Alter elaborates and defends an ambitious argument advanced by Chalmers against physicalism. As Alter notes, the argument is valid. But I will argue that not all its premises are true. In particular, it is false that all physical truths are purely structural. In denying this, I focus not on the objects of pure physical theory but on the homely, macroscopic objects of our daily lives.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the postulation of irreducible, distributed cognitive systems is necessary for the successful explanatory practice of cognitive science and sociology. Towards this end, and with an eye specifically on the phenomenon of distributed cognition, the debate over reductionism versus emergence is examined from the perspective of Dynamical Systems Theory. The motivation for this novel approach is threefold. Firstly, DST is particularly popular amongst cognitive scientists who work on modelling collective behaviors. Secondly, DST (...) can deliver two distinct arguments in support of the claim that the presence of mutual interactions between group members necessitates the postulation of the corresponding group entity. Thirdly, DST can also provide a succinct understanding of the way group entities exert downward causation on their individual members. The outcome is a naturalist account of the emergent, and thereby irreducible, nature of distributed cognitive systems that avoids the reductionists’ threat of epiphenomenalism, while being well in line with materialism. (shrink)

Kant elaborated his dynamical theory of matter in two quite different systematic accounts, the first in the Monadologia physica, the second in the Dynamics chapter of the Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft. In this paper I investigate the transition from the monadological to the “continuum” dynamical theory of matter, whose exact timing and motives are not explicitly clarified in Kant’s writings. I locate Kant’s turn around the middle 1760s, presenting Kant’s abandonment of his own physical monadology as a way out of (...) controversies about monads and materialism which characterized the German intellectual world of his time. Among the results of this crucial modification in matter theory stands out the new interpretation of Newtonian forces in the critical writings, which is not only relevant for Kant’s account of physics, but also plays a major exemplary role for his critical theory of knowledge. (shrink)

We are concerned with two modes of describing the dynamics of natural systems. Global descriptions require simultaneous global coordination of all dynamical operations. Global dynamics, including mechanics, remain invariant in the absence of external perturbation. But, failing impossible global coordination, dynamical operations could actually become coordinated only locally. In local records, as in global ones, the law of the excluded middle would be strictly observed, but without global coordination it could only be fullfilled sequentially by passing causative factors forward onto (...) subsequent contiguous operations.The local dynamics of sequential operations would be indefinite with regard to how commitments will be made which will avoid violating the law of the excluded middle, but any resulting record will be as definite as if there had been global coordination. While maintaining an agential capacity for making contingent choices internally, local dynamics could be cumulated into a global record of seemingly simultaneous operations. Natural selection within a framework of local dynamics would have a capacity for making opportunistic commitments, but its effects in a posterior record can be reduced to the mechanistic neodarwinian version as if there had been a global dynamics. However, the resulting global description falsifies the actual material nature of the dynamics. (shrink)

The figure of the materialist philosopher as the « laughing philosopher », who mocks the rest of humanity, its fears, superstitions and even values, is a classic one. It has been associated variously with Democritus, Epicurus, Spinoza, Rabelais, La Mettrie and others. Apart from the interest one might have in this figure of the philosopher as someone who is rather far removed from school benches, the present essay seeks to describe or define this conceptual character in order to argue that (...) laughter is the materialist philosopher’s « mode of access » to the human world, the so-called world of « values ». This implies that the equally classic reproach towards materialism – its coldness, its inability to grasp the dynamics of human action, what Flaubert would have called an « anatomist’s cruelty » – fails ; or only successfully targets materialism when it laughs. (shrink)

This article proffers a critical reading of multiliteracy pedagogy and a materialism of the multimodal and machinic. A critical stance is taken against the mesmerising modes of representation that run rampant across our ocular territories. The article assesses the dangers of fetishizing technologies. To this end, Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) is read through a Guattarian theoretical prism to emphasise four chief points: (1) the role of the unconscious, (2) the role of affect (affectus in the Spinozian sense; contrary to (...) feeling which immobilises, affect moves us), (3) the apparent becoming cyborg of the human race and (4) the desire to desire repression. The author contends that while qualitative multiplicities play a central role for MLT, it is neither inconsistent nor contradictory to consider the role of the machinic in greater detail. It is argued that more research must be directed into the cartographic, ethological and noological mechanisms at work in plastic universes of reference (new technologies and the arts) which transform the virtual and transfigure the dynamic of affect. (shrink)

In this article, I explore two neglected works by the twentieth-century Jewish German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left and Natural Law and Human Dignity. Drawing on previous analyses of leftist Aristotelians and natural law, I blend Bloch’s two texts’ concepts of pregnant matter and maternal law into “pregnant materialist natural law.” More precisely, Aristotelian Left articulates a concept of matter as a dynamic, impersonal agential force, ever pregnant with possible forms delivered by artist-midwives, building Bloch’s (...) messianic utopia. And Natural Law resurrects the Stoics’ concept of natural law as drawing on a prehistoric matriarchal utopia, later channeled by earth goddess cults misconstrued by the nineteenth-century German anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen as political matriarchy. I then conclude by linking this pregnant materialist natural law to Dionysus as son of the Great Mother Goddess. Though stigmatized throughout homophobic Western history for his queerness and maternal dependence, Dionysus is also the patron god of Bloch’s hero, the slave revolutionary Spartacus, paramour of a priestess of Dionysus who prophesied his divine mission of liberation. (shrink)

