"Ecotheological Community and the Question of Non-human Animals Understood as Persons" in American Journal of Theology & Philosophy (2022) 43 (2-3): 58–79.

 

Link HERE.

Mountain cabin vista (graphite)

Mushrooms (alcohol brush pen and ink)

Update to Reading Groups for Academic Year 2022-23

 

This semester's reading group is on Rescher's Axiogenesis and select readings by William James and John Dewey called "Philosophy of Organism III: Rescher's Axiogenesis and Readings in James and Dewey" running weekly on Fridays.  It's the third reading group in the topic of philosophy of organism which I've done over the years.

It's been decided that for Winter term (Dec 15-Jan 15) to read select chapters from John Dewey's How We Think and Knowing and the Known, focusing on the logic, concepts, and technics of organic consciousness (i.e. inferential reasoning by biological organisms, considering also briefly the philosophy of artificial life).

Spring 2023 will be a reading group called "Logic and Normativity" to coincide with the Logic class I'm teaching, followed by Exophilosophy in the summer (specific readings or philosopher tbd).

Link HERE.

Field and Forest: Delaware Water Gap, PA (ink and alcohol brush pen)

Grim Northern Mountains (India ink soft brush pen)

Forest Lehigh Gorge (brush pen)

Podcast: William Desmond and The Excess of Being with Steve Knepper

William Desmond and The Excess of Being with Steve Knepper
Hermitix Podcast

Steven E. Knepper is Associate Professor in the Department of English,  Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at the Virginia Military Institute. In  this episode we discuss his book Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics  and Literature with William Desmond, alongside discussions on being,  God, grace, prayer, silence and more...   

 

The book: https://sunypress.edu/Books/W/Wonder-Strikes  ---  

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hermitix/id1437997652?i=1000576388853

Thoreau on Solitude, Sympathy, and the Salve for Melancholy

Beautiful write-up replete with enchanting illustrations and some interesting historical photos. I used to yearly visit Maine summers and would often read the Transcendentalists as part of my healing nature-worship. My love for Thoreau, Emerson, first ignited in graduate school Ph.D. in a seminar simply titled "Transcendentalism" run by Doug Anderson. It was also in that seminar where I first encountered the Fruhromantik and Naturphilosophie influences amongst the Concord-Jena philosophers, Schelling being among them.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/08/09/walden-solitude/

Farmhouse in winter (line and wash)

What are our rights and duties towards alien life?

 

Very interesting article from Aeon covering a topic within my newfound obsession with "exophilosophy" (or exopolitics, or cosmopolitics - describe it how you wish). Save the absolute hubris in the passage below, the rest of the article at least takes a much needed philosophical approach to the subject, something refreshing in light of the short-sighted hardnosed scientism which prevails in its investigation and which lacks the phenomenological openness toward a "phenomenon" we simply cannot hope to understand without a more capacious sense of reality - nature - guiding the way.

None of this eliminates the possibility that alien life might discover us. But if NASA’s current timeline holds water, another civilisation has only a few more decades to get here before we claim the mantle of ‘discoverer’ rather than ‘discovered’. With every passing day, it grows more likely that ‘first contact’ will not take the form of an intellectual or moral back-and-forth between equals. It will be more like the discovery of a natural resource, and one we might be able to exploit.

Link HERE.