Timothy Morton's philosophy
It's insanely frustrating that, in 2016, climate change is still a partisan issue. While the political and scientific discourse trends toward the (justifiably) alarmist or the (depressingly) repressive, Timothy Morton’s philosophy opens up a new angle for considering humans' role on this spaceship Earth. His ideas about human selfhood, and our relationship with nature, are fascinating and provocative, and attest to an existence far richer than the “stranded polar bear on an ice sheet” caricature.
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Sunday, November 27, 2016
Thankful for Architects
This was a year in which I cemented (lol) some lovely relationships with some lovely architects, and I'm so honored therefore to be part of Archinect's list of things to be thankful for this year:
I would agree that proliferation of guns from 1610 onwards is likely to be significant, although machines firing missiles began much earlier, as did the use of yokes to cut a deeper ploughed furrow. I would say that Roman civilisation in combination with Archimedes and Hellenistic science was probably the most aggressively assertive culture when it came to using mechanics that the world had seen. It was Latin-speaking northern Europe that took this to new levels with a great variety of mills - water mills, windmills and other mechanical rotary devices (see J. Gimpel, The Medieval Machine), applied to iron-working, dying cloth, processing grain and so on. Other factors such as slavery-driven road construction also point to a Roman paradigm of concerted efforts towards large-scale geographical domination, containment and reproduction of economic advantages. Am I right in thinking that this is what we are trying to discuss? Or am I missing the point entirely? Avaaz keep telling me that two thirds of the world's species will be extinct by 2020, so we had better get to the point quite fast, don't you think?
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