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Ben Woodard
I am currently writing a book on Naturphilosophie, Romantic Science and formalism entitled Nature Itself Philosophizes.
I completed my PhD at the Centre for Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. My dissertation focused on the Naturphilosophie of FWJ von Schelling to and the borders of naturalism focusing particularly on the themes of space and motion.
I received my Masters in Media Philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS). My thesis focused on constructing a geophilosophy following concepts taken from FWJ von Schelling and illustrated via various forms of media (films, novels, video games etc).
I co-organize events at PAF (St Erme France). pspaf.wordpress.com
I completed my PhD at the Centre for Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. My dissertation focused on the Naturphilosophie of FWJ von Schelling to and the borders of naturalism focusing particularly on the themes of space and motion.
I received my Masters in Media Philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS). My thesis focused on constructing a geophilosophy following concepts taken from FWJ von Schelling and illustrated via various forms of media (films, novels, video games etc).
I co-organize events at PAF (St Erme France). pspaf.wordpress.com
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Schelling is a philosopher fundamentally concerned with the problem of nature and how philosophy has, historically, ignored or reduced nature’s importance. For Schelling, philosophy is impossible without a robust conception of nature, something which is lacking from most contemporary forms of philosophy both Analytic and Continental. Nature, in Schelling’s eyes, is not simply the great outdoors, or some authentic pastoral realm, but the various powers, processes and tendencies which run through biology, chemistry, physics and the very possibility of thought itself.
Arguing that slime is a viable physical and metaphysical object necessary to produce a realist bio-philosophy void of anthrocentricity, this text explores naturephilosophie, speculative realism, and contemporary science; hyperbolic representations of slime found in the weird texts of HP Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; as well as survival horror films, video games, and graphic novels, in order to present the dynamics of slime not only as the trace of life but as life's darkly vitalistic substance."
Schelling is a philosopher fundamentally concerned with the problem of nature and how philosophy has, historically, ignored or reduced nature’s importance. For Schelling, philosophy is impossible without a robust conception of nature, something which is lacking from most contemporary forms of philosophy both Analytic and Continental. Nature, in Schelling’s eyes, is not simply the great outdoors, or some authentic pastoral realm, but the various powers, processes and tendencies which run through biology, chemistry, physics and the very possibility of thought itself.
Arguing that slime is a viable physical and metaphysical object necessary to produce a realist bio-philosophy void of anthrocentricity, this text explores naturephilosophie, speculative realism, and contemporary science; hyperbolic representations of slime found in the weird texts of HP Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; as well as survival horror films, video games, and graphic novels, in order to present the dynamics of slime not only as the trace of life but as life's darkly vitalistic substance."
What this means is ultimately that one cannot start with reason in the way Kant does with reason picking up on sense in so cleanly a fashion. This worry is something which motivated all of the German Idealists (as well as other post-Kantian thinkers such as Maimon) most famously known in a letter from Schelling to Hegel – Kant has giving the results but the grounds are still lacking. The difference between these four post-Kantians is then what is the ground that allows thought to work the way it does? One could construct a spectrum in terms of reliance upon sense and reliance upon (logical) structure – ranging from Maimon-Schelling-Kant-Fichte-Hegel
Thought and what it thinks are interlaced but ‘from where’ this is seen, and how this examined is the persistent problem. My wager is that Schelling’s non-reductive (transcendental) naturalism posits a structural realist account of a prior auto-catalytic (or self-augmentative) nature by which the epistemological articulation of such a nature is required to make sense of thought. While Schelling is often critiqued as merely applying cognitive structures onto nature he is rather himself making a realist claim about the structure of nature such that something like cognition may come to be, and that something like understanding or intuition functions at all. Thought is an expression of nature and not its model. This in turn illustrates why Schelling attempts to view the genesis of cognitive features as a kind of geology, of the movement from intuition all the way up to reflection and abstraction. Furthermore, this is why Schelling sees an analogous parallel in consciousness, that types of thinking can be described as epoch’s in the history of natural cognition.
In regards to philosophies of process and the philosophy of becoming of Deleuze and Guattari in particular, Grant's valorization of antecedence and anteriority, questions not only the limits of thinkability of processes in nature but also the necessity of the material in grounding and regionalizing powers, processes, and forces. This results in a radical rethinking of immanence as has appeared in nascent form in the work of Jane Bennett whose engagement with Deleuze and Guattari's articulation of becoming suggests a move into more materialized realms, a move she has nominated as investigating the 'topographies of becoming.'
This paper will argue that Grant's double metaphysical resuscitation as well as Bennett's material vitalism necessitates a radical reinterpretation of the philosophies of process in order to better grasp complex conceptual problems such as the current environmental crisis and the relation of thinking to nature without reliance on Deleuze and Guattari's anthrocentric notion of becoming or on the overly optimistic process philosophies of Bergson and Whitehead.