Nicholas Gaskill, A. J. Nocek (eds.): The Lure of Whitehead (2014)
Filed under book | Tags: · abstraction, bifurcation, consciousness, constructivism, creativity, difference, ecology, feeling, god, immanence, life, mereotopology, metaphysics, nature, ontology, perception, philosophy, posthuman, science, society, subject, temporality, time, vitalism
“Once largely ignored, the speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead has assumed a new prominence in contemporary theory across the humanities and social sciences. Philosophers and artists, literary critics and social theorists, anthropologists and computer scientists have embraced Whitehead’s thought, extending it through inquiries into the nature of life, the problem of consciousness, and the ontology of objects, as well as into experiments in education and digital media.
The Lure of Whitehead offers readers not only a comprehensive introduction to Whitehead’s philosophy but also a demonstration of how his work advances our emerging understanding of life in the posthuman epoch.”
Contributors: Jeffrey A. Bell, Nathan Brown, Peter Canning, Didier Debaise, Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, Graham Harman, Bruno Latour, Erin Manning, Steven Meyer, Luciana Parisi, Keith Robinson, Isabelle Stengers, James Williams.
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2014
ISBN 9780816679959
ix+427 pages
Review: Ronny Desmet (Constructivist Foundations, 2015).
PDF (updated on 2021-3-9)
Comment (0)Claire Colebrook: Essays on Extinction, 2 vols.: Death of the PostHuman & Sex After Life (2014)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, anthropocene, autopoiesis, critical theory, death, ecology, feminism, life, philosophy, posthuman, posthumanism, queer theory, sex, vitalism
“Death of the PostHuman undertakes a series of critical encounters with the legacy of what had come to be known as ‘theory,’ and its contemporary supposedly post-human aftermath. There can be no redemptive post-human future in which the myopia and anthropocentrism of the species finds an exit and manages to emerge with ecology and life. At the same time, what has come to be known as the human–despite its normative intensity–can provide neither foundation nor critical lever in the Anthropocene epoch. Death of the PostHuman argues for a twenty-first century deconstruction of ecological and seemingly post-human futures.”
“Sex After Life aims to consider the various ways in which the concept of life has provided normative and moralizing ballast for queer, feminist and critical theories. Arguing against a notion of the queer as counter-normative, Sex After Life appeals to the concept of life as a philosophical problem. Life is neither a material ground nor a generative principle, but can nevertheless offer itself for new forms of problem formation that exceed the all too human logics of survival.”
Publisher Open Humanities Press, 2014
Critical Climate Change series
Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 License
ISBN 978-1-60785-299-5 (v1), 978-1-60785-300-8 (v2)
243 & 263 pages
Vol. 1: HTML, PDF, PDF, PDF
Vol. 2: HTML, PDF, PDF, PDF
Jacques Monod: Chance and Necessity (1970–) [FR, EN, DE, RO, IT]
Filed under book | Tags: · biology, causality, chance, cybernetics, evolution, genetics, god, information, life, materialism, necessity, noise, philosophy, science, thermodynamics
In this classic book, Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod interprets the processes of evolution to show that life is only the result of natural processes by “pure chance”. The basic tenet of this book is that systems in nature with molecular biology, such as enzymatic biofeedback loops can be explained without having to invoke final causality. (from Wikipedia)
Publisher Seuil, Paris, 1970
197 pages
English edition
Translated by Austryn Wainhouse
Publisher Vintage, 1971
199 pages
Reviews and commentaries: Bernard Strauss & Erica Aronson (Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 1972), R.J. Hernstein (Commentary, 1972), F. Eugene Yates & Arthur S. Iberall (Annals of Biomedical Engineering, 1973), Danny Yee (1994), Oren Harman (LA Review of Books, 2014).
Le Hasard et la Nécessité (French, 1970, 7 MB)
Chance and Necessity (English, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, 1971, 29 MB, no OCR)
Zufall und Notwendigkeit (German, trans. Friedrich Griese, 1977)
Hazard si necesitate (Romanian, trans. Sergiu Sararu, 1991, 15 MB)
Il caso e la necessità (Italian, 1997, 7 MB)