2021 has been a year for removing and reassessing monuments around the world, from statues of slave traders to memorials for an uprising. One of the aims of state sponsored removals has been to eliminate a physical memento in order to obliterate the events it stood for. That aim can…
Continue ReadingCategory: Process philosophy
Semiology of Autopoiesis (I)
What is the difference between conceptual analysis and semiology? An idea like autopoiesis can be analysed as a concept. We can study its description of self-making and autonomous organisations and life-forms for consistency, contradictions, meaning, references, through its cases and examples, its history, its implications and assumptions, and its values.…
Continue ReadingThe Danger of Group Signs: Philosophy and Covid-19
In the first year of the pandemic, there were many types of sign associated with Covid-19: warning signs; names; national symbols; new indicators for numbers and trends; orders; images; and instructions. However, when I wrote about Covid-19 and signs in 2020, I failed to predict the dominance of a particular…
Continue ReadingDeleuze’s Timed Logic (III) Tested to Destruction
When something is tested to destruction, for instance, when a seat is repeatedly pounded by a weight attached to a robot arm to gauge how long it will last in regular use, a series from the past traverses the present and extends into the future at each thump on the…
Continue ReadingStep Right Up
Step Right Up (Don’t be fooled by cheap imitations) The Egalitarian Sublime: a Process Philosophy is out in paperback this May. Edinburgh University Press will give you 30% off with the code PAPER30 if you buy direct from them
Continue ReadingFantastic pragmatism
[Discussion paper for Philosophy as a Method of Thinking Practices: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Post-Structuralism in the Light of Pragmatism, Università degli Studi di Milano, 10 Feb 2021] The argument of this paper is a tautology: To be fantastic, pragmatism must be fantastic But tautologies are vulnerable to the multiple and…
Continue ReadingFirst Principle of Pragmatics: Everything Evolves Amidst a Shared Problem
This is an edited text from the Pragmatism and the Analytic-Continental Split Conference, University of Sheffield, 09/08/17 – 11/08/17. I’d held it back, partly due to my reservations about the idea of a split, but I’m returning to it here, since its definition of pragmatics prepares for a later post…
Continue ReadingDeleuze’s Timed Logic (II)
Drawing on his philosophy of time, we can deduce Deleuze’s logic of events as processes. Taken fully, this logic is also the logic of his metaphysics, when it is considered as a system about the creation, encounter with, relations between, and changing of events. To develop this metaphysics, Deleuze doesn’t…
Continue ReadingRisky Signs: Philosophy and Covid-19
In an earlier post, I discussed the politics of the restrictions of freedom during the Covid-19 pandemic in Tom Sorell’s new interpretation of Hobbes. Here, I consider the risks involved in the use of signs during the pandemic. Communication about Covid-19 and political responses to the pandemic have been dominated…
Continue ReadingDeleuze’s Timed Logic (I)
Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy can accommodate any number of logics in a subspace of its metaphysics. By accommodate, I mean that any given logic can be observed, operated and considered for consistency within that subspace. The fact that we can isolate part of Deleuze’s system and consider its logics does not…
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