In spite of its reputation, Gaia is not half science and half religion. It offers a much more enigmatic set of features that redistribute agencies in all possible ways (as does this most enigmatic term “anthropocene”). Thus, it is far from clear what it means to “face Gaia”. It might require us to envisage it very differently from the various divinities of the past (including those derived from nature).
Once nature and the natural sciences are fully ”secularized”, it becomes possible to revisit also the category of the supernatural. Then, a different landscape opens which can be navigated through an attention to agencies and their composition. Such a freedom of movement allows the use of the rich anthropological literature to compare the ways different “collectives” manage to assemble and totalize different sets of agencies.
Andy Clark: Natural-Born Cyborgs? Reflections on Bodies, Minds, and Human Enhancement
We are entering an age of widespread human enhancement. This raises a fundamental question: where does the mind stop, and the rest of the world begin?
Lecture 1: ‘Once Out of Nature’ – Natural Religion as a Pleonasm
The set of questions around the two words “natural religion” implies that only the second word is a coded and thus a disputed category, the first one being taken for granted and uncoded. But if it can be shown that the very notion of nature is a theological construct, we might be able to shift the problem somewhat: the question becomes not to save or resurrect “natural religion”, but to dispose of it by offering at last a ”secular” version of nature and of the natural sciences.
Stelarc (Performance Artist and Chair in Performance Art at the School of Arts, Brunel University, London) on mixed and augmented realities and our biological bodies at the Screen Media seminar: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2251/
Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger scholar and literary theorist, talking about rhythm, spatio-temporal, dwelling, ethos, erlibnis, erfahrung, rootness, poesis, Dasein, romantic, stimmung, cleft, rift, tearing, intimacy, selbst behauptung, mythic, ontic, mimesis, ontological, referring to Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, Walter Benjamin, Levinas, Hölderlin, Alain Badiou, Plato
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/urban-studies-and-planning/11-965-reflective-practice-an-approach-for-expanding-your-learning-frontiers-january-iap-2007/
The course is an introduction to the approach of Reflective Practice developed by Donald Schön. It is an approach that enables professionals to understand how they use their knowledge in practical situations and how they can combine practice and learning in a more effective way. Through greater awareness of how they deploy their knowledge in practical situations, professionals can increase their capacities of learning in a more timely way. Understanding how they frame situations and ideas helps professionals to achieve greater flexibility and increase their capacity of conceptual innovation.
Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger scholar and literary theorist, talking about primitive art, tool, technology, gestalt, excessive, werklich, truth event, finite, translation, Oedipus, Antigone, Heraclitus, oppositions, disaster, metaphysics, blessing, endurance, earth, withholding, world referring to Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, Hölderlin, Being and Time, Lacan, Derrida.
ANTHEM 