Being in Flux: A Post–Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self

Description

Reality exists independently of human observers, but does the same apply to its structure? Realist ontologies usually assume so: according to them, the world consists of objects, these have properties and enter into relations with each other, more or less as we are accustomed to think of them. Against this view, Rein Raud develops a radical process ontology that does not credit any vantage point, any scale or speed of being, any range of cognitive faculties with the privilege to judge how the world ‘really’ is.  In his view, what we think of as objects are recast as fields of constitutive tensions, cross-sections of processes, never in complete balance but always striving for it and always reconfiguring themselves accordingly. The human self is also understood as a fluctuating field, not limited to the mind but distributed all over the body and reaching out into its environment, with different constituents of the process constantly vying for control. The need for such a process philosophy has often been voiced, but rarely has there been an effort to develop it in a systematic and rigourous manner that leads to original accounts of identity, continuity, time, change, causality, agency and other topics. Throughout his new book, Raud engages with an unusually broad range of philosophical schools and debates, from New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology to both phenomenological and analytical philosophy of mind, from feminist philosophy of science to neurophilosophy and social ontology. Being in Flux will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy and the humanities generally and to anyone interested in current debates about realism, materialism and ontology. Cover Title page Copyright page Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION 1 ONTOLOGY: SOME OF THE STORY SO FAR Objects and properties Two kinds of essentialism Identity and continuity Substance vs. pattern continuity Process philosophies Multiplicities and networks Back to objects? Critique of the critique of critique: excess and change Ontological priority, antigradualism and counterfactuals Methodological perspectivism If disease is not a ‘thing’, then what is it? Social constructionism Accommodating anti-representationalism The theory of assemblages Gaze and relationality Summary 2 AN ONTOLOGY OF PROCESSES AND FIELDS The tradition Ontological tiers Gradients and thresholds Properties and capacities Relations Matter as emergence Minimal instances of being Field ontology What is a process? Internality Game changers Time regimes Causality Causal laws Initialism Memory and desire, cell and lens Summary 3 ME, MYSELF AND MY BRAIN Consciousness and mind Thresholds of evolution Mind on a gradient Are we our brains? From brain to mind And I think to myself … The decision-making focus The core self Combat vs. constitution United states of mind The mind and the world The self as a field Summary 4 THE SELF AS AN EXTENDED DECISION-MAKING NETWORK The body Bodythink From movement to agency Agency as self-realization Agency and temporality Future-in-itself Mental causation The extended network From cognition to action Responsibility The flattened image Collective selves? Modes of joint action Performative inclusion Shared or joint cognition? Summary CONCLUDING REMARKS REFERENCES INDEX EULA