The wasteland and the wilding: the aesthetic of abandoned and reclaimed green spaces -- Green man: human-plant hybrids -- Robotany and aesthetics -- Bio rights: earth of agonies and eco-punks -- Eco-feminism: plants as becoming-woman -- Ungrounding plant life: the after-effects -- On rhizomes and dead trees.

I appreciate very much the thoroughness with which Jocelyne St-Arnaud has analyzed the text of my paper. As she points out, the major source of difference between our approach to the authors under consideration derives from a preference for an ethical and political perspective on her side and a preference for a metaphysical perspective on mine. However, there are a few key points in interpretation that need to be addressed which go beyond this central difference in orientation.

To know the shape is to enjoy the information it embodies.In his classic work of lithic scrying, The Writing of Stones, Roger Caillois suggests that the pareidoliac's interpretation of a stone's pattern depends upon her own personal internalized database of stored images, a database defined by the cultural stock of mediated imagery forged and embellished by personal memory, emotion and psychical topography. For Caillois, "the vision the eye records is always impoverished and uncertain. Imagination fills it with the treasures of (...) memory and knowledge." Caillois's own database was one defined in a pre-digitized, barely computerized world. His meditations on Agates, Jaspers and Septaria evoked for him a world of... (shrink)

v. 1. The Aristotelian revolution, 750 BC-AD 1250 -- v. 2. The early humanist Reformation, 1250-1500.

This study examines rivers as a literary phenomenon, particularly in the poetry of Vergil. It first considers the Greco-Roman understanding of the river in its primary symbolic roles, cosmological, ritual and ethnographical, and then analyzes the river as a literary device, arguing that descriptions of rivers in Roman poetry are, in many cases, a form of authorial comment on the progress or structure of a narrative.

Why is it that we watch _Mad Men_ and think it represents a period? Flashes of patterned wallpaper, whiskey neat, babies born that are never mentioned, contact lining for kitchen drawers, Ayn Rand, polaroids, skinny ties, Hilton hotels, Walter Cronkite, and a time when Don Draper can ask ‘What do women want?’ and dry old Roger Sterling can reply ‘Who Cares?’ This essay explores the embrace of period detail in _Mad Men_ finding it to be both loving and fetishistic, and (...) belonging, like all period film, to the politics of the present. (shrink)

Abstract:Water lilies flourish in clusters and hormonally communicate together within their community. They can self-reproduce and have mobility across the water surface, being both earthed and waterborne. The capacities of water lilies are further evidence that plants require critical and cultural examination, as companion species, and that plants require an accompanying shift in human perception of their vegetal status. This paper addresses the feminist nature of the water lily and develops a connection between plant biology and the creation of models (...) for cultural practice, ethical living and a better understanding of plants. (shrink)

This pioneering study by Sister Prudence Allen traces the concept of woman in relation to man in more than seventy philosophers from ancient and medieval traditions. The fruit of ten years' work, this study uncovers four general categories of questions asked by philosophers for two thousand years. These are the categories of opposites, of generation, of wisdom, and of virtue. Sister Prudence Allen traces several recurring strands of sexual and gender identity within this period. Ultimately, she shows the (...) paradoxical influence of Aristotle on the question of woman and on a philosophical understanding of sexual coomplemenarity. Supplemented throughout with helpful charts, diagrams, and illustrations, this volume will be an important resource for scholars and students in the fields of women's studies, philosophy, history, theology, literary studies, and political science. (shrink)

This Collision explores the relationship between Object-Oriented Ontology theory, the “aesthetic experience” of a contemporary artwork (Iris Haussler’s He dreamed overtime from 2012) and the creeping hand of fiction. OOO is a useful theory to apply to contemporary art, as it charts a philosophical return to all things as objects, rather than their relations or networks. It is also timely for understanding the changing nature of multi-media art, wherein experience, interactivity, spectatorial agency and contingent narratives are key.

