Tag Archives: Philosophy

The Silent Reverberation of Materiality

Sculptor Dr Gindi is an artist of the elemental, a material thinker who pursues philosophical inquiry through a deep engagement with extra-human sensibility. Attuned to the resonation of material things, she is also a sculptor of words, deploying a distinctive, poetic idiom to elicit the conditions through which something new can be sensed. For Dr Gindi, the artist is a conduit through which the art forces of nature reveal a world in the process of becoming, rendering tangible a thought or sentiment in the process of finding form. Beyond the allure of the enchanting surface she hearkens to the ‘silent reverberation of materiality’ and in sentiments reminiscent of Whitman, speaks in this interview of its utterance. She discusses her ideas and work with Jill Marsden, Professor of Literature and Philosophy, The University of Bolton, UK. She is the author of ‘After Nietzsche: Notes Towards a Philosophy of Ecstasy’ (Palgrave 2002) and assorted essays on Nietzsche, aesthetics, modernism and literary thinking.

‘QBism’: quantum mechanics is not a description of objective reality – it reveals a world of genuine free will

Ruediger Schack is a Professor at the Department of Mathematics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He obtained his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at the University of Munich in 1991 and held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, the University of Southern California, the University of New Mexico, and Queen Mary and Westfield College before joining Royal Holloway in 1995. His research interests are quantum information theory, quantum cryptography and quantum Bayesianism.

Three minds: physicist, poet, philosopher

The minds are those of international physicist David Bohm, German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Canadian Blackfoot/Indigenous philosopher/ researcher Leroy Little Bear.

Bohm saw thought as a system, a network of connections passing seamlessly between people throughout society. Enzensberger said that a poem, notably his summer poem, is a netlike construction which can catch new experience again and again. Little Bear said the Blackfoot mind is a repository of creativity through the notion of constant flux: a ‘spider web’ network of relationships where everything is interrelated.

The overlap between these views can illumine consciousness and thinking.

Let’s protect nature, but not merely for the sake of humans

Simon P. James is Professor of Philosophy, Durham University.

“I came to philosophy by a roundabout route, taking a BSc in Biological Sciences followed by an MA in the History and Philosophy of Science, before obtaining a PhD for a thesis on environmental ethics. I have written a number of articles on environmental philosophy as well as the following books: ‘Zen Buddhism and Environmental Ethics’ (Routledge, 2004), ‘Buddhism, Virtue and Environment’ (Routledge, 2005; co-authored with David E. Cooper), ‘The Presence of Nature: A Study in Phenomenology and Environmental Philosophy’ (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009) and ‘Environmental Philosophy: An Introduction’ (Polity, 2015). My new book, ‘How Nature Matters’ (Oxford University Press, 2022), presents a new theory of environmental value, based on the concepts of meaning, constitution and cultural identity.”

On ‘Perception: First Form of Mind’

In his recent book, ‘Perception: First Form of Mind’, Tyler Burge develops an understanding of the most primitive type of mental representational: perception. Focusing on the functions and capacities of perceptual states, Burge accounts for their representational content and structure, and develops a formal semantics for them. Drawing mainly on vision science, ‘Perception: First Form of Mind’ is a rigorous, agenda-setting work in philosophy of perception and philosophy of science.

The Unsettled Sense

The eye is a sense organ and an affective organ. It receives and is moved. We see and we cry. This essay focuses primarily on the eye which sees and, in particular, on seeing as a presence to our experience of the world and others. It considers how there is an inherent unsettledness and instability in the phenomenology of seeing. Drawing on the phenomenological investigations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it explores how the phenomenal richness of seeing is, by its nature, in flux and susceptible to disequilibrium; how seeing is therefore also a steadying and bound up with our experience of spatiality and openness.

Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that’s okay

Sam Baron is Associate Professor, Australian Catholic University. His present research focuses on the connection between key topics in the philosophy of mathematics concerning mathematical ontology, and topics in the philosophy of time concerning temporal ontology. A central focus of this research is the role of truthmaking and non-causal explanation in arguments both for and against particular ontological views.
Dr Baron is currently investigating the role of non-causal explanation in the indispensability argument for the existence of mathematical objects, as well as timelessness in theories of quantum gravity and timelessness in metaphysics more generally.

Talking about the Mind

Jack Symes is a public philosopher and writer. He is currently a teacher and researcher at the University of Liverpool and is best known as the producer of ‘The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast’. The podcast, in which Jack discusses philosophy with the world’s leading thinkers, has over 75,000 regular listeners. He is also the editor of ‘Talking about Philosophy’, a series of introductory philosophy books for the general public. Jack’s first book, ‘Philosophers on Consciousness: Talking about the Mind’, was published by Bloomsbury in February 2022.

Hanna Lemmik: Engrammatica / Bodies in trouble

Rumination takes place within the body and is therefore constrained by the body’s material reality, particularly the material reality of memory. We do not know exactly how memory is contained in the body but there are indications that memories are constantly remodelled on the molecular level. That is, they do not stay static. Kierkegaard’s ideas on despair are in line with this idea of constant change. Kierkegaard’s self strives for a consistency which it cannot achieve and therefore it must despair, but it is also transformed through this process, suggesting that unwelcome mental loops are tentative and changeable.

How could the Big Bang arise from nothing?

Alastair Wilson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, working on metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science and philosophy of physics. His doctoral thesis was on the metaphysics of Everettian (many-worlds) quantum mechanics, and this line of thought culminated in his book The Nature of Contingency: Quantum Physics as Modal Realism (OUP, 2020). More recently he has worked on explanation and dependence in physics and metaphysics as part of his ERC-funded project FraMEPhys, on metaphysical explanation in physics. He has also worked on laws of nature, chance, properties, causation, counterfactuals, and the epistemology of disagreement and of self-locating beliefs. He was President of the Society for the Metaphysics of Science in 2017-18 and Honorary Secretary of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science in 2018-19. He remains on the SMS and BSPS committees, and is also a member of the climate task force of the Philosophy of Science Association and a Trustee of the Philosophy of Physics Association. He is PhilPapers editor for the categories ‘Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’ and ‘Theories of Modality’, and a Managing Editor of the open-access journal Ergo.