•  10218
    The spectre of global environmental destruction is before us, the legacy of the expansion and domination of the world by European civilization. Not even the threat to the continued existence of humanity is enough to move the members of this civilization to alter its trajectory. And Marxism, which had held out the possibility of creating a new social order, has been swept from the historical stage by the failure of Eastern European communism. Nihilism Inc. is an attempt to overcome this crisis. E…Read more
  •  672
    Human Ecology and Public Policy: Overcoming the Hegemony of Economics
    Democracy and Nature 8 (1): 131-141. 2002.
    The thinking of those with the power to formulate and implement public policy is now almost totally dominated by the so-called science of economics. While efforts have been made to supplement or modify economics to make it less brutal or less environmentally blind, here it is suggested that economics is so fundamentally flawed and that it so completely dominates the culture of late modern capitalism (or postmodernity) that a new master human science is required to displace it and provide an alte…Read more
  •  669
    This paper argues that human ecology, based on process philosophy and challenging scientific materialism, is required to effectively confront the global ecological crisis now facing us.
  •  1520
    Beyond Desartes and Newton: Recovering life and humanity
    with Stuart A. Kauffman
    Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 119 (3): 219-244. 2015.
    Attempts to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology challenge both traditional phenomenology and traditional approaches to cognitive science. They challenge Edmund Husserl’s rejection of naturalism and his attempt to establish phenomenology as a foundational transcendental discipline, and they challenge efforts to explain cognition through mainstream science. While appearing to be a retreat from the bold claims made for phenomenology, it is really its triumph. Naturalized phenomenology is spearheading a succ…Read more
  •  201
    Review of Maria Kronfeldner, Darwinian Creativity and Memetics, Acumen, 2011 (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 1-3. 2012.
    Review of Maria Kronfeldner, Darwinian Creativity and Memetics, Acumen, 2011
  •  206
    Book Review: The Great Adventure: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution (review)
    Cosmos and History 3 (1): 230-235. 2007.
    Book Review of David Loye (ed). The Great Adventure: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution. N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2004.
  •  798
    By revealing the centrality of stories to action, to social life and to inquiry together with the implicit assumptions in polyphonic stories about the nature of humans, of life and of physical reality, this paper examines the potential of stories to transform civilization. Focussing on the failure of environmentalists so far in the face of the global ecological crisis, it is shown how ethics and political philosophy could be reconceived and radical ecology reformulated and reinvigorated by appre…Read more
  •  282
    Endorsing Bill Readings’ argument that there is an intimate relationship between the dissolution of the nation-State, the undermining of the Humboldtian ideal of the university and economic globalization, this paper defends both the nation-State and the Humboldtian university as core institutions of democracy. However, such an argument only has force, it is suggested, if we can revive an appreciation of the real meaning of democracy. Endorsing Cornelius Castoriadis’ argument that democracy has b…Read more
  •  586
    Whitehead and Pythagoras
    Concrescence 7. 2006.
    While the appeal of scientific materialism has been weakened by developments in theoretical physics, chemistry and biology, Pythagoreanism still attracts the allegiance of leading scientists and mathematicians. It is this doctrine that process philosophers must confront if they are to successfully defend their metaphysics. Peirce, Bergson and Whitehead were acutely aware of the challenge of Pythagoreanism, and attempted to circumvent it. The problem addressed by each of these thinkers was how to…Read more
  •  451
    The Semiotics of Global Warming: Combating Semiotic Corrruption
    Theory and Science 9 (2): 1-36. 2007.
    The central focus of this paper is the disjunction between the findings of climate science in revealing the threat of global warming and the failure to act appropriately to these warnings. The development of climate science can be illuminated through the perspective provided by Peircian semiotics, but efforts to account for its success as a science and its failure to convince people to act accordingly indicate the need to supplement Peirce’s ideas. The more significant gaps, it is argued, call f…Read more
  •  1352
    The transformation of universities from public institutions to transnational business enterprises has met with less resistance in Australia than elsewhere. Yet this transformation undermines the founding principles of Australian democracy. This democracy emerged in opposition to the classical form of free market liberalism that the neo-liberals have revived. The logical unfolding of social liberalism in Australia underpinned the development of both the system of wage fixing and the idea of publi…Read more
  •  693
    While some process philosophers have denigrated the emergent theory of mind, what they have denigrated has been ‘materialist’ theories of emergence. My contention is that one of the most important reasons for embracing process philosophy is that it is required to make intelligible the emergence of consciousness. There is evidence that this was a central concern of Whitehead. However, Whitehead acknowledged that his metaphysics was deficient in this regard. In this paper I will argue that to full…Read more
  •  1774
    Defending Robert Rosen’s claim that in every confrontation between physics and biology it is physics that has always had to give ground, it is shown that many of the most important advances in mathematics and physics over the last two centuries have followed from Schelling’s demand for a new physics that could make the emergence of life intelligible. Consequently, while reductionism prevails in biology, many biophysicists are resolutely anti-reductionist. This history is used to identify and def…Read more
  •  1226
    The global ecological crisis is the greatest challenge humanity has ever had to confront, and humanity is failing. The triumph of the neo-liberal agenda, together with a debauched ‘scientism’, has reduced nature and people to nothing but raw materials, instruments and consumers to be efficiently managed in a global market dominated by corporate managers, media moguls and technocrats. The arts and the humanities have been devalued, genuine science has been crippled, and the quest for autonomy and…Read more
  •  640
    Barbarity, Civilization and Decadence
    Chromatikon 5 167-189. 2009.
