Scott Bakker has written a fascinating and extremely timely interrogation of a recent article by Catherine Malabou on the implications of recent biology for biopolitics in Critical Enquiry “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance” Malabou’s piece castigates biopolitical theorists such as Foucault and Agamben for infusing their accounts of embodiment and life with symbolic and vitalistic conceptions […]
Tag: Eliminativism
Dark Posthumanism I: summer's ice
I’m ending an all too brief sojourn in Western Crete, just as Greece seems set to become Europe’s new experiment in post-democratic capitalism – its very own Interzone. Many, if not most, economists claim that the conditions cannot be met and that attempting to do so will shred Greece’s economic, social, educational and cultural life as much […]
Reduction, Elimination and Radical Uninterpretability
Anti-reductionist physicalists or materialists deny that psychology can be theoretically reduced to physics but allow physics sovereignty concerning what exists. Anti-reductionist arguments vary but a common line of attack against reductionism is that psychology expresses rational or normative relationships between mental states; not causal or functional relationships of the kind expressed in theories of natural […]
Rebecca Saxe and Clockwork Orange 2.0
http://embed.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html In this excellent presentation Saxe claims that Transcranial Magnetic Simulation applied to the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) – a region specialized for mentalizing in human adults – can improve the effectiveness of moral reasoning by improving our capacity to understand other human minds. This suggests an interesting conundrum for moral philosophers working in the Kantian […]
Epic Object-Oriented Flame War!
There’s an epic flame war over at Three Pound Brain in response to Scott Bakker’s discussion of Levi Bryant’s Object Oriented Ontology. I’m sitting this one out like my hero Custard the Cat. In part because, I’m just too busy and in part cos’ I don’t want to distract Scott from the trudge to […]
Thought without Language
There’s a fascinating post at Neuroanthropology.net detailing the work of Susan Schaller with language-deprived deaf people and other research on the difficult relationship between non-linguistic conceptual thinking and linguistically mediated thinking.
The Inchoroi weigh in
Scott Bakker fires a dirty nuclear device into the naturalism row over at Three Pound Brain.
enemyindustry 