Agents of Erasure
The second installment of a series of novellas evoking post-artificial, post-sexual worlds in an imaginary version of the Solar System. This metaphysical melodrama charts the inter-planetary journeys of several human-like beings who kill while searching for their cosmic origins …
Being and Beauty: The philosophy of Japanese Aesthetics
Not something apart from everyday life but intrinsic to it, beauty in Japanese thought does not entail perfection but the surprise of imperfect and transient being.
Being in the world: Heidegger's philosophy
“The being of ‘being’ is itself not a being”. Questioning the meaning of ‘Being’ lies at the root of Heidegger’s critique of the ‘crisis’ of Western culture that his philosophy sought to overcome.
Beyond the Human
The idea that humanity will supersede itself through reflexive action involving a series of involutionary changes, entails the question whether humanity — taken as one — becomes two, three or four, and more, instantiated in a series of organism|machine types.
Buddhist Philosophy
Impermanence is the root of human suffering. Over hundreds of years a highly developed philosophy grew from this simple idea. However, one does not need to adopt a religious outlook, or quest for salvation, to benefit from the conceptual resources of Buddhist philosophy.
Chinese Buddhist Philosophy in a Nutshell
“Every blade of grass, tree, pebble, and particle of dust is perfectly endowed with buddha nature … ” — Zhanran “If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha … ” — Linji
Chinese Philosophy: Introduction
An overview of some of the major schools of Chinese philosophy with their key associated thinkers with an emphasis on core concepts: Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Mozi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xuan Xue, Zhu Xi, Wang Yangming and Mao Zedong.
Eidopolis
The first installment of a series of novellas evoking post-artificial, post-sexual worlds in an imaginary version of the Solar System. In this metaphysical melodrama, an existential crisis unfolds in lunar mega-city ‘Eidopolis.’ Death becomes the profound totem of a dawning post-mortal existence …
Heraclitus and the Philosophy of Change
“The world, the same for all, neither any god nor any man made; but it was always and is and will be, fire ever-living, kindling in measures and being extinguished in measures …” — Heraclitus
Jupiter|Saturn
The third installment of a series of novellas evoking post-artificial, post-sexual worlds in an imaginary version of the Solar System. In this metaphysical melodrama, the transformation of the Solar System brings about a synthesis of organic, organismic, machine and nuclear modes of being … and the suicide of a God.
Kierkegaard and The Possibility of God
God forms an almost absent background to Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Does he – or any of us – need God in order to have faith?
Nietzsche and The Psyche
“ … soul atomism … the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon … Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of “the soul” at the same time, and thus to renounce one of the most ancient and venerable hypotheses — as happens frequently to clumsy naturalists who can hardly touch on “the soul” without immediately losing it. But the way is now open for new versions and refinements of the soul hypothesis, [including] “mortal soul”, “soul as subjective multiplicity”, and “soul as social structure of the drives and affects”…” Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil §12
Phenomenology: An Introduction
“Psychic life is accessible to us not only through self-experience but also through experience of others.” — Edmund Husserl (1927, Encyclopedia Britannica: Phenomenology)
Phenomenology: Culture and History
The historical world forms the cultural background in and through which we live. It shapes our experience and expectations of reality. What is the phenomenology of our contemporary era?
Phenomenology: Politics and Empathy
The political begins in the recognition of human interdependence. To be oneself is to be others, not to be others is not to be oneself. This tension is empathy and grounds a phenomenology of politics.
Phenomenology: The Body
The phenomenology of embodiment begins with bodily experience, language and activity in the world. In what ways does phenomenology illuminate bodily being as sexed and non-sexed?
Philosophy of the Sublime: Horror
The sublime – dreadful, ecstatic, terrifying, awesome, uncanny, perverse – names the uncommon in human experience. The dark sublime of horror reveals our mortality and those dangerous transformations of self that lead us into an unsettling beyond.
Philosophy of the Sublime: Magic & Imagination
The philosophical sublime refers to those terrifying and delightful realities that exist beyond the common everyday, it is these that the magician seeks to experience and use to achieve a cosmic elevation of the self.
Plotinus and the One
“THE ONE is all things and no one of them; the source of all things is not all things; all things are its possession … ” — Plotinus
Religion and nothingness: the Kyoto School
Thinking of God as ‘Absolute’ and as ‘Nothing’ is key to the inter-faith dialogue of Zen Buddhism and Christian theology promoted by Kyoto School thinkers Nishida and Nishitani. In what sense is God ‘Nothing’?
Sleep|Nothing|Asylum
To dream, perchance to sleep. We are such stuff as sleep is made on, and our little life is rounded with dreams. In a regime in which sleep has been banned, a dissident, somnambulist machine dreams on-the-run, shape-shifting, trying to avoid the insomniac tyranny. This novella belongs to a peripheral literature that concerns itself with eidetic and virtual worlds — insubstantial actualities populated by unstable entities, whose passions outweigh any ability to maintain ongoing form or identity.
The Last Days of The Most Hidden Man
Mental machines dream of great power … This metaphysical melodrama takes place in a technocratic society sealed-off from an Earth in ecological crisis. The emergence of consciousness in a machine triggers a process of social disintegration as atavistic impulses, thought long buried, erupt. A new order of mental being will come to displace and supersede the old human world. Dreaming machines portend apocalypse …
The oneness of time and being: the Zen philosophy of Eihei Dogen
“Life is not coming, not going, not present, not becoming. … life is the manifestation of the whole works, death is the manifestation of the whole works.” — Dogen
The philosophy of Hannah Arendt: where are we when we think?
“ … the thinking activity belongs among those energeiai [activities] which, like flute-playing, have their ends within themselves and leave no tangible outside end product in the world we inhabit.”
Video Povera (1984-89)
A collection of ‘povera’ video pieces that I made in the 1980s. Video povera — drawing on ‘Arte Povera’ — means video production and editing, with low-cost, low resolution technology and found footage in which little or no narrative structure is either intended or presented, and a concern for the qualities and properties of the video medium itself comes to the fore. Video povera is by and large constructed on a somewhat fragmentary and arbitrary, even chance, basis in pursuit of an idea which may or may not find coherent expression … these are workings, not works, assemblages, thinkings, yet to be coherent thoughts.