Philosophy After Nature

✍ Scribed by Rosi Braidotti (editor), Rick Dolphijn (editor)

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 238
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The significant changes that have dominated the social and the scientific world over the last thirty years have brought about upheavals and critical re-appraisals that have proved quite positive in fostering 21^st century thought. This interdisciplinary collection of state-of-the-art essays offers innovative and thought-provoking insights concerning contemporary philosophical and cultural reflection on the nature-culture interaction. Starting from the assumption that the binary opposition between the two terms has been replaced by a continuum of the two, the volume explores both the terms of this new interaction, and its implications.

Technology occupies a central place in the shift towards a nature-cultural continuum, but it is not the only factor. The consequences of economic globalization, notably the global spread of digital mediation, also account for this change of perspective. Last but not least the climate change issue and a renewed urgency around the state of the environmental crisis also contribute to bring the ’natural’ much closer to home. Digital mediation has by now become a standard way to live and interact. The electronic frontier has altered dramatically the practice of education and research, especially in the Humanities and social sciences, with direct consequences for the institutional practice and the methodology of these disciplinary fields. This book aims to explore the implications of these complex shifts for the practice of critical thinking.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Chapter One Introduction: After Nature
Modernity and Nature
Beyond Dualism
And After?
Notes
Bibliography
Part I After Matter
Chapter Two Information and Thinking
Four Universal Rules
Information, Something New
Ancient Networks
Matter and Information
The Cave Streamed With Light
Sweet Night
From Rotating Revolutions to an Expanding Universe
Matter and Mirrors
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter Three ‘Die Natur ist nur einmal da’ [Nature Is There Only Once]
Eindeutig, Eindeutigkeit, and so on
A Hundred and Twenty Years Later
Determinatio and Bestimmung
Digression
Das Gesetz Der Eindeutigkeit and Einstein
As a Conclusion: Equivalence, Sameness and Difference
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter Four Generic Mediality: On the Role of Ciphers and Vicarious Symbols in an Extended Sense of Code-based ‘Alphabeticity'
Hors-Là
How to Address the Spectral Space of Massive Conductivity?
Technicity Rather Than Logistics: The Vicarious Space of an Electric Circuitry
Assessing the Potentiality of What-Has-Not-Happened
Spectra, Depicting Magnitudes That are Genuinely Simulacral
Speculative (Spectral) Phenomenology, Physics of Mediated Communication
Channels, Keys and Ciphers (Code Systems as Manners of Discerning No-Thing-At-All)
Two Kinds of Technics: Concentrating on No-Thing (Equational) and Being Concerned With Some-Thing (Functional)
Abstractions That Prolong Rather Than Cut Short: Articulating What is Unthinkable
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter Five The Resonance of Disparates: Spinoza, Damasio, Deleuze and the Ecology of Form
The Building (Brain), or ‘That Which Feels as One’
Another Humanity
The Ascent of Gothic Stone
The Many Lives of Stones
Notes
Bibliography
Part II After Machines
Chapter Six Media Entangled Phenomenology
All Media are Measuring Media
Medium as Measurement
Media Time-Criticality
Time-Critical Media Measurement as the Performative Hinge Linking Micro- and Macroworlds
Hyperobjects and Hyperobfuscation
Measurement as an Originary Phenomenon
The Ethics of Climate Simulation
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter Seven On Reason and Spectral Machines: Robert Brandom and Bounded Posthumanism
Bounded Posthumanism
First- and Second-Class Agents
The Norm-Grounding Problem
Deontic Statuses and Deontic Attitudes
The Interpretationist Defence
Unbounded Posthumanism
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter Eight Circuits of Desire: Cybernetics and the Post-natural According to Lyotard and Stiegler
Systems
Entropy
Negentropy
Metastability
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter Nine History as an Ecological Niche: Beyond Benjamin’s Nature
The Breath of Capitalism
Roots and Problems
History as an Ecological Niche
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter Ten Nature, Technology and Conscious Evolution: A Post-human Constructive Philosophy
Cosmogenesis and Individuation
Metaphysics of Conscious Evolution
Evolution and Psychological Praxis of Sri Aurobindo
Social Praxis and Technology
Heidegger and the Question Concerning Technology
Mcluhan: Media Technology and Consciousness
Simondon’s Process Metaphysics
Orders of Individuation: Simondon and Sri Aurobindo
Dynamics Of (Trans)Individuation
Transindividuation, Technology and Collective Yoga
Utopia or Dystopia?
Notes
Bibliography
Part III After Man
Chapter Eleven Being without Life: On the Trace of Organic Chauvinism with Derrida and DeLanda
Trace, Space and Time
The Sticky Question of Creation
Late-Stage Vitalism
Non-Linear Darwinism
Iterability, Again
Concern Concerning Concern
Island Living (and Dying)
Neither Vital Nor Mechanical: Spectral
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter Twelve Returning to Text: Deconstructive Paradigms and Posthumanism
Deconstruction, Materialism, ‘Text’
Deconstruction and the Post-Human: Wolfe and Morton
Deconstruction, ‘Text’, Posthumanism
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter Thirteen Primary and Secondary Nature: The Role of Indeterminacy in Spinoza and Bartleby
Bartleby’s Indeterminate Provocation
Spinoza and The Natural Tendency to Division
Indeterminacy and Resistance
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors
Editors
Contributors