The concept of self has preeminently been asserted (in its many versions) as a core component of anti-reductionist, antinaturalistic philosophical positions, from Descartes to Husserl and beyond, with the exception of some hybrid or intermediate positions which declare rather glibly that, since we are biological entities which fully belong to the natural world, and we are conscious of ourselves as 'selves', therefore the self belongs to the natural world (this is characteristic e.g. of embodied phenomenology and enactivism). Nevertheless, from Cudworth (...) and More’s attacks on materialism all the way through twentieth-century argument against naturalism, the gulf between selfhood and the world of Nature appears unbridgeable. In contrast, my goal in this paper is to show that early modern materialism could yield a theory of the self according to which (1) the self belongs to the world of external relations (Spinoza), such that no one fact, including supposedly private facts, is only accessible to a single person; (2) the self can be reconstructed as a sense of “organic unity” which could be a condition for biological individuality (a central text here is Diderot’s 1769 Rêve de D’Alembert); yet this should not lead us to espouse a Romantic concept of organism as foundational or even ineffable subjectivity (a dimension present in Leibniz and made explicit in German idealism); (3) what we call 'self' might simply be a dynamic process of interpretive activity undertaken by the brain. This materialist theory of the self should not neglect the nature of experience, but it should also not have to take at face value the recurring invocations of a better, deeper “first-person perspective” or “first-person science.”. (shrink)

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. The interrelated dynamics of fitting (...) and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming. The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects. (shrink)

Robert Schofield explores the rational elements of British experimental natural philosophy in the 18th century by tracing the influence of two opposing concepts of the nature of matter and its action—mechanism and materialism. Both concepts rested on the Newtonian interpretation of their proponents, although each developed more or less independently. By integrating the developments in all the areas of experimental natural philosophy, describing their connections and the influences of Continental science, natural theology, and to a lesser degree social and (...) institutional changes, the author demonstrates that mechanistic concepts dominated interpretations from about 1687 to 1740, when they were replaced by materialistic concepts. A revival of the mechanistic approach early in the next century made England a fertile field for ideas on the dynamic interaction of forces. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The mature materialism of Joseph Priestley's Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit of 1777 is based on three main arguments: that Newton's widely-accepted scientific methodology requires the rejection of the 'hypothesis' of the soul; that a dynamic theory of matter breaks down the active/passive dichotomy assumed by many dualists; and that interaction between matter and spirit is impossible. In Matter and Spirit it is the first two arguments which are given greatest prominence; but it is the third argument (...) which first brought Priestley to take materialism seriously. It was an argument which had persistently troubled him in his dualist years, but it was not until 1774 in the Examination that he 'first entertained a serious doubt of the truth of the vulgar hypothesis'. Underlying this fact is an episode of some complexity which this article examines. (shrink)

In this the second volume of his trilogy, Adrian Johnston delineates the philosophy of nature requisite for a properly materialist theory of irreducible autonomous subjectivity. Bringing to light a hitherto invisible undercurrent linking together Hegelian "Naturphilosophie," Marxian-Engelsian-Leninist dialectical materialism, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology, and today's approaches to metaphysics and the philosophy of science on both sides of the analytic-continental divide, he assembles an ontology that dramatically transfors our understandings of figures like Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Lukács, Freud, Lacan, Althusser, and (...) McDowell. In turn, this work looks to provide answer to the fundamental question: How must nature be conceptualized insofar as it happens to have eventuated in, and continues to contain the structures and dynamics peculiar to, full-fledged subjectivity? According to "A Weak Nature Alone," images of nature as akin to either a machine or organism in which each and every entity and event is governed by unbreakable causal laws preclude satisfying explanations of the emergence of human subjects with their spontaneous and self-determining capacities. Such explanations instead demand what Johnston as a "dialectical naturalism," namely, a materialism of a selfdenaturalizing nature radically altering itself in and through its human offspring. The transcendental materialism on display in "A Weak Nature Alone" is a systematic intervention that changes our senses of the philosophical past as well as the future while moving effortlessly within and between traditions and positions (Western and Soviet Marxisms, continental and analytic philosophy, etc.)"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

_René Descartes proposed an interactive dualism that posits an interaction between the_ _mind of a human being and some of the matter located in his or her brain. Isaac Newton_ _subsequently formulated a physical theory based exclusively on the material/physical_ _part of Descartes’ ontology. Newton’s theory enforced the principle of the causal closure_ _of the physical, and the classical physics that grew out of it enforces this same principle._ _This classical theory purports to give, in principle, a complete deterministic account (...) of the_ _physically described properties of nature, expressed exclusively in terms of these_ _physically described properties themselves. Orthodox contemporary physical theory_ _violates this principle in two separate ways. First, it injects random elements into the_ _dynamics. Second, it allows, and also requires, abrupt probing actions that disrupt the_ _mechanistically described evolution of the physically described systems. These probing_ _actions are called Process 1 interventions by von Neumann. They are psycho-physical_ _events. Neither the content nor the timing of these events is determined either by any_ _known law, or by the afore-mentioned random elements. Orthodox quantum mechanics_ _considers these events to be instigated by choices made by conscious agents. In von_ _Neumann’s formulation of quantum theory each such intervention acts upon the state of_ _the brain of some conscious agent. Thus orthodox von Neumann contemporary physics_ _posits an interactive dualism similar to that of Descartes. But in this quantum version the_ _effects of the conscious choices upon our brains are controlled, in part, by the known_ _basic rules of quantum physics. This theoretically specified mind-brain connection allows_ _many basic psychological and neuropsychological findings associated with the apparent_ _physical effectiveness of our conscious volitional efforts to be explained in a causal and_ _practically useful way.. (shrink)

This paper proceeds from the premise that time and temporality constitute a distinct philosophical problem for Marx and Engels’s materialist concept of history in 'The German Ideology'. It is thus necessary to 'temporalize' this concept of history: to situate it in relation to the active production of a dynamic difference between the past, the present, and the future. After revisiting the philosophical dimensions of Marx’s concepts of materialism, the human, and need, this article uncovers a temporality within the (...) materialist concept of history that is irreducible to a historicist framework of linear, progressive time. (shrink)

