Search Results (8)

This article offers a Thomistic evaluation of Richard J. Pendergast, SJ’s The Cosmic Hierarchy: The Universe and Its Many Irreducible Levels, situating his integrative cosmology within the ongoing dialog between Christian theology and the natural sciences. Pendergast’s attempt to synthesize Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, process philosophy, and modern physics exemplifies both the promise and the perils of constructing a unified worldview that embraces the theology of creation, teleology, and metaphysical realism. This analysis commends his defense of the intelligibility of nature and the legitimacy of final causality. It also identifies areas where his speculative adoption of process categories departs from Thomistic principles and raises theological difficulties. Engaging questions of creation theology, metaphysics, and epistemology, the paper demonstrates how a Thomistic framework provides critical criteria for assessing integrative cosmologies informed by contemporary science. Full article

The existence of the spiritual can be deduced from knowledge of the material. There is an inherent affinity between speculation and spirituality: an embrace of gaps in knowledge. Speculative Realisms’ rejection of both existential anthropocentrism and correlationism in favor of more empathetic, a-, pan-, or metacentric perspectives, allows for a flat ontology where all objects equally exist and allow us to describe how the spiritual exists outside of thought. This perspective allows us to derive the existence of the spiritual via the examination of interactions between material objects. By showing how all objects, whether material or abstract, have a spiritual aspect, this paper advocates for a holistic understanding of reality that recognizes the interconnectedness of all objects. Full article

In Tropic of Orange (1997), Karen Tei Yamashita uses literary imagination to challenge the settler-colonial discourse on space and time in the Americas. The influence of Latin American magical realism on Yamashita is most pronounced in the orange, a nonhuman object imbued with human agency. The orange magically initiates cross-border movements of people that disrupt the binaries of local/global, East/West, and North/South, challenging the unequal distribution of freedom of movement across the globe. In this paper, I engage with Wai-Chee Dimock’s concept of “deep time” to discuss the temporality of such border crossings. I propose that the cyclicality symbolized by the orange provides an alternative to linear settler-colonial management of spacetime. Full article

Margaret Atwood’s science/speculative dystopian MaddAddam trilogy—Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013)—opens up questions about how genre-mixing indexes and probes interrelated notions of authenticity. This focus is prompted by the simple question of why Atwood, having established worldwide renown for realist novels of socio-historical authenticity, switched to blending realism with science/speculative fiction. Through analyzing how the trilogy departs from realism, while never truly embracing SF, the paper argues that while the realist novel may offer the strongest representations of authentic psychological states, larger questions of epistemic authority and the state of our world demand a literature that authenticates knowledge. The MaddAddam trilogy challenges the notion that realism’s social, existential and moral concerns are more authentic when supported with a scientific explanatory logic. Authenticity is thus found in a negotiation between Truth and whether to trust in the locations (social and geographical, literary and literal) of knowledge. Full article

Dark theology as a theoretical approach emerged during debates on human rights and inclusion in Orthodox theology. It is realized at the junction of such disciplines as ecclesiology, political theology, philosophy, and social theory. It is based on the tools of object-oriented ontology (OOO), one of the branches of the philosophy of speculative realism. The author proposes a theoretical framework by which we can talk about God and supernatural entities as real objects included in public discourses through the collective imagination. The article discovers the basic theoretical (ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic) principles of dark theology as they apply to ecclesiology and political theology. Additionally, it discusses the existence of church dark actors who do not come within the field of vision of the theological mind (ecclesiology) illuminating ecclesial space. The author concludes by proposing a concept of reassembling the Church based on Bruno Latour’s notion of the ‘collective’. Full article

Early robotics research held that increased realism should result in increased positivity of the interactions between people and humanoid robots. However, this turned out to be true only to a certain point, and researchers now recognize that human interactions with highly realistic humanoid robots are often marked by feelings of disgust, fear, anxiety, and distrust. This phenomenon is called the Uncanny Valley. In a world in which Artificial Companions are increasingly likely, and even desired, engineering humanoid robots that avoid the Uncanny Valley is of critical importance. This paper examines theories of the uncanny, and focuses on one in particular—that humans subconsciously appraise robots as potential sexual partners. Drawing from work on love, sexuality, and gender from a variety of fields, this paper speculates on possible futures in a world of intimate companionships between humans and machines. Full article

Artists figure fairly frequently in novelle, so it is not unreasonable to suppose that they may have taken more than a passing interest in the genre. Although much scholarly effort has been dedicated to the task of exploring how Horace’s adage “ut pictura poësis” affected the course of the visual arts during the Italian Renaissance and vast scholarly effort has been assigned to the study of Boccaccio’s literary efforts (much more so than the efforts of his successors), relatively little effort has been spent on the dauntingly interdisciplinary task of estimating how the development of prose literary imagination may have affected habits of perception and may also have augmented the project of integrating quotidian observations into pictorial compositions. In contrast to these issues of “realism”, the essay also addresses questions of how the literary conventions of novelle, although they may have been created in deliberate defiance of current social norms, may eventually have helped to shift those norms. More specifically, the gender norms of the novelle offer intriguing precedents for characterizations that we find in the visual arts, from Botticelli to Leonardo to Michelangelo, ones that rarely match what we know of societal expectations of the day. The argument, though necessarily speculative, is addressed as much to the question of how readers and viewers might have had their thinking shaped by their combined aesthetic experiences as by the more traditional question of identifying artists’ sources. Did theorizing about style, or simply thinking about what made for vividness or impressiveness, shift readily between the verbal and the visual, and perhaps more easily then than now? Can we create a history of art that seeks evidence from the whole literary record rather than consistently prioritizing poetry and the “poetic”? Full article

The concept of “deep mapping”, as an approach to place, has been deployed as both a descriptor of a specific suite of creative works and as a set of aesthetic practices. While its definition has been amorphous and adaptive, a number of distinct, yet related, manifestations identify as, or have been identified by, the term. In recent times, it has garnered attention beyond literary discourse, particularly within the “spatial” turn of representation in the humanities and as a result of expanded platforms of data presentation. This paper takes a brief look at the practice of “deep mapping”, considering it as a consciously performative act and tracing a number of its various manifestations. It explores how deep mapping is a reflection of epistemological trends in ontological practices of connectivity and the “flattening” of knowledge systems. In particular those put forward by post structural and cultural theorists, such as Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, as well as by theorists who associate with speculative realism. The concept of deep mapping as an aesthetic, methodological, and ideological tool, enables an approach to place that democratizes knowledge by crossing temporal, spatial, and disciplinary boundaries. Full article