Archive for the ‘nature’ Category
Jumping off from last time here I am going to make some notes about the history of biology as it concerns the relation of Darwin and Lamarck and how this applies to the social or theoretical uptake of evolutionary theory. Sylvia Wynter’s “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, The Puzzle of Conscious Experience, of “Identity” What […]
Filed under: cognitive science, Freud, Lacan, nature, politics, trauma | 1 Comment
Tags: eugenics, Fanon, Ferenczi, recapitulation, sylvia wynter
Shiny Flesh – Ideals in biology
Last time I wrote about (among other things) how the mistake of confusing the normal with the healthy should not be merely combined with a critique of the biometric approach in biology (or even more generally the mathematization of life). Canguilhem is well known for repeating over and over the impossibility of equating the normal […]
Filed under: history, nature, politics, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Tags: biology, biophilosophy, biostatistics, evolution, panpsychism, philosophy of biology
A long erratic path has led me back to looking at biology and bio-philosophy as part of a book project on the relationship between German Romanticism/Naturphilosophie and French Structuralism and Materialism. Having read both analytic Philosophy of Biology (especially Grene and Depew) and various Bio-Philosophies (Bergson’s Creative Evolution, Canguilhem’s Knowledge of Life, various Deleuzian takes […]
Filed under: cognitive science, history, nature, ontology, politics, race, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Tags: biology, biophilosophy, darwin, evolution, philosophy of biology
Review: Elvia Wilk’s Oval
Elvia Wilk’s novel Oval is about a green-washed near-future Berlin that moves straight into disaster without anyone seeming to notice it is too late, without anyone talking about the actual problems around them. All the characters seem too invested with a narrow vision of their immediate situations, of wondering about their social circles, with small […]
Filed under: art, feminism, literature, nature, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Tags: berlin, design, ecofeminism, Elvia Wilk, environment, technology
Cyborgian Gaia
Post-apocalyptic narratives crowd current fiction, television, film, and videogames. Horizon: Zero Dawn combines two versions of these narratives and actually makes an interesting, if slightly abstract, point about anthropogenic climate change. In the game you play a young woman named Eloy who is a hunter from a matriarchal tribe. The wilderness around you is rather […]
Filed under: art, feminism, film, gender, literature, nature, television | Leave a Comment
Tags: Borne, ecological politics, haraway, horizon zero down, jeff vandermeer
What Idealism Is and isn’t
“Shorn of its rational constraint, the banner of ‘realism’ by itself becomes strictly meaningless. In fact, the relations between ‘realism,’ ‘materialism,’ and ‘idealism,’ are of considerable dialectical complexity so I think it’s a mistake to brandish any one of them in isolation from the others. They derive whatever philosophical sense they posses from their contrastive […]
Filed under: Brassier, cognitive science, Hegel, Iain Hamilton Grant, Kant, nature, ontology, Schelling | Leave a Comment
Tags: Bradley, German Idealism, idealism, James Jeans, kant, Schelling
Updates and Announcements
Having defended my dissertation Schelling’s Naturalism: Space, Motion, and the Volition of Thought I’m now in the strange position of looking for an academic job. But, in the meantime, I thought I would give a general update. 1 – Starting the end of this month I’ll be team teaching a course on German Idealism and […]
Filed under: art, Brassier, cognitive science, Deleuze, Hegel, Iain Hamilton Grant, Kant, nature, ontology, Schelling, Speculative Realism, transcendental materialism | Leave a Comment
Schelling and Kant (pt 1)
Despite the fact that Schelling is a German Idealist or, more broadly, a post-Kantian thinker, there is not (to my knowledge) anything resembling a consensus regarding Schelling’s relation to Kant. Iain Grant sets up the relation as an overtly hostile one (akin to what the Furies do to Orestes) while thinkers such as Arran Garre […]
Filed under: Hegel, Iain Hamilton Grant, Kant, nature, ontology, Schelling, transcendental materialism | Leave a Comment
Some recent publications: An essay on Tombs and Design appeared in the journal Design Ecologies with a preface by science fiction author Peter Watts. Details here. An essay based on a talk on parasitism and Schelling is in the Weaponsing Speculations collection. Details here. My essay version of a talk done in London on Schelling […]
Filed under: Iain Hamilton Grant, Kant, Meillassoux, nature, ontology, politics, Speculative Realism, transcendental materialism | Leave a Comment
Tags: Ariadne, Australia, design, ecological design, ecologies, geology, geophilosophy, Negarestani, paf, parasites, Performing Arts Forum
The massiveness of the nuclear is ‘lightened’ only by a catastrophe. The Earth is geophilosophically and geopolitically frustrating because it’s an ongoing nuclear disaster (a great heat engine as James Hutton understood it) but one that is metastable while proving itself the ground of all production whether noetic or material. Whether the collecting of ferrite […]
Filed under: Deleuze, fantasy, film, history, Iain Hamilton Grant, literature, nature, ontology, politics, Schelling | 2 Comments
Tags: Akira, anthropocene, geophilosophy, geopolitics, Godzilla, kate paterson, nuclear disaster, nuclear waste, Pacific Rim, slow violence
Naught Thought 