Phenomenology, New Materialism, and Advances In the Pulsatile Imaginary: Rites Of Disimagination brings together scholars from art history and image theory, literary studies and philosophy. Chapters of this volume engage with the overarching theme of imagination as a pulsatile force embedded in words, images, and all imaginative modes of instantiation of the work of art in their elemental aspects, expressed in visual arts, and literature, as well as bodily schemata of choreographic and musical performances. The papers employ contrasting and (...) complementing methods from literary studies and image theory, especially phenomenology and new materialism, such as G. Bachelard and M. Merleau-Ponty, G. Bataille, J. Kristeva, P. Lacoue-Labarthe and J. Sallis, G. Didi-Huberman, H. Belting and A. Warburg, J. Bennett and Jason M. Wirth, as well as performance studies. Chapters in this volume inquire into the imaginative forces that disrupt and disinhibit the traditional habits of imagination to create pulsatile imaginaries, i.e., a dynamic process of “emergence-resurgence” of image manifested in the act of creation and in perception. This process does not properly imply a destruction of image, but rather a withdrawal of image from the realm of representation to give way to new images and new imaginative experiences. The newly coined term “rite of disimagination” points out to this operation, consecutively implying imagining and disimaging that both denies, as well as validates image – it valorizes matter. The affirmation of the materiality of image is “the re-incarnation of image.”. (shrink)

Previous research (e.g., Horiuchi, Goldsmith, and Inoguchi, 2005) has shown some intriguing patterns of effects of several variables on international public opinion about US foreign policy. But results for the theoretically appealing effects of regime type and post-materialist values have been weak or inconsistent. This paper takes a closer look at the relationship between these two variables and international public opinion about US foreign policy. In particular, international reaction to the wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) are examined using (...) two major multinational surveys. The conclusions of previous research are largely reinforced: neither regime type nor post-materialist values appears to robustly influence global opinion on these events. Rather, some central interests, including levels of trade with the US and NATO membership, and key socialized factors, including a Muslim population, experience with terrorism, and the exceptional experiences of two states (Israel, Albania) emerge as the most important factors in the models. There is also a consistent backlash effect of security cooperation with the US outside of NATO. A discussion of these preliminary results points to their theoretical implications and their significance for further investigation into the transnational dynamics of public opinion and foreign policy. (shrink)

Religion: material dynamics is a lively resource for thinking about religious materiality and the material study of religion. Deconstructing and reconstructing religion as material categories, social formations, and mobile circulations, the book explores the making, ordering, and circulating of religious things. Split into three sections, Part One revitalizes basic categories--animism and sacred, space and time--by situating them in their material production and testing their analytical viability. Part Two examines religious formations as configurations of power that operate in material cultures and (...) cultural economies and are most clearly shown in the power relations of colonialism and imperialism. Part Three explores the material dynamics of circulation through case studies of religious mobility, change, and diffusion as intimate as the body and as vast as the oceans. Each chapter offers insightful orientations and surprising possibilities for studying material religion. Exploring the material dynamics of religion from poetics to politics, David Chidester provides an entry into the study of material religion that will be welcomed by students and specialists in religious studies, anthropology, and history."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This book challenges the traditional idea that religions can be understood primarily as texts to be interpreted, decoded, or translated. In More Than Belief, Manuel A. Vásquez argues for a new way of studying religions, one that sees them as dynamic material and historical expressions of the practices of embodied individuals who are embedded in social fields and ecological networks. He sketches the outlines of this approach through a focus on body, practices, and space. In order to highlight the (...) centrality of these dimensions of religious experience and performance, Vásquez recovers materialist currents within religious studies that have been consistently ignored or denigrated. Drawing on state-of-the-art work in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, critical theory, environmental studies, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences, Vásquez offers a groundbreaking new way of looking at religion. (shrink)

This paper proceeds from the premise that time and temporality constitute a distinct philosophical problem for Marx and Engels’s materialist concept of history in The German Ideology. It is thus necessary to “temporalize” this concept of history: to situate it in relation to the active production of a dynamic difference between the past, the present, and the future. After revisiting the philosophical dimensions of Marx’s concepts of materialism, the human, and need, this article uncovers a temporality within the (...) materialist concept of history that is irreducible to a historicist framework of linear, progressive time. (shrink)

The first part of this book contains a selection of Leszek Nowak’s (1943-2009) works on non-Marxian historical materialism, which are published here in English for the first time. In these papers, Nowak constructs a dynamic model of religious community, reconstructs historiosophical assumptions of liberalism and considers the methodological status of prognosis of totalitarization of capitalist society. In the second part of the book, new contributions to non-Marxian historical materialism are presented. Their authors analyze mechanisms of the oligarchization (...) of liberal democracy, the democratization of real socialism, and the development of early modern Ottoman and post-war Chinese societies. The volume will be of interest to graduate and undergraduate students, as well as specialists who deal with the development of capitalist society, philosophy of history, the philosophy of social sciences and the political philosophy of liberalism. (shrink)

René Descartes proposed an interactive dualism that posits an interaction between the mind of a human being and some of the matter located in his or her brain. Isaac Newton subsequently formulated a physical theory based exclusively on the material/physical part of Descartes’ ontology. Newton’s theory enforced the principle of the causal closure of the physical, and the classical physics that grew out of it enforces this same principle. This classical theory purports to give, in principle, a complete deterministic account (...) of the physically described properties of nature, expressed exclusively in terms of these physically described properties themselves. Orthodox contemporary physical theory violates this principle in two separate ways. First, it injects random elements into the dynamics. Second, it allows, and also requires, abrupt probing actions that disrupt the mechanistically described evolution of the physically described systems. These probing actions are called Process 1 interventions by von Neumann. They are psycho-physical events. Neither the content nor the timing of these events is determined either by any known law, or by the afore-mentioned random elements. Orthodox quantum mechanics considers these events to be instigated by choices made by conscious agents. In von Neumann’s formulation of quantum theory each such intervention acts upon the state of the brain of some conscious agent. Thus orthodox von Neumann contemporary physics posits an interactive dualism similar to that of Descartes. But in this quantum version the effects of the conscious choices upon our brains are controlled, in part, by the known basic rules of quantum physics. This theoretically specified mind-brain connection allows many basic psychological and neuropsychological findings associated with the apparent physical effectiveness of our conscious volitional efforts to be explained in a causal and practically useful way.. (shrink)