    In 1984 scientists in the former Soviet Union called for an ecological civilization. This idea was taken up in 1987 in China by Ye Qianji. Subsequently the notion of ecological civilization was promoted by the deputy director of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), Pan Yue, incorporated into the Central Commission Report to the Communist Party’s 17th Convention in November, 2007, and embraced as one of the key elements in its political guidelines. Characterized as the su…Read more
  •  1202
    Toward an Ecological Civilization
    Process Studies 39 (1): 5-38. 2010.
    Chinese environmentalists have called for an ecological civilization. To promote this, ecology is defended as the core science embodying process metaphysics, and it is argued that as such ecology can serve as the foundation of such a civilization. Integrating hierarchy theory and Peircian semiotics into this science, it is shown how “community” and “communities of communities,” in which communities are defined by their organization to promote the common good of their components, have to be recog…Read more
  •  472
    Narratives and culture: The primordial role of stories in human self-creation
    Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 122 (Winter): 80-100. 2002.
    This paper demonstrates the primordial role of narratives in human self-creation as essentially cultural beings.
  •  363
    The post-Kantians were inspired by Kant’s Critique of Judgment to forge a new synthesis of natural philosophy, art and history that would overcome the dualisms and gulfs within Kant’s philosophy. Focusing on biology and showing how Schelling reworked and transformed Kant’s insights, it is argued that Schelling was largely successful in laying the foundations for this synthesis, although he was not always consistent in building on these foundations. To appreciate this achievement, it is argued th…Read more
  •  815
    Aleksandr Bogdanov's History, Sociology and Philosophy of Science
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 31 (2): 231-248. 2000.
    With the failure of the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Bogdanov has come under increasing scrutiny as the anti-authoritarian, left-wing opponent of Lenin among the Bolsheviks and the main inspiration behind the Proletk'ult movement, the movement which attempted to create a new, proletarian culture (Sochor, 1988). Bogdanov's efforts to create a new, universal science of organization, a precursor to systems theory and cybernetics, has also attracted considerable attention (Gorelik, 1980; Bello, 1985; Big…Read more
  •  609
    Developing MacIntyre’s metaphilosophy, Whitehead’s contention that philosophy ‘is the most effective of all the intellectual pursuits’ is elucidated and defended. It is argued that the narratives through which philosophical ideas are evaluated can refigure the stories constituting societies. In this way philosophical ideas become practically effective and come to be embodied in institutions. This is illustrated by the challenge by process philosophy to scientific materialism in the face of an im…Read more
  •  679
    We have reached the peculiar situation where the advance of mainstream science has required us to dismiss as unreal our own existence as free, creative agents, the very condition of there being science at all. Efforts to free science from this dead-end and to give a place to creative becoming in the world have been hampered by unexamined assumptions about what science should be, assumptions which presuppose that if creative becoming is explained, it will be explained away as an illusion. In this…Read more
  •  1713
    This book offers an historical study and critique of Marxism as it was developed in the Soviet Union, then outlines and defends a version of process philosophy on the basis of which a form of eco-Marxism is defended.
  •  833
    The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Western World (review)
    Cosmos and History 8 (1): 412-449. 2012.
    Review of Iain McGilchrist, 'The Master and His Emissary'
  •  3863
    Environmental degradation is the most important complex of problems ever confronted by humanity. Humans are interfering with the world's ecosystems so severely that they are beginning to undermine the conditions for their own continued existence. They are polluting the air, the oceans and the land. They are rapidly exhausting the reserves of minerals and destroying the resources of the world on which civilization depends, while destroying other life forms on a massive scale. At the same time hum…Read more
  •  406
    James Hansen, the world’s leading climate scientist, argues that global climate destabilization could totally destroy the conditions for life on Earth, and further, that politicians are not taking effective action. Instead, they are using their power to cripple science. This situation is explained in this paper as the outcome of the successful alliance between a global class of predators and people who must be recognized as idiots taking over the institutions of government, research and educatio…Read more
  •  2375
    Stepping Beyond the Newtonian Paradigm in Biology. Towards an Integrable Model of Life: Accelerating Discovery in the Biological Foundations of Science
    with Plamen L. Simeonov, Edwin Brezina, Ron Cottam, Andreé C. Ehresmann, Ted Goranson, Jaime Gomez‐Ramirez, Brian D. Josephson, Bruno Marchal, Koichiro Matsuno, Robert S. Root-­Bernstein, Otto E. Rössler, Stanley N. Salthe, Marcin Schroeder, Bill Seaman, and Pridi Siregar
    In Plamen L. Simeonov, Leslie S. Smith & Andrée C. Ehresmann (eds.), Integral Biomathics: Tracing the Road to Reality, Springer. pp. 328-427. 2012.
    The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers. This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit that biology to …Read more
  •  611
    While some philosophers and increasing numbers of scientists are striving to revive speculative metaphysics as a condition for further advancing science, solving the central problems of contemporary philosophy and confronting the major problems facing society, even philosophers decrying the increasingly marginal status of philosophy continue to ignore or denigrate their efforts. It is argued that this lack of appreciation and the associated misrepresentations of speculative metaphysics stems fro…Read more
  •  305
    Michel Weber, Whitehead's Pancreativism: The Basics Reviewed by (review)
    Philosophy in Review 27 (6): 444-447. 2007.
    Michel Weber Whitehead’s Pancreativism: The Basics. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag 2007. Pp. 255. US$106.00 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-3-938793-15-2). In his introduction to After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre called upon his readers to imagine a culture in which, to begin with, the natural sciences had been destroyed by an anti-science movement, and then, reacting against this movement, people had attempted to reconstruct science from surviving fragments. In this imaginary world adults argue over the respective…Read more