Philosophy

31 Aug Words to Ponder and Create With

Posted at 20:21h in Creativity, Culture, Human Development, Philosophy, Psychology of Becoming 0 Comments

Are you familiar with my “Words to Ponder” column on this site? It’s a place where—when the spirit moves me—I quote something that someone wrote that provokes my pondering. My contemplating. My mulling. My imagining. My conversing with them. It could be a few lines from a poet, a sentence...

17 Jul We Can’t Be Posthuman

Posted at 01:14h in Culture, Philosophy, Psychology of Becoming 0 Comments

Just as human exceptionalism and superiority were conceptualized and have been practiced by humans, so too are any and all attempts to go beyond them, to dig our way out of the anthropocene and inhabit a non human-centric world. For any such attempts will be our (human) conceptions and practices....

08 Jul Beware the Tyranny of Size!

Posted at 18:03h in Culture, Language, Philosophy, Psychology of Becoming 0 Comments

In 1999, Ken Gergen wrote about the tyranny of the normal—“the pattern of expectations, obligations and swift sanctions within the core of most disciplines.” In 2019, Jerry Z. Muller, zeroed in on how one dominant feature of the normal —metrics—tyrannizes us. His book is aptly titled The Tyranny of Metrics. Lately, I’ve...

22 Jun We are biased!

Posted at 21:28h in Creativity, Culture, Human Development, Philosophy, Psychology of Becoming 0 Comments

Descartes famously said (in Latin): “I think, therefore, I am.” Such is the modernist bias of mainstream psychology. The bias of Social Therapeutics and Performance Activism is a postmodern rewriting of Descartes: "We perform, therefore, we become.” This is the activity of a humanizing mass psychology and a new kind of social activism....

26 Apr (Mis)Shapers of Our Lives

Posted at 15:30h in Creativity, Culture, Human Development, Philosophy, Psychology of Becoming 0 Comments

We humans—with our species exceptionalism, our arrogance, our smarts and our not so smarts, our bloated brains and shrinking hearts, our degenerating ranges of sight and sound, the cooling of our touch, and the freezing of our feelings—are in deep, deep trouble. It is a trouble of our own making....

18 Apr Words to Ponder #49

Posted at 19:43h in Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology of Becoming, Words to Ponder 1 Comment

Today's words are from Belgian radical philosopher Raoul Vaneigem's influential (in the 1960s) book The Revolution of Everyday Life. “People are far too unperturbed, it seems to me, by the way in which the world, in certain periods, assumes the forms of the prevailing metaphysics. No matter how bizarre belief in...

27 Aug Words to Ponder #47

Posted at 21:31h in Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Words to Ponder 0 Comments

I think about how exhausting the indicative becomes - the constant demand to perform progress, to show we're winning, to prove harm is decreasing. Bayo Akomolafe...

20 Feb Words to Ponder # 43

Posted at 15:33h in Critical psychiatry, Philosophy, Psychology of Becoming, Words to Ponder 0 Comments

The opening paragraph of "We’re Obsessed with Labelling Suffering, But Our Power to Think about it Matters More," a post on Mad in America by Charlotte Beale The philosopher Ian Hacking described a looping effect, whereby people adjust themselves to become more like the labels foisted upon them. “Sometimes, our sciences create...

05 May Development for All

Posted at 02:15h in Culture, Education, Human Development, Philosophy, Psychology of Becoming, What's New 0 Comments

I hope you recognize me! It's the logo for my new project—an advice column like no other! Check out The Developmentalist and, if you like it SHARE SHARE SHARE! ...

19 Feb Words to Ponder # 41

Posted at 00:39h in Creativity, Language, Philosophy 1 Comment

Today’s ponderings come from Winnie the Pooh, who I’m finding remarkably relevant to living/becoming/developing in this strange and scary 21st century. So philosophical! So Vygotskian! So post-postmodern! (Thank you, A.A.Milne for your creation.) “When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that...