The relationship between Prospero and Miranda is fairly typical for Shakespeare’s way of portraying parental authority and filial obligation. A strong and authoritative father, an absent mother and a rebellious daughter are character types reused in many of his plays. In The Tempest, authority, power and ownership, be it political or domestic, are important themes. In criticism, Prospero is frequently discussed through the prism of his attitude to his “subordinates”—Ariel, Caliban and Miranda—and the play’s narrative is interpreted in the context (...) of the theatre of power. Parental authority, a social construct, is a dynamic thing, and the Renaissance patterns discernible in Shakespeare’s plays are refashioned and changed in contemporary adaptations and appropriations of his plays. Informed by New Historicism and Cultural Materialism in relation to gender studies, this article seeks to examine the changing dynamics of the Prospero-Miranda relationship in three films—Derek Jarman’s, Paul Mazursky’s, and Julie Taymor’s —as well as Philip Osment’s 1988 play This Island’s Mine. Focusing on the issue of authority, power and ownership, the article aims at showing how stereotypical social and gender roles resonate with various political contexts of power. (shrink)

Twelve years after his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin published his Descent of Man. If the first book brought the gases of philosophi cal controversy to fever heat, the second exploded them in fiery roars. The issue was the nature, the condition, and the destiny of genus humanum. According to the prevailing Genteel Tradition mankind was a congregation of embodied immortal souls, each with its fixed identity, rights and duties, living together with its immortal neigh bors under conditions imposed by (...) "the laws of nature and of nature's God." Obedience or disobedience of these laws destined all to eternal bliss or eternal damnation. What had come to be called "evolution" was assimilated to the Tradition in diverse interpretations such as John Fiske's, Henry Drummond's and Charles Pierce's. Their common ten dency was to establish "evolution" as somehow the method whereby divine providence ordains the conditions under which man accom plishes his destiny. The most productive competitor of the Genteel Tradition went by various names, with positivism, materialism and naturalism the most telling. Its success as competitor was not due to its theological or metaphysical import. Its success flowed from its mode of observing how effects or results, those undesired as well as those desired, got produced. Unified and generalized, these observations were taken for notations of causal sequences always and everywhere the same, thus for laws of "nature" to whose workings "the providence of God" added nothing productive and could be and was dispensed with. (shrink)

“Feminicity” is the term for a predicate register that enables feminist work be accounted for as relational “active-points” that collectively can be seen through what they have achieved. But going further, it marks where those active-points contribute to the dynamic field of feminist epistemologies and where change occurs. This article contributes to my larger project’s discussion of this concept. Broadly, feminicity argues that the active-points of feminist practices need to be understood within their situated fields as materialist informatics. In (...) the digital era, examples of the affects of digital feminicity are as identified in works such as those by Wajcman ; Haraway, Hayles, VNSMatrix, Adam, Plant. Collectively, such authors and artists opened a creative, and sometimes radical discourse of the digital field as multidirectional, multidimensional, multitemporal platform of “gender actions”. Taken as a predicated field sense of the term “predicate”), this work contributes to the feminist materialist reappraisal of feminist epistemology, and larger radical feminist deconstructive projects. Thus conceived, the genealogy of digital feminicity problematizes the monopolitical terms of feminism in its collation of actions, enabling a re-situation of feminist practices as positive material interventions and expressions of the ontological constitution of the political sphere. Feminicity does not propose a chronological account of the active-points, but processually and systemically addresses the terms of generational epistemological political change. This article describes the ways in which a materialist constructed register – “feminicity”– can be used to think about encounters between the domains of gender, politics and technology, as manifested by materialist informatics. For reasons of brevity, this article focuses on just two aspects of feminicity: the terms of predication of the female as gendered, and the issue of the image, as digital informatics, comprised of activitypoints of feminist practice. Consequently, these are measurable and offer practical resources for the general problem of gendering politics that operate in governance, resource distribution and a non-equal opportunity social/cultural power structure, under which minorities are disadvantaged. Feminist practice here refers to forms produced through feminist activities, ie, forms generated through relations with the matter of life through specific modalities of needs-based practices. (shrink)

