Typically, we think of extinction in terms of the death of the last individual member of the species facing extinction. A species goes extinct when there aren’t any more organisms belonging to it still walking around. What comes to mind is a short fragment by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Witness” (1967). In the fragment, Borges… Continue Reading On the concept of pre-extinction
Tag: conceptual engineering
The left hand of all creation: how to repurpose whole worlds
“The world is an asymmetrical place full of asymmetrical beings.” – Frank Close In the following series of interrelated posts, I sketch out in preliminary fashion the theoretical framework of an ontological program of strong redescription. Redescription refers to one mode of interacting with, repurposing, and using the various objects that constitute our world. One… Continue Reading The left hand of all creation: how to repurpose whole worlds
The left hand of all creation (3): Excursus on creative destruction (Spielrein, Schumpeter, Boyd, Land)
Obviously, a concept like creative destruction has an extensive genealogy. In Western philosophy, at least, you can trace variations of the idea back to Greek pre-Socratics like Anaximander and Heraclitus. While the specific locution “creative destruction” is often attributed to Joseph Schumpeter (who probably pulls the term from either Karl Marx or Werner Sombart), the… Continue Reading The left hand of all creation (3): Excursus on creative destruction (Spielrein, Schumpeter, Boyd, Land)
The left hand of all creation (2): Freeing up the objects for use
While including our ordinary understanding of objects (as real objects, out there in external reality), the conceptual vocabulary of psychoanalysis helps us register objects rather more expansively than the ordinary conception of objects alone. For psychoanalysis, objects are not just mere bundles of features or properties occupying space or time, numerically distinct from our own… Continue Reading The left hand of all creation (2): Freeing up the objects for use
The left hand of all creation (1): The sinister pathway of the object
Objects act. But what is an object? The concept has a long and varied career. As a word, it comes from the Latin noun obiectum, referring generically to a tangible thing that’s perceptible by the mind or the senses, to “something that occurs in front of,” or, more abstractly, to “that which is placed before”… Continue Reading The left hand of all creation (1): The sinister pathway of the object