One of the trends of the last hundred years of philosophy has been to think questions of ontology in terms of categories of totality and community. This “episteme” takes an endless variety of forms (Heidegger’s worldhood, Whitehead’s “organism”, Hegel’s system, Wittgenstein’s “language games”, the structuralist’s structures, etc), but generally we can refer to the core thesis behind each of these positions as that of “relationism”, where relations are held to hold ontological priority over parts.
Other Things I’d Like to Understand: The Genesis of Receptivity from Larval Subjects This week my students and I began exploring Meillassoux’s After Finitude
… larvalsubjects Says: March 26, 2010 at 7:18 pm
… larvalsubjects Says: March 26, 2010 at 7:18 pm In other words, for the intro student no philosophical text is easy. It doesn’t matter whether you’re teaching Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, Mill’s Utilitarianism or Division 1 of Heidegger’s Being and Time. They find it all difficult. In my view, the aim of an intro course is not so much mastery of the texts– hell we labor our entire life trying to master texts –so much as it is a question of acquainting them with basic questions, reasoning and relations between premises and conclusions, key concepts, and the cultivation of textual hermeneutics.
With Meillassoux, for example, I don’t think the issue is one of showing them how correlationism is an interesting intervention in Continental circles (they lack the background to find that important), but rather to acquaint them with the debate between realism and anti-realism and how Meillassoux is attempting to navigate that debate. This question can stand fairly well on its own, independent of its broader context, and especially after they’ve worked through Kant’s Prolegomena and understood its basic argument and what led Kant to that argument…
As for Meillassoux, he’s an exceptionally clear philosopher that clearly outlines his arguments. He’s actually a relief after Hume and Kant… Thus, for example, when I recently taught We Have Never Been Modern
, I found that this categorically did not work. The text, as great as it is, just presupposes too much and is not put together very well.
, I found that this categorically did not work. The text, as great as it is, just presupposes too much and is not put together very well. 
: 1934-1935
- Page 441
(pioneer in Cultural Studies) has shown, arose precisely as a way to reach people who were excluded from the conservative educational programs of the day, working people and women; it was later absorbed into institutional education and made conservative of God-and-Nation values (think 
, the great Hegelian who in my opinion exerted a great influence over Cousins and 
)…
, at 
. Although he teaches at the University of Notre Dame, a Roman Catholic institution, Plantinga is 
(Regnery, 1991), seem to reject all forms of evolution. Others, like Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at 
(Free Press, 1996), seem to accept a lot of common descent and might even be called theistic evolutionists, meaning that they think God guides the course of continuous development. Wherever Plantinga stands on this spectrum, he stands with the intelligent-design theorists in strongly emphasizing what they see as the falsity of Darwinian evolutionary biology.
used to pun that the arrival of the human species was entirely an accident brought on by our lucky stars—a comet that hit the earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and allowing for the rise of mammals. It is precisely that kind of thinking to which Plantinga is opposed.
(Oxford University Press, 2007), has spoken of Plantinga's decision to blurb Johnson's book as revealing "a combination of Schwärmerei [excessive sentiment] for creationist doctrine and profound ignorance of relevant bits of biology," which has caused Plantinga to put his brain "in cold storage."
, who has established himself right at the top of the field thanks to a long series of dazzling essays on topics as diverse as the thinking apparatus of a bat and the nature of sexual perversion. Although he states firmly that he does not believe in a deity, he has now come out against Darwinism. If Nagel is not a supporter of intelligent design, one wonders why he says what he does. He has endorsed a book by Stephen C. Meyer, 
(HarperOne, 2009), naming it one of the top books of 2009 in the Times Literary Supplement.
, examines the "currently available evidence about the normal frequency and biochemical character of random mutations in the genetic material of several organisms."
. Fodor finds something deeply flawed in contemporary evolutionary thinking: "An appreciable number of perfectly reasonable biologists are coming to think that the theory of natural selection can no longer be taken for granted. This is, so far, mostly straws in the wind; but it's not out of the question that a scientific revolution—no less than a major revision of evolutionary theory—is in the offing."
, suggests that one day the eye just appeared. However the new sources of variation play out, selection is going to be there right along with them.
, was just published by Cambridge University Press. He contributes to The Chronicle Review's blog, Brainstorm.
, and later, to Wilber's surprise, found repeated in Hegel and other right-wing and authoritarian idealists. There is much more to be said about the coincidence of idealism in doctrine with the ideal of the state as an expression of Spirit (the Hegelian state as an "Omega point" as it were, to draw in Wilber's appropriation of 
's iteration of this idealism). The state in its ideal form subordinates the subject's mind stuff, matures it spiritually, organizes its freedom: the authoritarian state looks not so very unlike the Wilberian superholon, does it not?
for instance, 
) then one is suffering from plank-in-the-eye syndrome if one ignores the Islamic world's contributions to integral culture. There are, surely, other examples (Wilber's circle has precious little to say about Gurdjieff and the