The traditional, and still standard, view of psychological phenomena in some empirical sciences holds that they take place inside the organism’s body and can be individuated independently of external factors. The organism’s behaviors are, according to this view, mere effects, rather then constituents, of psychological phenomena. And the fact that, for example, an organism is desiring something instead of something else is taken to be a matter entirely of what is inside the organism. The current versions of the view are (...) usually couched in materialistic terms, identifying psychological phenomena with brain phenomena. However, as Noë, in this book, and some other authors point out, such approaches are still Cartesian in spirit. Despite doing away with the nonphysical dimension of Descartes’ doctrine, they too believe our psychological phenomena are inner causes of behavior and can be, in pri .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Figures of Entanglement: Diffractive Readings of Barad, New Materialism, and Rhetorical Theory and Criticism ed. by Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. HananSavannah Greer DowningFigures of Entanglement: Diffractive Readings of Barad, New Materialism, and Rhetorical Theory and Criticism. Edited by Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan. Routledge, 2021. xvi + 122 pp. $168 (hardcover), $47.16 (electronic book). ISBN: 9780367903794.Rhetorical scholars have turned to various new (...) materialist frameworks to shift the discipline's historically anthropocentric focus and fully engage matter's rhetoricity. While all such frameworks attempt to challenge "the anthropocentric assumption that nonhuman matter is intrinsically passive or non-agential and thus external to or separable from (human) meaning," Figures of Entanglement enters this burgeoning conversation by centering the unique contributions of Karen Barad (xi, x). Readers may recognize this collection from a 2016 special issue of Review of Communication. Yet, with a new foreword by editors Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan and an afterword by Laurie Gries, this collection makes Barad's distinct approach to matter's rhetoricity even more apparent, underscoring its fruitful potential for new materialist rhetorics invested in ethical, political transformation.In the book's foreword Gamble and Hanan differentiate Barad's per-formative new materialism from "vital" as well as what they refer to as "negative" new materialisms to show the generative potential of Barad's framework and the notion of entanglement (x). Other new materialisms tend to be "inclusionary"—add matter and stir—and fail to complicate "the human" itself and its differences (xiv, xi). First, vital and negative new materialisms maintain a distinction between being and knowing, allowing humans to emerge with a unique capacity to "objectively observe and know the existence of something essential, determinate, and unchanging about [End Page 395] reality that precedes and remains unaffected by both its own activities and our observations of it" (xi). On the contrary, Barad's performative approach suggests that "no aspect of reality—including human thought, meaning, and observation—is in any sense external to matter or ever remains entirely unchanged by matter's ongoing performances" (x). Here, humans are not "outside" of observation, but all observation "human or otherwise" co-constitutes what is observed (xi). Second, failing to interrogate "the human" in an attempt to observe matter's vitality is an ethical flaw that makes other approaches less capable of grappling with difference: they have been charged with "erasing associations between race, gender, and matter" and (re)producing a homogenizing, "Western-colonialist notion of humanness" (xiv). In contrast, Barad's is a "thoroughly relational," performative new materialism (1).Barad's concept of "entanglement" draws attention to the indeterminacy of matter and meaning, but it is accompanied by an ethical imperative to examine how difference, human or otherwise, is produced and the implications of power imbalances that arise through these enactments. For Barad, the notion of entanglement does not dissolve difference; difference is what matters. Indeed, they give us a way of thinking about how performative intra-actions produce difference through material-discursive practices, or apparatuses—differences that may be expected but are not inevitable. Rhetorical scholars are therefore invited to interrogate the production of boundaries that cause harm and reconfigure them, rather than assume the discreteness of boundaries from the start. Gamble and Hanan thus make a convincing case for how Barad's work may contribute to important scholarship in decolonial and critical rhetorics for which vital and negative new materialisms are less equipped.Gamble and Hanan utilize the introduction to show how Barad's per-formative new materialism both "supports and affirms" rhetorical materialism, or rhetoric's materiality, and enriches it (5). Ushered in by Michael Calvin McGee, "standard" rhetorical materialism worked to challenge the centuries-old debate about rhetoric's secondary, supplementary status vis-à-vis philosophy by recognizing rhetoric as part of a "shifting and dynamic material history" (6). Building upon this view, Ronald Walter Greene utilizes Foucault's notion of the apparatus to demonstrate how even the "material history" McGee called our attention to is itself "produced by apparatuses"—history is not "outside" of meaning (6). Instead, rhetoric's materiality is a "publicity effect" produced through technologies of rhetoric and intersecting power... (shrink)

The problem of the dynamic of development is a fundamental problem over which materialist dialectics has been struggling with metaphysics for a long time. The metaphysical cant of the "gang of four," which frantically promoted the "philosophy of struggle," distorted and perverted this problem beyond recognition. In order to correct the confusion and accelerate the realization of the four modernizations, a thorough critique of the false doctrines of the "gang of four" must provide a correct response to this problem.

Seafood consumption is crucial for global nutrition, but the decline of wild marine fisheries necessitates aquaculture to meet the rising demand. Nevertheless, the pervasive preference for wild seafood among Chinese consumers, especially in Qingdao, has not been comprehensively explored. This study investigates the preference for wild seafood in Qingdao, China, challenging the notion of wildness as a mere characteristic and revealing its active role in influencing consumer behavior. Employing the relational perspective of new materialism, the study unravels the (...) class='Hi'>dynamic interactions between humans and non-human actors, providing a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted nature of food. The research uncovers how wild seafood is entangled within the social fabric, labor relations, and consumer choices. It demonstrates that wildness is not a static social fact but rather is constantly emerging and transforming through interactions among seafood, people, places, nature, and technology. By examining the affective and subjective dimensions of seafood consumption, the findings indicate that the subjectivity of wild seafood impacts consumers’ physical and emotional states. The study also highlights the importance of social relations in food systems and calls for increased transparency and consumer education to promote sustainable consumption practices. (shrink)

This volume revisits the concepts of enchantment and sacralization in light of perspectives which challenge the modern notion that man (alone) is the measure of all things. As Bruno Latour has argued, the battle against superstition entailed shifting power away from God/the gods to humans, thereby disqualifying the agency of all the other objects in the world. Might enchantment and sacralization be understood in other ways than through this battle between almighty gods and almighty humans? Might enchantment be understood to (...) involve processes where power and control are not distributed so clearly and definitely?Like social constructionists, Latour emphasizes that things are constructed; yet, like many other new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, Manuel De Landa and Karen Barad, he emphasizes that this construction is not the result of projecting meaning onto a passive and meaningless world, but a matter of compositional achievements, whereby assemblages of actants co-compose each other and frame, enable and delimit one another's agency. This move recognizes the active and entangled participation of players beyond the humans versus God(s) framework that informed the modernist project. Understanding enchantment and sacralisation as compositionally and relationally constructed does not mean the same as understanding them as constructed by humans alone. What it means is one of the main questions posed in this book. In other words, if enchantment and sacralization are not understood (solely) in terms of projecting anthropocentric meaning onto mute objects, what are some promising alternative approaches - old and new - and what are their implications for how we understand modernity and for method and theory in the study of religion? (shrink)

