Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Robert Paul Wolff Lecture 6 (YouTube)

HERE, continuing on in the Kant Critique of Pure Reason seminar.

Environmental Humanities, 8(1): Multispecies Studies (2016) [.pdf download]

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Environmental Humanities, 8(1): Multispecies Studies (2016)




"The emerging field of multispecies studies, grounded in passionate immersion in the lives of fungi, microorganisms, animals, plants, and others, is opening up novel ways of engaging with worlds around us. This issue brings together some of the leading scholars in this field to explore what is at stake—epistemologically, politically, ethically—for different forms of life caught up in diverse relationships of knowing and living together. The collection takes us into the worlds of sheep and shepherds; of stones, worms, salmon, and forest-devouring beetles; of viruses and their elephants; of seals, crows, and lava flows in Hawaii; and finally of frogs-as-pregnancy-tests and possible agents of pathogenic fungal spread. Each of the contributors explores what difference curious and careful attention to others might make in our efforts to inhabit and coconstitute flourishing worlds in these difficult times."

Edited by Thom van Dooren, Ursula Münster, Eben Kirksey, Deborah Bird Rose, Matthew Chrulew, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Publisher Duke University Press, May 2016
Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
ISSN 2201‐1919
148 pages
HT marcelo

Publisher
PDFs
single PDF (2 MB)

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Sellars and His Legacy (NDPR review)

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Sellars and His Legacy // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/70404-sellars-and-his-legacy/
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quote of the day

284. Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations. – One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number! – And now look at a wriggling fly, and at once these difficulties vanish, and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it.

And so, too, a corpse seems to us quite inaccessible to pain. – Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead is not the same. All our reactions are different. – If someone says: “That cannot simply come from the fact that living beings move in such-and-such ways and dead ones don’t”, then I want to suggest to him that this is a case of the transition ‘from quantity to quality.’

286. But isn’t it absurd to say of a body that it has pain? – And why does one feel an absurdity in that? In what sense does my hand not feel pain, but I in my hand?

What sort of issue is: Is it the body that feels pain? – How is it to be decided? How does it become clear that it is not the body? – Well, something like this: if someone has a pain in his hand, then the hand does not say so (unless it writes it) and one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into his eyes.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Not "what" but "why" speculative realism? (ect podcast, ht Karen Oyama)

Thanks to Karen for the pointer. What I like is how the narrators don't focus on ownership of a label or membership of names to any supposed "movement" and stick to explaining speculative realism as an historical event and tendency of thought, rather than brand.

While discussion of speculative realism is indeed tired (if not passe') I'm about half way through and so far it seems fair enough.

https://ectpodcast.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/ect-6-why-speculative-realism/

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Robert Paul Wolff Lecture 5 (YouTube)

Deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding (i.e. the categories). HERE. Wolff mentioned some recommended reading, for Kant I'd add Stephan Korner's short but masterful Kant (Korner was from Yale and incidentally taught Robert Hahn who at SIUC led the Kant seminars I went through).

I would add H.J. Paton's Kant's Metaphysics of Experience Vols. I and II.

Throughout my graduate education I took several Kant seminars (essentially working through all of the Critiques), but when it came to the first Critique Paton's book(s) were invaluable. Just as anyone studying the Phenomenology of Spirit requires Harris' two volume Hegel's Ladder, anyone studying the first Critique requires Paton's Kant's Metaphysics of Experience. Nowwhile  the latter is in paperback with a decent price it is justifiable to argue that even in hardback in excess of $100 both of these texts are worth it considering they are the "gold standard" for learning one's Kant and Hegel.

(For more on required Hegel reading see HERE and HERE.)

Beauty (SEP entry update)

Crispin Sartwell updates the entry. I used the entry just this past week for the Philosophies of Art & Beauty course I am currently teaching. It's really quite helpful for the students it seems.

See here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/

Neutral Monism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Interesting enough for those who enjoy William James, ontological pluralism, etc. etc.

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Neutral Monism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/
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Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Robert Paul Wolff Lecture 4 (YouTube)

This lecture covers the logical function of the understanding in judgment. HERE.

first frost

Congrats to Adrian Ivakhiv, fellow eco-process philosopher

On his new position. He was one of the first academic bloggers I came in touch with when I first began After Nature blog roughly six years ago. Adrian acknowledged as much in his latest book (which you should definitely pick up) and he has been nothing but a warm, gracious, and most of all consumate professional in his online interactions. During the early teens of the '00s this was a rarity and indeed still is. But all of my interactions with him have been productive, professional, and enlightening.

A great guy with unique and interesting views, check out his work, especially on C.S. Peirce, Whitehead, and the environmental humanities.

Congrats once again, Adrian!

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Sabbatical note
// immanence

It gives me pleasure to share the news that I've been named the Steven Rubenstein Professor for Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. The position provides some teaching release and a budget enabling me to work on my proposed project of developing a new center for eco-arts, media, and culture (or something of the sort), to be based here at the university.
While it's an outgrowth of things we have been doing for a while here (such as the recent Sixth Extinction Howl), the center is a few years away, and its ultimate form will be dependent on various contingencies. But I take the committee's decision as welcome recognition that the arts and humanities are — and ought to be — central to environmental scholarship and action today. Those of us in the environmental humanities have long argued that, but its recognition in a school of "environment and natural resources" is unusual.
There's irony in that term "natural resources" for me. I learned to be skeptical of the very idea since my graduate studies with John Livingston (author of The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation and Rogue Primate) and Neil Evernden (The Natural Alien and The Social Creation of Nature) at York University in the late 1980s. Both were sharply critical to the ideology of "resourcism" that they saw as underpinning too much of mainstream environmentalism, not to mention the rest of society. While ecocritical discourse has evolved considerably since those days, that critique has stayed with me.
But names are just names, and those who confuse them for actions have always had a tough argument to sell (though poststructuralism has tried, with some success).

Meanwhile, I am on sabbatical this year and, in addition to a heavy writing schedule, have a few research trips and several speaking engagements ahead of me, including in Stockholm (the Stories for the Anthropocene Festival), the University of Amsterdam, Kyїv and Lviv in Ukraine (the Visual Culture Research Center, and Ukrainian Catholic University), Morocco, Taiwan, Switzerland, and others (including hopefully next summer's Whitehead conference in the Azores). Maybe even see some of you somewhere along the way…
As Robert Heinlein once put it, "Have space suit, will travel." Will even speak, for a penny or two.

Related posts:

1. blog time
2. EMI on Enviro Humanities Book Chat
3. Environmental Humanities series update
4. IAEP call for papers

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