“Hijack” has etymological connotations of force. It is intended here as a purposeful turn away from expert authority and from singular authorship, towards a more expanded sphere of multiple experience in art aesthetics. If there is a hijacking force in art, it is the dynamic desire to reclaim the impossible and the unexpected. These qualities are evident in telepathy as a system of transmitted aesthetic information. Isabelle Stengers, who has investigated the role of the charlatan, might urge us to follow (...) such a turn away from regulated forms of sensory information and repurpose telepathy as a propagated extra-sensory activity. Like the charlatan or other maligned characters of ill repute, the art writer who responds to the essence of the artwork through participation rather than judgment becomes the outsider and, in this case, the telepath. This paper addresses the work of Australian artist Jacquelene Drinkall as an aggregate of telepathic transmissions, ripe for hijacking. I argue that a telepathic hijack, as an unexpected reclamation and as a method of aesthetic experimentation, can be enacted as a speculative form of art writing. Telepathy in art and of art allows a writing with the artwork. By this I mean that a super-sensory and speculative mode of writing can exist beside the artwork, rather than in judgment of it. This is a divergence from an overt critique of art through established constructs of history, origin or relations alone. In this paper I will explore the concept of telepathy as a quality of speculative aesthetics, which is distinguished by contingent change, variable outcomes and meandering. I will focus on: telepathic art transmissions as a hijack of conventional aesthetics; Jacquelene Drinkall’s telepathic artwork as an interrupted experience; and Isabelle Stengers’ figure of the charlatan. (shrink)

Today a “new” field of philosophy has emerged which can be called simply “The Philosophy of Man and Woman”. Paradoxically, it is a field of study with a long and impressive history which began when the pre-Socratic philosophers first questioned their own identity in the midst of the world. Their questions fall into four broad areas:1. How is the male “opposite” to the female?2. What roles do male and female play in the generation and identity of offspring?3. Are women and (...) men wise in the same or different ways?4. Are women and men good in the same or different ways? (shrink)

Mary Ellen Waithe has put together another collection of essays on seventeen different women philosophers. In addition to serving as the general editor, Waithe authors lengthy chapters on Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese literary writer; Heloise, a French writer on love and friendship; Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera, a Spanish writer in natural philosophy; and a short summary chapter on Roswitha of Gandersheim, Christine Pisan, Margaret More Roper, and Teresa of Avila.

Three contemporary acts—corporate theft, sexual abuse of minors, and abortion—when done by generally moral people whose consciences at times seems to be inoperative, all share the same dynamic of harming an innocent person entrusted to them. Drawingupon philosophical anthropology, I argue that these acts reveal a mislocation of conscience in the emotions, imagination, memory, theoretical intellect, or will as defended by Hume, James, Freud, Kant, Nietzsche, or Hegel. In this article Aquinas and certain contemporary Catholic philosophers engage these erroneous views (...) about conscience. They defend the position that conscience is found in a person’s exercise of the practical intellect as integrated with, but not supplanted by, these other operations. Throughout the analysis Christine Gudorf’s existential reflection on the relation of her conscience to abortion is analyzed. I argue that many generallymoral people today have in one area either disengaged, locked tight, or transferred their conscience by what Robert Lifton calls “The Faustian Bargain of Doubling.”. (shrink)

Mary Ellen Waithe has put together another collection of essays on seventeen different women philosophers. In addition to serving as the general editor, Waithe authors lengthy chapters on Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese literary writer; Heloise, a French writer on love and friendship; Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera, a Spanish writer in natural philosophy; and a short summary chapter on Roswitha of Gandersheim, Christine Pisan, Margaret More Roper, and Teresa of Avila.

Mary Rousseau has written an important work on community. In this text she considers the contrasting foundations and effects of communitarian society versus contractual society. Citing several examples of concrete choices she relentlessly seeks to demonstrate that community is the only real choice that faces people who want fulfilment in their lives.

It is often claimed that feminist philosophy has moved into a second phase of development, a self critical period in which previous theories are subjected to rigorous analysis and evaluation. Jean Elshtain's Public Man, Private Woman is an excellent example of this second phase. Her text offers a powerful critique not only of traditional philosophers' theories of the relation of the public-private distinction to sex identity, but also classifies and evaluates several different contemporary feminist philosophies. Finally, Elshtain suggests a theory (...) of her own about how the public and private spheres ought to be structured for the future of women and men. (shrink)