We have no interest whatever in minimizing the continuing history of racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise abusive biologisms, or the urgency of their exposure, that has made the gravamen of so many contemporary projects of critique. At the same time, we fear — with installation of an automatic antibiologism as the unshifting tenet of `theory' — the loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm. I was left wondering what danger had been averted by the exclusion of biology. What does (...) the nominative `biological or anatomical body' actually refer to? And what secures the separation of its inadmissible matter from the proper purview of Irigaray's textual interventions? When I asked a question to this effect it was met with a certain nervous comprehension. Deciding, perhaps, that I must still be immersed in a precritical understanding of the body, the speaker dismissed me with a revealing theatrical gesture. As if to emphasize the sheer absurdity of my question she pinched herself and commented `Well I don't mean this body'. And so it seemed with a gesture so matter of fact that it required no further comment, the fact of matter was both decided and dispatched. Feminism has been as deeply implicated in routinized antiessentialism as any of our critical procedures. Even though questions of `the body' have become increasingly fashionable in all manner of feminist projects, the schedule of feminism's antibiologism has been little altered. In most of these projects on `the body', the body in question is pursued in its socially, experientially, or psychically constituted forms, but rarely in its physiologically, biochemically, or microbiologically constituted form, the idea of biological construction having been rendered either unintelligible or naive. Despite an avowed interest in the body, there is a persistent distaste for biological detail. These feminist theories have usually been reluctant to engage with biological data: they retain, and encourage, the fierce antibiologism that marked the emergence of second wave feminism. That feminist scholars are particularly prone to a `knee jerk constructivism' helps explain the reluctance of those in the humanities to engage seriously with the claims of science. This book functions primarily as a reminder to social, political, and cultural theorists, particularly those interested in feminism, antiracism and questions of the politics of globalisation, that they have forgotten a crucial dimension of research, if not necessary to, then certainly useful for more incisively formulating the concepts on which they so heavily, if implicitly rely. It is written as a remembrance of what we have forgotten — not just the body, but that which makes it possible and which limits its actions: the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time. We have forgotten the nature, the ontology, of the body, the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency. We have forgotten where we come from. (shrink)

This paper pursues a question about the spatial relations between the three types of matter posited in Margaret Cavendish’s metaphysics. It examines the doctrine of complete blending and a distinctive argument against atomism, looking for grounds on which Cavendish can reject the existence of spatial regions composed of only one or two types of matter. It establishes, through that examination, that Cavendish operates with a causal conception of parts of nature and a dynamic notion of division. While the possibility (...) of unmixed spatial regions is found to be consistent with both the doctrine of complete blending and Cavendish’s anti-atomism by themselves, it is finally ruled out by a consideration of her theory of place. In fact, the geometrical question of the spatial relations between types of matter that drives the paper is ultimately exposed as illicitly mathematical from the perspective of Cavendish’s metaphysics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 235-237 [Access article in PDF] Determined by Chaos: The Nonlinear Dynamics of Free Will Jessica Wahman Keywords free will, chaos theory, determinism, materialism In "antidepressants and the Chaotic Brain: Implications for the Respectful Treatment of Selves," Douglas Heinrichs provides an intriguing justification of individuated and longer term therapy for depressive clients. He does not reject medication as a therapeutic strategy, nor does (...) he question the materialist basis of the traditional medical model. Rather, he offers a physically deterministic account of depression that is at the same time compatible with a sense of human agency and individuality. Heinrichs suggests that human physiology and its psychiatric disorders are better accounted for by the nonlinear dynamics of chaos theory than by the traditional account of neurotransmitter production and reuptake. Because the latter, microscopic, explanation suggests a direct cause-and-effect relationship between synaptic activity and subjective affect, it cannot account for the wide variation of responses to the same medications, nor can it satisfy the client's fears that her drug-induced well-being is not fully hers to control. Chaos theory, he asserts, can provide a better explanation by treating the human organism as a complex holistic system whose patterns resemble a topographical map of probability more than they do a unidirectional vector model of cause to effect. Like the weather, human affect and behavior are physically determined but difficult to predict, and so careful attention to both the individual history of the client and the uniqueness of responses to medication are a necessary part of any successful therapeutic program.Connected to this theory of nonlinear physiology is Heinrichs's account of autonomy and agency under this rubric. He notes that a psychology based on chaos theory is not only compatible with the notion of free will, it can better explain why the successful use of medication actually increases freedom and autonomy instead of limiting it. It is here that I wish to focus my comments, because his interpretation of free will may give us, to borrow a phrase from Daniel Dennett, a "variet[y] of free will worth wanting" (1984, title page). Free will, in this case, is not a metaphysical ability to act above and beyond our material causes, but is instead a property of the material system itself, namely when that system feels itself capable of greater psychic mobility around the topographical map of probabilistic patterns.According to this model, our ability to reason, plan, and act on the decisions we make is itself a [End Page 235] part of our chaotically determined neurologic system. When we are healthy, we are able to reason in our best interests and act on those reasons. This is modeled as an ability for the organism to metaphorically "move about" the map of its own possibilities, and more important, to both enter and escape certain states, known as chaotic attractors, into which it is likely to be drawn. "Where" we wind up, psychologically speaking, at any point in time is determined by our own system, and so we may say that in such a case we are autonomous and our choices are made freely. Depression, on the other hand, can be compared to a deep groove in the map, a chaotic attractor that is hard to escape, and so the system quite literally becomes "stuck in a rut." This is subjectively experienced as the tendency for thought processes and activities to fall into negative and self-defeating patterns despite the best efforts of the client to escape these habits. So long as the organism does not have a sense of being "trapped" in an attractor (whether a depressive or, for example, manic or compulsive state), then that organism may be said to be free. Medication and the therapy that accompanies it, so far as it facilitates our ability to escape deep chaotic attractors, promotes our own freedom of will. If a car cannot spin its way out of a ditch, does the tow truck hinder or promote its freedom by hauling it back onto solid pavement where it may again... (shrink)

