Posts Tagged ‘nature’

Things having calmed a bit I will try and do more regular postings here. The two lectures for the Congress of Pessimism seemed to well…I discussed reason as a kind of wandering insignificance – where the reasoner is a wayward figure stuck between the desert of reason and the ocean of nature. I hope to […]


Following from my last two posts (1 and 2) I have argued that German Idealism (and this is a fairly common observation) is a non-substantial monism by which the philosopher is set up as a figure of navigation having absorbed skepticism and the subsequent self-conditioning, to create or synthesize in a way that has global […]


[The following is a post based on my paper for the German Idealism Workshop (which was just rejected…c’est la vie!) and in many ways foregrounds issues that Iain Grant discussed this past week in Pittsburgh. I will follow this post with a discussion of Grant’s lectures] There is a fairly well known saying that the […]


FWJ von Schelling closes his essay on human freedom in the following way: “We have the greatest respect for the profundity of historical investigations, and believe to have shown that the almost universal opinion of man only gradually arose from the dullness of animal instinct to rationality it not our own. Yet we believe the […]


Update: Graham responds to my note below here. I did not intend to say that he was saying Grant was Fichtean, that was meant in relation to the previous point about reflection and intuition (bad writing on my part!). I have tried to clarify it below. Something that has been bothering me is that when […]


In the introduction to On University Studies its said that it was one of Schelling’s last happy texts – as he begins to entertain ideas of darkness, chaos, and evil in the Essay on Freedom. But this, I think, overlooks a serious transition in Schelling, a movement away from Spinoza and towards something more unique […]


/2/ – Nature-as-becoming is an un-prethinkable becoming contra Deleuze’s image of thought or by any kind of virtuality. Any sense of prethinkability must be replaced by a darkness of onto-epistemlogical indistinction. Unprethinkable nature, in Schelling, comes from a combination of his dark absolute (famous because of Hegel’s black cows comment) and the concept of prius […]


The following is an attempt to summarize what exactly Dark Vitalism means as a metaphysical project. In many ways, it seems that quite a bit of philosophy seems lost between overformalization (Badiou) and lack of it (Deleuze). There is either not enough or too much speculative play with the very possibility and stature of the thinker poorly examined. […]


Zizek’s Unbehagen In Der Nature addresses current discussions surrounding ecology and nature. Right off the bat however Zizek’s conceptualization of nature is limited – seeming to be nature as it appears to us, nature as we can manipulate it. The anxieity or uneasiness that Zizek discusses seems more to be more about the loss of […]


In a recent post Reid writes: “If the difference between nature and artifice is itself artifice, then it seems in vain to probe into uncontaminated nature, which itself exists in its distinction only on behalf of artifice, and as itself artifice.” Reid writes that this does not lead to social constructivism but instead that: “Nature, […]