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The Starship Philosophy: Its Heritage and Competitors
Examines the distinctive features of the astronautical philosophy characteristic of the current surge of interest in interstellar spaceflight. Contrasts them with the conflicting features of more Earthbound philosophies in order to elucidate the…
Tags: colonialism, diaspora, history, Matter, philosophy, political philosophy, science
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Tsing traces the rhythms of disturbance-based ecologies through the biological and economic lives of matsutake mushrooms. Attending to the fortuitous multispecies assemblages of lifeforms and lifeways that arise within the ruins of capitalist…
Tags: capitalism, climate, ecocritique, ecology, environment, In-between
Natural Disasters and the Debate on the Unity or Plurality of Enlightenments,
Discusses eighteenth-century views of natural portents and disasters, mainly in the thought of Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith, and claims, vis-à-vis Jonathan Israel's thesis regarding the Radical Enlightenment, that in fact the Moderate Enlightenment…
Natural Disasters and the Debate on the Unity or Plurality of Enlightenments,
Discusses eighteenth-century views of natural portents and disasters, mainly in the thought of Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith, and claims, vis-à-vis Jonathan Israel's thesis regarding the Radical Enlightenment, that in fact the Moderate Enlightenment…
The Enlightenment legacy is under siege. Defend it.
Linker defines Enlightenment legacies as "individualism, international commerce and trade, moral cosmopolitanism, freedom of the press and a culture of publicity, technological modernity, the valorization of expertise" and defends them against…
Tags: economics, enlightenment, globalization, modernity, politics, upheavals
Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century
Remains, even after half a century, the most comprehensive serious general survey available of the development of intellectual and scientific attitudes toward nature in the history of western civilization from antiquity up to the end of the…
Nature's Queer Performativity
Through a range of vivid examples drawn from scientific research (from social amoebas to lightening), Barad lays out how nature itself is queer, how it models queer communication through a performative rather than represnetative mode. Barad expands…
Cinema and Experience: Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno
Hansen explores the promise of cinema as it defined and changed the notion of experience in modernity and modernist thinkers. Here Hansen proposes a materialst theory of the cinema to help work understand the radical potential that the cinema and…
Tags: critical theory, experience, film, In-between, materialism, media history
FRN 825:The Marquis de Sade: From materialist philosophy to popular culture and feminist theory
Dr. Grey gives a lecture on the philosophical debates between materialists and theologians in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on Descartes, La Mettrie, and Sade.
Tags: John Grey, La Mettrie, lecture, materialism, moral theory, naturalism, philosophy, Sade
The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization
Written over the scope of 20 years of research, Mignolo argues that European colonizers used writing technologies (like the alphabet) as a weapon of war in Mesoamerica, with subsequent political and cultural projects in the Enlightenment serving to…
Tags: colonialism, In-between, Latin America, literacy, modernity
The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future.
Written by Paul Tillich’s student, Rubenstein argues the holocaust is the rational expression of historical tendencies made possible by the European Enlightenment, it’s focus on rational order and technical mastery of nature.
Objectivity
Daston and Galison write the history of the emergence of scientific objectivity, beginning in the eighteenth century and proceeding into the present day. This magisterial study reveals practices of scientific image-making as constitutive of both…
Catching Nature in the Act: Réaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century
Terrall's investigation of the eighteenth-century French scientist Réaumur and his circle represents both a fascinating account of the techniques and practices of eighteenth-century naturalists and a stimulating analysis of the production of…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Botany: The Salutary Science
Cook's magisterial study explores Jean-Jacques Rousseau's abiding interest in botany and botanical science and the significance of his botanical writings in the context of the history of plant science. She gives a wide-ranging yet exquisitely nuanced…
Tags: botany, ecology, ethics, In-between, philosophy of nature, Rousseau, science
Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
A by-now classic and deeply influential critique of the foundational assumptions of ecocriticism (and strands of Romantic literature), Morton’s book issues a challenge to the idea of Nature as a transcendental term—and to the fantasy of a…
Tags: aesthetic, ecocritique, ecology, environment, ethics, In-between, Romanticism
Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics
Allewaert uncovers the enmeshment of persons in places-- and the imbrication of the nonhuman and the human-- in eighteenth-century American plantations (and the literature, culture, and thought circulating around and through them). Her book imagines…
Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life
Nealon explores the (liminal yet significant) role played by concepts of vegetable life within biopolitical discussions of life in the humanities today. Where Nealon, following Foucault, suggests that modernity has been primarily invested in an…
Tags: agency, climate, climate change, In-between, philosophy, plants, subjectivity, world
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning
Barad builds on the insights of Niels Bohr's quantum physics to develop a new queer and feminist ontology and epistemology that radically reframes questions of being, individualism, relationality, representation,agency, and identity. Her notion of…
Worksheet on the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission II
This is an in-class assignment about the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, a US research institute established after WWII in Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to study effect of radiation on humans. The worksheet is based on a couple of…
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