Forms Of Concrescence

Ricorso and Revelation traces the impact on Modernism of the archaeological discoveries of the Palace of Knossos, the Royal Cemetery of Ur, and the Tomb of Tutankhamen, and the artifacts recovered from these sites, showing how they entered the narrative strategies of the Modernist movement. The author also develops a new argument about the four myth configurations — the maze, alchemy, the Great Goddess, and the Apocalypse — which were of central importance to the literature of European Modernism between 1895 and 1946, studying their appearances in a wide range of European modernist writers and in the paintings of Picasso and the films of Jean Cocteau. Drawing from a variety of theories on myth, Smith suggests that each of these four myths represents a creative return to the origins (ricorso), a reduction of the raw materials of daily life to the fundamental elements of creation (revelation), followed by a recreation of the world (cosmogenesis), of the poet (ontogenesis), and of the text (poesis).

As artists not uncommonly keep sketchbooks, so thinkers often write notebooks. Schubert Ogden is a thinker for whom writing notebooks has been an essential discipline throughout his long career of trying to think as a Christian systematic theologian. By his own confession, constantly writing down his thoughts so he could discover what he wanted to think has always been as necessary to learning how to think theologically as constantly reading in order to think fruitfully with the minds of others. This volume is a selection from the indefinitely larger corpus of Ogden’s notebooks now archived in the Drew University Library. All arising from his thinking as a theologian, the entries selected are addressed to some of the more fundamental, and therefore mainly philosophical, issues now facing anyone who would do Christian theology systematically. While each entry stands on its own and may well be read discretely, they together make up a single many-sided argument for a distinctive way of doing theology today by resolutely pursuing a comparably distinctive way of doing metaphysics and ethics.

Hegel and Whitehead presents a careful exploration of the similarities between these two formidable representatives of systematic philosophy. Some of the most distinguished scholars in European and American philosophy converge herein to explore the similarities in Hegel's and Whitehead's contemporary influence, as well as in the content of their respective systems and in their philosophical styles. This volume begins with important critical, comparative, and historical assessments of the contemporary problems in metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics, social thought, and philosophy of religion, of history, and of culture against the background of the important contributions made to these discussions by both Hegel and Whitehead. The result is a collection of vigorous new essays in systematic philosophy that reflect the enduring contributions of these two philosophers to the contemporary philosophical climate on two continents.

An examination of Whitehead's metaphysics through a study of his Process and Reality.

What has a use in the future, unforeseeably, is radically useless now. What has an effect now is not necessarily useful if it falls through the gaps. In For a Pragmatics of the Useless Erin Manning examines what falls outside the purview of already-known functions and established standards of value, not for want of potential but for carrying an excess of it. The figures are various: the infrathin, the artful, proprioceptive tactility, neurodiversity, black life. It is around the latter two that a central refrain echoes: "All black life is neurodiverse life." This is not an equation, but an "approximation of proximity." Manning shows how neurotypicality and whiteness combine to form a normative baseline for existence. Blackness and neurodiversity "schizz" around the baseline, uselessly, pragmatically, figuring a more-than of life living. Manning, in dialogue with Félix Guattari and drawing on the black radical tradition's accounts of black life and the aesthetics of black sociality, proposes a "schizoanalysis" of the more-than, charting a panoply of techniques for other ways of living and learning.

This is the first booklength account of how Maurice Merleau-Ponty used certain texts by Alfred North Whitehead to develop an ontology based on nature, and how he could have used other Whitehead texts that he did not know in order to complete his last ontology. This account is enriched by several of Merleau-Ponty's unpublished writings not previously available in English, by the first detailed treatment of certain works by F.W.J. Schelling in the course of showing how they exerted a substantial influence on both Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead, and by the first extensive discussion of Merleau-Ponty's interest in the Stoics's notion of the twofold logos—the logos endiathetos and the logos proforikos. This book provides a thorough exploration of the consonance between these two philosophers in their mutual desire to overcome various bifurcations of nature, and of nature from spirit, that continued to haunt philosophy and science since the 17th-century.

Current debate in cognitive science, from robotics to analysis of vision, deals with problems like the perception of form, the structure and formation of mental images and their modelling, the ecological development of artificial intelligence, and cognitive analysis of natural language. It focuses in particular on the presence of a hierarchy of intellectual constructions in different formats of representation. These diverse approaches, which share a common assumption of the inner nature of representation, call for a new epistemology - even a new psychophysics - based on a theory of reference which is intrinsically cognitive. As a contribution to contemporary research, the reading presents the core of theories developed in Central Europe between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by philosophers, physicists, psychologists and semanticists who shared a dynamic approach and a pronounced concern with problems of interaction and dependence. These theories offer innovative solutions to some of the epistemological and philosophical problems currently at the centre of debate, like part-whole, theory of relations, and conceptual and linguistic categorization.

The title says it all. Eric Weiss is going for the gold. I'm watching and believing. -Michael Murphy, Cofounder of Esalen Institute Author of The Future of the Body As I read Eric Weiss' The Long Trajectory, I am often lifted beyond understanding into ecstasy. Integrating the physical, transphysical, and spiritual dimensions, Weiss offers a metaphysical model that heals the past and opens the door to a new future for humanity. -Dr. Christopher M. Bache, Youngstown State University Author of Dark Night, Early Dawn What happens to us after we die? Do we cease to exist? Do we survive bodily death? Do we live again in a new body? Without answers to these questions, we cannot know who and what we really are. In The Long Trajectory, author and philosopher Eric Weiss explores these fundamental questions. Inspired by the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Sri Aurobindo, Weiss develops a new metaphysical system he calls "transphysical process metaphysics." It rethinks space, time, matter/energy, consciousness, and personality in ways consistent with the findings of science, while providing a coherent explanation for the survival of the personality beyond death and how it can reincarnate in a new body.