As the sixteenth Century drew to a close, the human race teetered at the brink of an unprecedented intellectual revolution. The Aristotelean conception of a small, spherical, Earth-centered cosmos ceased to confine the imagination of an increasing number of thinkers; the recently proposed Copernican system, problematic though it was, sketched a provocative alternative with some real explanatory advantages ; and distinct intellectual currents converged in the growing search for a new dynamics that would encompass at once all motion, superlunary and (...) sublunary. In the event, the cosmology, the planetary astronomy, and the dynamics finally came together in Newton's uniquely coherent synthesis, and by the dawn of the eighteenth century we had exchanged the dubious comfort of Aristotle's enveloping egg for the more chilling contemplation of a spatially infinite universe. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Figures of Entanglement: Diffractive Readings of Barad, New Materialism, and Rhetorical Theory and Criticism ed. by Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. HananSavannah Greer DowningFigures of Entanglement: Diffractive Readings of Barad, New Materialism, and Rhetorical Theory and Criticism. Edited by Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan. Routledge, 2021. xvi + 122 pp. $168 (hardcover), $47.16 (electronic book). ISBN: 9780367903794.Rhetorical scholars have turned to various new (...) materialist frameworks to shift the discipline's historically anthropocentric focus and fully engage matter's rhetoricity. While all such frameworks attempt to challenge "the anthropocentric assumption that nonhuman matter is intrinsically passive or non-agential and thus external to or separable from (human) meaning," Figures of Entanglement enters this burgeoning conversation by centering the unique contributions of Karen Barad (xi, x). Readers may recognize this collection from a 2016 special issue of Review of Communication. Yet, with a new foreword by editors Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan and an afterword by Laurie Gries, this collection makes Barad's distinct approach to matter's rhetoricity even more apparent, underscoring its fruitful potential for new materialist rhetorics invested in ethical, political transformation.In the book's foreword Gamble and Hanan differentiate Barad's per-formative new materialism from "vital" as well as what they refer to as "negative" new materialisms to show the generative potential of Barad's framework and the notion of entanglement (x). Other new materialisms tend to be "inclusionary"—add matter and stir—and fail to complicate "the human" itself and its differences (xiv, xi). First, vital and negative new materialisms maintain a distinction between being and knowing, allowing humans to emerge with a unique capacity to "objectively observe and know the existence of something essential, determinate, and unchanging about [End Page 395] reality that precedes and remains unaffected by both its own activities and our observations of it" (xi). On the contrary, Barad's performative approach suggests that "no aspect of reality—including human thought, meaning, and observation—is in any sense external to matter or ever remains entirely unchanged by matter's ongoing performances" (x). Here, humans are not "outside" of observation, but all observation "human or otherwise" co-constitutes what is observed (xi). Second, failing to interrogate "the human" in an attempt to observe matter's vitality is an ethical flaw that makes other approaches less capable of grappling with difference: they have been charged with "erasing associations between race, gender, and matter" and (re)producing a homogenizing, "Western-colonialist notion of humanness" (xiv). In contrast, Barad's is a "thoroughly relational," performative new materialism (1).Barad's concept of "entanglement" draws attention to the indeterminacy of matter and meaning, but it is accompanied by an ethical imperative to examine how difference, human or otherwise, is produced and the implications of power imbalances that arise through these enactments. For Barad, the notion of entanglement does not dissolve difference; difference is what matters. Indeed, they give us a way of thinking about how performative intra-actions produce difference through material-discursive practices, or apparatuses—differences that may be expected but are not inevitable. Rhetorical scholars are therefore invited to interrogate the production of boundaries that cause harm and reconfigure them, rather than assume the discreteness of boundaries from the start. Gamble and Hanan thus make a convincing case for how Barad's work may contribute to important scholarship in decolonial and critical rhetorics for which vital and negative new materialisms are less equipped.Gamble and Hanan utilize the introduction to show how Barad's per-formative new materialism both "supports and affirms" rhetorical materialism, or rhetoric's materiality, and enriches it (5). Ushered in by Michael Calvin McGee, "standard" rhetorical materialism worked to challenge the centuries-old debate about rhetoric's secondary, supplementary status vis-à-vis philosophy by recognizing rhetoric as part of a "shifting and dynamic material history" (6). Building upon this view, Ronald Walter Greene utilizes Foucault's notion of the apparatus to demonstrate how even the "material history" McGee called our attention to is itself "produced by apparatuses"—history is not "outside" of meaning (6). Instead, rhetoric's materiality is a "publicity effect" produced through technologies of rhetoric and intersecting power... (shrink)

For most philosophers of psychology and cognitive science, inquiry into human cognitive activity begins at the level of intrapersonal processes. A central question is whether these processes are sufficiently autonomous from more basic neurophysiological processes to be investigated in their own terms, or whether all explanations must be in neurophysiological terms. Some philosophers have insisted on the relative autonomy of the cognitive level. One currently quite popular view, eliminative materialism, however, holds that the explanations that have been advanced at (...) the intrapersonal cognitive level are misguided, and must be replaced by accounts developed from an understanding of the underlying neurophysiological processes. (shrink)

Abstract:This article examines how two American theorists, Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler, deploy geologic language during the 1990s moment when their feminist careers morphed into queer careers. I argue that the precise composition of this institutional shift – methodological, material, and epistemological – is both reflected and refracted in the figure of the rock. A symbol that connotes fixity in short time spans, but dynamism in long ones, the rock oscillates between facticity and dissolution, mirroring shifting notions of sex and (...) gender in the 1990s. In her retrospective account of the emergence of queer theory, Rubin’s use of a fossil metaphor ushers the field toward a non-reproductive and non-procreative genealogy, illuminating a different temporal texture to such seemingly fixed structures as sex, gender, and sexuality. Butler’s inherited geologic language conceives of gender as the process of sedimentation that resists the biological determinism of identity-based feminist politics. Examining the rock provides crucial readings of Butler’s materiality, one that oscillates between fixed being and dynamic becoming, stability and change, surface signification and depth excavation. (shrink)

