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 article at least takes a much needed philosophical approach to the subject, something refreshing in light of the short-sighted hardnosed scientism which previals its investigation and which that 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.

Ray Brassier Unbound (2022 podcast interview with Ray Brassier)

 

Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour · Ray Brassier - Brassier Unbound

Large tree (ink, in Sokcho South Korea)

Mountain lake version 2 (ink)

Quick sketch - Evening church, Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania (ink, brush pen)

Trees, mountain scene, flowers (ink)

NORTH AMERICAN SCHELLING SOCIETY (NASS7) SCHELLING AND PHILOSOPHIES OF LIFE - Conference Program

HERE.

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast: Ep. 292: Langer on Symbolic Music (Part One) (Podcast)

Ep. 292: Langer on Symbolic Music (Part One)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

On Susanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key (1942), ch. 8-10. Is music (the supposedly non-representational artform) a language? If it's "expressive," what exactly does it express? Part two of this episode is only going to be available to you if you sign up at partiallyexaminedlife.com/support 

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-partially-examined-life-philosophy-podcast/id318345767?i=1000558562162

Tree at farm (water color pencil, field sketch)

Nature and Naturalism in Classical German Philosophy

 

A new book appearing in August looks quite fascinating.

Nature and Naturalism in Classical German Philosophy is a collection of essays that sets out to present exactly what the title depicts. I'll copy below the table of contents - however I'd urge anyone who is interested in Naturphilosophie to take a look at this. Obviously a high price-point prohibits easily adding it to one's collection, but from the essay titles alone it seems like the sort of thing that would be essential in the philosophical naturalist's library.

Introduction: Nature and Naturalism: The Relevance of Classical German Philosophy, Luca Corti and Johannes-Georg Schülein 1. Kant’s Regulative Naturalism, James R. O'Shea 2. The Concept of Life in Classical German Philosophy: A Question of Nature or the Lifeworld?, Brigit Sandkaulen 3. Nature and Freedom in Schlegel and Alexander von Humboldt, Elizabeth Millán Brusslan 4. The Challenge of Plants: Goethe, Humboldt, and the Question of Life, Dalia Nassar 5. Beyond Nature? The Place of the Natural World in J.G. Fichte’s Early Wissenschaftslehre, Daniel Breazeale 6. The Fichte-Schelling Debate, or: Six Models for Relating Subjectivity and Nature, Philipp Schwab 7. Schelling and Von der Weltseele, John Zammito 8. The Freedom of Matter: Self-Constitution in Schelling’s ‘Physical Explanation of Idealism’, Johannes-Georg Schülein 9. Beyond A Naturalistic Conception of Nature: Nature and Life in Hegel’s Early Writings, Luca Illetterati 10. The Phenomenology and the Logic of Life: Heidegger and Hegel, Robert Pippin 11. The Logical Form of a Living Organism: Hegel, Naturalism, and Biological Autonomy, Luca Corti 12. Genus-Being. On Marx’s Dialectical Naturalism, Thomas Khurana