Tag: cognitive science

Alexander Wilson on Nonhuman Aesthetics and Disconnection

Alexander Wilson’s  paper ‘What Aesthetics Tells us About Posthumans’ (WA)  provides a synopsis of a challenging account of aesthetics developed at greater length in his new book Aesthesis and Perceptronium (AP). This is nothing less than an aesthetics generalized beyond the human phenomenology cited in philosophies of aesthetic judgement. I’m currently working through AP, so […]

Predictive Coding and Brassier’s Freedom

I’m currently revisiting earlier work on Brassier’s (20b13a) short text on improvisation with a view to using the Predictive Coding (PC) account of cognition and agency as framework for understanding the role of improvisation and similar performance in our cognitive economy. The key take home that paper, I think, is its picture of a not-necessarily-human […]

Posthumanism and Art Seminar, Open School East

  Here‘s the audio for a fizzy discussion on posthumanism in the arts I participated in at the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London. We talked monsters, posthuman urbanism, science fiction, the speculative/critical divide in posthumanism, whether immersive media and technological arts might help us overcome entrenched dualisms in western thought and political implications (if any) […]

Scott on the End Times

There’s a lively debate around Scott Bakker’s recent lecture: “The End of the World As We Know It: Neuroscience and the Semantic Apocalypse” given at The University of Western Ontario’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism here at Speculative Heresy.  The text includes responses from Nick Srnicek and Ali McMillan.    

Hyperapocalypse: A Hole in the Space of Reasons?

Continuing the “dark” posthumanism strand from recent blog posts and from my book Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (Routledge 2014), I argue that we cannot extend our moral thinking to certain portions of “posthuman possibility space” because our folk psychology and parochial norms of practical reasoning might not apply to “hyperplastic” […]

Evan Thompson on Dark Phenomena

In a Notre Dame review of Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature, edited by Havi Carel and Darian Meacham, Evan Thomson criticizes my claim that the existence of dark phenomenology implies that phenomenology must be a naturalistic discipline without transcendental warrant. He is correct about my aims and provides a neat […]

Conferences in September

I’ll be attending conferences at either end of our continent in September: Philosophy After Nature, University of Utrecht, 3-5 September Posthuman Politics, 25th until the 28th of September 2014, University of the Aegean, Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, Geography Building – University Campus. I’m presenting the same paper at both. Here’s the abstract, though the […]

CFP: Philosophy After Nature in Utrecht 3-5 September

CFP: SEP-FEP 2014 Utrecht, 3-5 September February 19th, 2014 | Author: johnm CALL FOR PAPERS The Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy Joint Annual Conference   Philosophy After Nature Utrecht University 3-5 September 2014 The Joint Annual Conference of The Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy in 2014 will be […]