Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“The ontology of this Marxian framework treats society as a complex of social relations among social individuals. This primacy of relations enables Marxian thought to avoid the unreal dichotomy of “the individual” versus “the society.” There are no real individuals standing outside of and prior to the relational nexus: each becomes a specific individual in…
“From the perspective of environmental ethics, astrology might seem irresponsibly otherworldly and anthropocentric, not unlike other spiritual traditions. Even if it touts a stewardship ethic or ecofeminist care ethic that would mitigate it’s anthropocentric focus, wouldn’t such an astrological application of such a caring ethic entail ethical attention to planets other than Earth, and couldn’t…
“The rise of the buffered identity has been accompanied by an interiorization; that is, not only the Inner/Outer distinction, that between Mind and World as separate loci, which is central to the buffer itself; and not only the development of this Inner/Outer distinction in a whole range of epistemological theories of a mediational type from…
“To put this into the context of a life narrative, my dreams do not belong only to myself but to all of the people and non-human things and processes with which I share this earth. The earth flows through me, and my vision of the world, in turn, reverberates back out into my surroundings. Strictly…
“A central feature of any naturalism is that there is at least some form of continuity between mind and nature – or, that mind “stretches” to meet nature (in the words of John Dewey). But, what is “mind” within a naturalistic register? A basic premise for naturalists such as Charles S. Peirce, John Dewey, George…
“In other words: The only type of culture that can thrive is one in which there is prevalent trust, and in which there is also prevalent contempt and rejection of cheaters. But what happens when the person who is held in contempt is not the cheater, but the cheater is instead more often admired because…
“But there is no society in isolation…The environment, together with the society in question, must form a larger society in respect to more general characters than those defining the society from which we started. Thus we arrive at the principle that every society requires a social background, of which it is itself a part.” —…
“The idea is the same: Truth is not found, but made, and making truth means exercising power […] The reductive version is simpler and easier to abuse: Fact is fiction, and anything goes. It’s this version of critical social theory that the populist right has seized on and that Trump has made into a…
“What I am writing may seem very remote and abstract. However, it has one implication that can be sensed right away. If we talk about energy as being the most fundamental thing there is, and events as being the only units of reality we ultimately can know, we are immediately describing a world in which…
“What we see visually is not present inside of the tissue of our brain. It is not a physical phenomenon, or rather physics is actually a subset of a much larger psycho-physical context of nature. Unlike a computer simulation, which relies completely on a physical video screen to accomplish any sense of simulation, the brain…