with another. Let’s call this the thing-experience, since we (or others) experience it from the ‘inside.’ This experience is what happens with us when we enter into the relationship with (1). (Other things may be happening with us simultaneously; this thing-experience doesn’t exhaust us. It’s just what we’re trying to understand here.)

(3) The relating of the thing-world and thing-experience with the whole world. To keep things simple, we can call this the thing-world/extra-thing-world relation (with the thing-experience being a subset of this whole relation, and the only piece of it that is distinctly “ours”). Or we can call it the world-earth relation, or the world-universe relation, with the ‘world’ being the thing-world and the ‘earth’ or ‘universe’ being the unencompassable ground (considered either in its earthbound or its cosmic aspect) within which all thing-worlds have their being/becoming. This relation is the full set of connections and interdependencies within which the thing has its action. To map out this relation in its entirety is impossible, but to understand the more proximal and direct parts of it is possible and useful. It is, in effect, the thing come into its fullness: both its full glory and its full dispersion into (other) things.

[. . .]

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Peirce-Whitehead-Hartshorne & process-relational ontology

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , on June 9, 2010 | 6 Comments »

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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between Whitehead & Peirce

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , on May 12, 2010 | 9 Comments »

The case has often been made — by John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, and others — that Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics provides an account of the universe that is, or could be, foundational to an ecological worldview. This is because it is an account that is naturalist (or realist), relational, evolutionary, and non-dualistic in […]

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