From the seventh to the fourteenth century, the Muslim world’s key actors were free peasants working limited and scattered cultivated areas, whose communities paid heavy taxes. A distinct nomadic mode of production dominated the arid lands and their warlike pastoral tribes. Wealthy merchants and artisans controlled urban ideological production, living next to actual ruling classes, who drew exceptional material privileges from their proximity to the state. Since the latter’s status contradicted the contractual community’s values, political power was socially alienated and (...) needed support from paid soldiers and often co-opted religious notables. The author describes Islamic social formations as real flesh-and-blood beings who developed original features on the same tributary mode of production’s skeleton. He shows that comparable dialectical oppositions enlivened them, stemming from uneven and combined development processes. Thus, their states and villages, barren lands and city markets, contractual ideology and monarchical powers were permanently in conflictual interaction. (shrink)

Following in Joan Scott's anti-foundationalist footsteps, Linda Zerilli argues for a theory of feminist political judgement not framed in terms of epistemological certainty but assimilated to aesthetic judgement. Tani Barlow criticises Zerilli for not taking adequate account of history in her theory. I analyse the implications of Zerilli's ‘abyssal’ approach to political judgement and Barlow's critique of it. Despite their shared concerns, Zerilli's, Barlow's, and Scott's abyssal approaches struggle to effectively ground the validity of historical analysis and political judgement within (...) a context of plurality and historical difference. All three thinkers focus extensively on discursive and imaginative potential for change while marginalising the role of materiality in the creation of new horizons for women. Incorporating a dynamic account of the materiality of human life into their work would allow them to tie politics and history to an explanation of the role material life plays in constituting plurality, factuality, and historicity. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn an early modern context, ‘vitalistic’ natural philosophies had been associated with antiauthoritarian political theories. Whilst mechanical philosophy has been characterized as amenable to conservative politics on account of the structural analogies between passive and inert particles that can only be organized by externally imposed strict mechanical laws on the one hand, and similarly passive citizens, on the other, vitalism understood as a monistic, dynamic materialism purportedly implicated alternative modes of agency and organization. This alternative model incorporated inherently (...) active, self-organizing agents allegedly capable of bringing about higher structures in a bottom-up fashion both in the natural and in political realm. In this paper, I focus on James Harrington’s appropriation of William Harvey’s physiology and examine whether the republican philosopher actually made use of the political potential said to be inherent in vitalistic discourse. I intend to show that Harrington, rather than boldly capitalizing on vitalism’s decentralizing and democratic potential, adapts his physiological imagery to his wider set of ideas concerning human nature and moral psychology underpinning his politics. Simple analogy between vitalism and antiauthoritarianism is then lost in Harrington’s writings, pointing to a more complex relationship between early modern natural and political philosophy. (shrink)

Explores how Deleuze's thought was shaped by Lucretian atomism – a formative but often-ignored influence from ancient philosophy -/- More than any other 20th-century philosopher, Deleuze considers himself an apprentice to the history of philosophy. But scholarship has ignored one of the more formative influences on Deleuze: Lucretian atomism. Deleuze’s encounter with Lucretius sparked a way of thinking that resonates throughout all his writings: from immanent ontology to affirmative ethics, from dynamic materialism to the generation of thought itself. (...) Filling a significant gap in Deleuze Studies, Ryan J. Johnson tells the story of the Deleuze-Lucretius encounter that begins and ends with a powerful claim: Lucretian atomism produced Deleuzianism. (shrink)

A materialist construction of semiosis requires system embodiment at particular locales, in order to function as systems of interpretance. I propose that we can use a systemic model of scientific measurement to construct a systems view of semiosis. I further suggest that the categories required to understand that process can be used as templates when generalizing to biosemiosis and beyond. The viewpoint I advance here is that of natural philosophy—which, once granted, incurs no principled block to further generalization all the (...) way to pansemiotics—nearer to Peirce’s own very general perspective. This project requires a hylozooic framework, which I present in the form of a specification hierarchy, whereby physical dynamics subsume all other transactions at more highly developed integrative levels. The upshot of the paper is a proposal that meanings can be assimilated most generally to final causes. (shrink)

The following article studies the paradoxical influence of Leibniz on Diderot’s materialism. Indeed, by using the principle of identity of indiscernibles, the principle of continuity and the idea that force is inherent to matter. Diderot develops a materialistic explanation of the apparent order of nature that he opposes to the empirical finalism, as well as to metaphysical finalism of “Leibniz, Newton and Clarke”.

In the last of this set of ten essays, "How do Realism, Material and Dialectics Fare in Contemporary Science?," Professor Bunge invites his audience to join him in developing a philosophy he chooses to call logical materialism. This philosophy presupposes mathematical logic and includes a critical realist epistemology wherein scientific theories are symbolic, partial representations of things out there, and a dynamical materialist ontology wherein every existent is an ever changing system situated in emerging multiple levels of complexity and (...) organization the behavior of which is lawful, both of which are seen as programmatic. In arriving at this program, Bunge is both critical of and shares important points with the dominate Anglo-American approaches to philosophy of science. For example, with the tradition of logical positivism-empiricism he shares the heavy use of formal logic, semantics, and axiomatization, as a way to understanding scientific theories. At the same time he applauds the historico-philosophical tradition for its careful attention to the history of science and he insists that real science must be the object of analysis in philosophy of science, rather than what he considers to be unilluminating examples like green emeralds or black ravens. (shrink)

Plural Temporality traces out a dynamic historical relationship between the texts of Spinoza and of Althusser. It interrogates Spinoza's text through Althusser and vice versa regarding the question of materialism.

New insights into the microbiome, epigenetics, and cognition are radically challenging our very idea of what it means to be 'human', while an explosion of neo-materialist thinking in the humanities has fostered a renewed appreciation of the formative powers of a dynamic material environment. The Matter of History brings these scientific and humanistic ideas together to develop a bold new post-anthropocentric understanding of the past, one that reveals how powerful organism and things help to create humans in all their (...) dimensions, biological, social, and cultural."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)