The Entropic Philosphy

Now is a time of tremendous anxiety about the present and future state of the world. As the second law of thermodynamics states, entropy never decreases, time marches relentlessly forward, and closed systems inevitably break down. Entropy serves as a powerful metaphor capturing expressions of growing malaise and decline. Entropic Philosophy: Chaos, Breakdown, and Creation builds on the meaning of entropy from the Greek entropia, signifying “a turning toward” or “transformation.” Developing a philosophy of entropy, this book draws variously from anthropology, psychoanalysis, literature, art, and the history of philosophy. This approach opens pathways for reverence and care that are crucial in preventing fear, existential inertia, and despair.

The Entropic Philosophy takes a science-based approach to answering our most pressing existential questions. Drawing from fields like astrophysics, evolutionary biology, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics, the thought experiments detailed in this book provide novel explanations for both biological life and human consciousness. The central thought experiment proposes that we live in an evolutionary multiverse and that life on Earth and human consciousness are the predictable outcomes of natural selection at a grand scale. Writing for a diverse audience, Kaschke excels at making these topics accessible to any eager mind. The philosophical implications of Kaschke's thought experiments are profound; offering desperately needed fresh insights into pressing and timely ethical questions. The Entropic Philosophy offers a new worldview with much to say on topics like climate change, space colonization, feminism, commerce, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence. In a single book, The Entropic Philosophy provides a new set of answers to ancient questions but also lays bare just how much we have left to learn.

How do we conceptualize death when its very nature implies absence and nothingness? It is difficult to put into words precisely because we want our words to help us delineate the world around us, whereas the absence associated with death is the opposite of such delineation. For this reason, death might be said to represent a form of infinite otherness, something radically different from our usual, finite, anthropomorphic way of thinking about the world. With this in mind, Apple Igrek observes an unusual paradox. Some philosophers argue that we should be more open to that which is infinitely other (as with change or death) in the context of ethics, culture, and politics, while others critique this position since we cannot logically say what is more or less open to the immeasurable. It would therefore seem impossible to defend the relevance of what is infinite to ethics while nevertheless acknowledging the validity of the above-stated critique. If we want, in other words, to say that infinite otherness remains relevant to our social and ethical values, we will have a difficult time doing so unless we create a new methodological approach determining how it is possible for pure absence and alterity to play a role in the creation of those values. In this book Apple Igrek takes up the challenge of articulating this new approach explaining how something transcending our finite comprehension (as with death or never-ending change) is nonetheless essential for describing the construction of social values, especially in terms of describing their conflictual and agonistic tendencies.

Entropic Creation is the first English-language book to consider the cultural and religious responses to the second law of thermodynamics, from around 1860 to 1920. According to the second law of thermodynamics, as formulated by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius, the entropy of any closed system will inevitably increase in time, meaning that the system will decay and eventually end in a dead state of equilibrium. Application of the law to the entire universe, first proposed in the 1850s, led to the prediction of a future 'heat death', where all life has ceased and all organization dissolved. In the late 1860s it was pointed out that, as a consequence of the heat death scenario, the universe can have existed only for a finite period of time. According to the 'entropic creation argument', thermodynamics warrants the conclusion that the world once begun or was created. It is these two scenarios, allegedly consequences of the science of thermodynamics, which form the core of this book. The heat death and the claim of cosmic creation were widely discussed in the period 1870 to 1920, with participants in the debate including European scientists, intellectuals and social critics, among them the physicist William Thomson and the communist thinker Friedrich Engels. One reason for the passion of the debate was that some authors used the law of entropy increase to argue for a divine creation of the world. Consequently, the second law of thermodynamics became highly controversial. In Germany in particular, materialists and positivists engaged in battle with Christian - mostly Catholic - scholars over the cosmological consequences of thermodynamics. This heated debate, which is today largely forgotten, is reconstructed and examined in detail in this book, bringing into focus key themes on the interactions between cosmology, physics, religion and ideology, and the public way in which these topics were discussed in the latter half of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth century.

What is time? Does it pass? Is the future open? Why do we care? Philosophy of Time: The Basics doesn’t answer these questions. It does give you an opinionated introduction to thinking a bit more deeply about them. Written in a way that assumes no philosophical background from its readers, this book looks at central topics in philosophy of time and shows how they relate to other time-related topics – from theoretical physics (without the maths!) to your own mortality. Additional questions include: In what way is time different to space? How long is the present? Does the Theory of Relativity show time doesn’t pass? What makes time have a direction or ‘arrow’? Can you be harmed by your own death? Allowing the reader to think more deeply about time, this book begins to untangle some of the most difficult knots in all of philosophy. It also provides practical advice to prospective time-travelers.

This is the second volume of research into the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler and its interconnections with the philosophy of education. Building on the first edited collection, Stiegler’s philosophy is introduced to scholars in the field of the philosophy of education in the hope that researchers dig deep into his philosophy and apply it to their own educational context in order to produce new forms of knowledge, that is “negentropic” forms of knowledge which may counter the endemic crises we see in educational institutions in towns, cities and villages across the planet. This second volume throws down the gauntlet to others to find new ways to contest toxic forms of digital life inside and outside education and to challenge entrenched and conservative ways of teaching and learning in the 21st century. The writers in this volume from Australasia, Europe, and across South, Southeast and East Asia do a remarkable job of translating Bernard Stiegler’s sometimes complicated language into ways which are interpretable, applicable and communicable to those who witness, day in day out, in their schools, universities and institutions the struggle to capture the hearts and minds of young people. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This study – the first full-length monograph in English on the subject – discusses the genesis of Theodor Lessing’s philosophy of history as mainly expressed in his books Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen (1919 and 1927), as well as its philosophical implications.