Suchergebnisse

Using Schelling's philosophy, Ben Woodard examines how an expanded form of naturalism changes how we conceive of the division between thought and world, mathematics and motion, sense and dynamics, experiment and materiality, as well as speculation and pragmatism.

For too long, the Earth has been used to ground thought instead of bending it; such grounding leaves the planet as nothing but a stage for phenomenology, deconstruction, or other forms of anthropocentric philosophy. In far too much continental philosophy, the Earth is a cold, dead place enlivened only by human thought—either as a thing to be exploited, or as an object of nostalgia. Geophilosophy seeks instead to question the ground of thinking itself, the relation of the inorganic to the capacities and limits of thought. This book constructs an eclectic variant of geophilosophy through engagements with digging machines, nuclear waste, cyclones and volcanoes, giant worms, secret vessels, decay, subterranean cities, hell, demon souls, black suns, and xenoarcheaology, via continental theory (Nietzsche, Schelling, Deleuze, et alia) and various cultural objects such as horror films, videogames, and weird Lovecraftian fictions, with special attention to Speculative Realism and the work of Reza Negarestani. In a time where the earth as a whole is threatened by ecological collapse, On an Ungrounded Earth generates a perversely realist account of the earth as a dynamic engine materially invading and upsetting our attempts to reduce it to merely the ground beneath our feet.

Abstract
While many of the physical sciences have historically and conceptually informed philosophy, geology is one field that has not received adequate philosophical attention. In what follows, I attempt to demonstrate how the relation between the geological and the philosophical is over-coded in numerous historical and fictional contexts in the form of geotrauma, the violence of the earth or the inorganic on the organic, and the violence of the inorganic on itself. Historico-mythical tales of the violence of mining and surveying often centre on the geological landscape as offering a form of violence, or as invading the consciousnesses of those around it with a form of ancient violence. In this regard, the earth's geological forces can be treated as murderous agents, where investigating the crime simply seems to redouble the violence. The article examines how this strange and violent reflectivity deploys itself in an exaggerated way in weird and gothic fiction. Looking at the works of Fritz Leiber, H. P. Lovecraft and Charles Brockden Brown, this article attempts to argue how the fictionalization of geotrauma is a dramatization of the already existent co-implication of geology and philosophy in the form of a co-murdering and the traumatic nature of the expansive concept.

Abstract
In the 1980s, the United States Department of Energy created The Human Interference Task Force, a group of semioticians, physicists, science-fiction writers and anthropologists tasked with creating an everlasting warning to prevent future beings from unintentionally disturbing nuclear waste repositories. The proposed systems ranged from warning orbital satellites to glowing radioactive cat companions, to setting up an atomic priest hood, to surrounding the site with giant black thorns. These paranoic strategies of radical closure can be further examined in comparison and contradiction to the openness of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in which massive quantities of pure water are housed in order to detect the passage of weakly interacting neutrinos. This site of inviting invasion is at the same time isolated and buried deep in the earth. These two examples demonstrate that the attempt to combat and the attempt to welcome contingency involve complex and twisted modes of closure and openness as demonstrated by the work of Reza Negarestani. By investigating these models, I hope to investigate how the intimacies of geological formation cross into and disrupt the purported stability of space (both as outer space and abstract space) in relation to chemistry, both inorganic and astrobiological.

From the Editorial Introduction: "Since I am convinced that nobody reads editorials I will keep my remarks brief. Putting together the inaugural issue of Speculations has been an unusual experience. It has depended on the collusion of fellow speculative types, the help of many anonymous reviewers, the endless patience of designer Thomas Gokey, and more hours than someone in the final year of their PhD should ever spend on a project. Looking over the final product I think it has all been worth it. This is the first journal dedicated to speculative realism and despite the obscurity of that term I think we all understand it as a handy label under which weird realists, continental metaphysicians, object oriented ontologists, transcendental realists, vitalists, and Lovecraftians can unite. This is also, perhaps, the first time a journal can boast that each contributor is also a blogger. This is the reason why Speculations could only ever be an online, open-access journal. …"

"Diseases of the Head is an anthology of essays from contemporary philosophers, artists, and writers working at the crossroads of speculative philosophy and speculative horror. At once a compendium of multivocal endeavors, a breviary of supposedly illicit ponderings, and a travelogue of philosophical exploration, this collection centers itself on the place at which philosophy and horror meet. Employing rigorous analysis, incisive experimentation, and novel invention, this anthology asks about the use that speculation can make of horror and horror of speculation, about whether philosophy is fictional or fiction philosophical, and about the relationship between horror, the exigencies of our world and time, and the future developments that may await us in philosophy itself. From philosophers working on horrific themes, to horror writers influenced by heresies in the wake of post-Kantianism, to artists engaged in projects that address monstrosity and alienation, Diseases of the Head aims at nothing less than a speculative coup d'état.

Refusing both total negation and absolute affirmation, refusing to deny everything or account for everything, refusing the posture of critique and the posture of all-encompassing unification, this collection of essays aims at exposition and construction, analysis and creation – it desires to fight for some thing, but not everything, and not nothing. And it desires, most of all, to speak from the position of its own insufficiency, its own partiality, its own under-determinacy, which is always indicative of the practice of thinking, of speculation. Considering themes of anonymity, otherness and alterity, the gothic, extinction and the world without us, the end times, the apocalypse, the ancient and the world before us, and the uncanny or unheimlich, among other motifs, this anthology seeks to articulate the cutting edge which can be found at the intersection of speculative philosophy and speculative horror."