Graham Harman: Guerrilla Metaphysics. Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · metaphysics, perception, phenomenology, philosophy, things
Too unorthodox to be conservative, too systematic to be postmodern, Guerrilla Metaphysics is a unique attempt to describe the carpentry of things. At once systematic and offbeat, technical and poetic, it is a startling new vision of phenomenology’s motto: To the things themselves!
Instead of the occasional cause that makes God responsible for all events, Guerrilla Metaphysics seeks the vicarious cause that links human beings, tools, rivers, mountains, plastic, and clowns. Professor Harman argues for a radical shift in the phenomenological attitude to objects, and explains how phenomenology can be reunified with the physical world that it wanted to bracket from view.
In Part Two Harman takes a fresh approach to metaphor and comedy, showing how even physical causation has the structure of allure. In the final Part, he offers a new account of causation, which is shown to be not only vicarious but also asymmetrical and buffered.
Publisher Open Court, 2005
ISBN 0812694562, 9780812694567
Length 283 pages
Irving Massey: The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, brain, cognitive science, neural networks, neuroaesthetics, neurons, neuroscience
“Art and technology have been converging rapidly in the past few years; an important example of this convergence is the alliance of neuroscience with aesthetics, which has produced the new field of neuroaesthetics.
Irving Massey examines this alliance, in large part to allay the fears of artists and audiences alike that brain science may “explain away” the arts. The first part of the book shows how neuroscience can enhance our understanding of certain features of art. The second part of the book illustrates a humanistic approach to the arts; it is written entirely without recourse to neuroscience, in order to show the differences in methodology between the two approaches. The humanistic style is marked particularly by immersion in the individual work and by evaluation, rather than by detachment in the search for generalizations. In the final section Massey argues that, despite these differences, once the reality of imagination is accepted neuroscience can be seen as the collaborator, not the inquisitor, of the arts.”
Publisher University of Texas Press, 2009
Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture series
ISBN 0292752792, 9780292752795
224 pages
PDF (updated on 2018-8-7)
Comments (2)John Avery: Information Theory and Evolution (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · bioinformatics, biology, biosemiotics, entropy, evolution, information technology, information theory
This highly interdisciplinary book discusses the phenomenon of life, including its origin and evolution (and also human cultural evolution), against the background of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Among the central themes is the seeming contradiction between the second law of thermodynamics and the high degree of order and complexity produced by living systems. This paradox has its resolution in the information content of the Gibbs free energy that enters the biosphere from outside sources, as the author shows. The role of information in human cultural evolution is another focus of the book. One of the final chapters discusses the merging of information technology and biotechnology into a new discipline — bio-information technology.
Publisher World Scientific, 2003
ISBN 9812383999, 9789812383990
Length 217 pages