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Taking Gaia Hypothesis seriously + Foucault's work on power matters more than ever

#1
C C Offline
It’s Time to Take the Gaia Hypothesis Seriously
http://m.nautil.us/blog/its-time-to-take...-seriously

EXCERPT: Can a planet be alive? Lynn Margulis, a giant of late 20th-century biology, who had an incandescent intellect that veered toward the unorthodox, thought so. She and chemist James Lovelock together theorized that life must be a planet-altering phenomenon and the distinction between the “living” and “nonliving” parts of Earth is not as clear-cut as we think. Many members of the scientific community derided their theory, called the Gaia hypothesis, as pseudoscience, and questioned their scientific integrity. But now Margulis and Lovelock may have their revenge. Recent scientific discoveries are giving us reason to take this hypothesis more seriously. At its core is an insight about the relationship between planets and life that has changed our understanding of both, and is shaping how we look for life on other worlds...



Michel Foucault’s work on power matters now more than ever
https://aeon.co/essays/why-foucaults-wor...-than-ever

EXCERPT: [...] For his part, however, [Michel] Foucault moved on, somewhat singularly among his generation. Rather than staying in the world of words, in the 1970s he shifted his philosophical attention to power, an idea that promises to help explain how words, or anything else for that matter, come to give things the order that they have. But Foucault’s lasting importance is not in his having found some new master-concept that can explain all the others. Power, in Foucault, is not another philosophical godhead. For Foucault’s most crucial claim about power is that we must refuse to treat it as philosophers have always treated their central concepts, namely as a unitary and homogenous thing that is so at home with itself that it can explain everything else.

Foucault did not attempt to construct a philosophical fortress around his signature concept. He had witnessed first-hand how the arguments of the linguistic-turn philosophers grew brittle once they were deployed to analyse more and more by way of words. So Foucault himself expressly refused to develop an overarching theory of power. Interviewers would sometimes press him to give them a unified theory, but he always demurred. Such a theory, he said, was simply not the goal of his work. Foucault remains best-known for his analyses of power, indeed his name is, for most intellectuals, almost synonymous with the word ‘power’. Yet he did not himself offer a philosophy of power. How could this be possible?

Herein lies the richness and the challenge of Foucault’s work. His is a philosophical approach to power characterised by innovative, painstaking, sometimes frustrating, and often dazzling attempts to politicise power itself. Rather than using philosophy to freeze power into a timeless essence, and then to use that essence to comprehend so much of power’s manifestations in the world, Foucault sought to unburden philosophy of its icy gaze of capturing essences. He wanted to free philosophy to track the movements of power, the heat and the fury of it working to define the order of things.

To appreciate the originality of Foucault’s approach, it is helpful to contrast it to that of previous political philosophy....
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#2
Zinjanthropos Offline
I would imagine that over time, many particles have shared different life forms. I wonder if over billions of years whether or not every particle comprising the Earth might eventually become part of a life form. Surely some particles have shared several life forms. 

Life, as in living things, has the ability to move matter, does that make it a force?
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#3
C C Offline
(Mar 19, 2017 03:27 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Life, as in living things, has the ability to move matter, does that make it a force?


Certainly not in fundamental physics, but a conception that might be entertained in other physical sciences that occasionally seem to treat the affairs and models sported by their higher-level domains of study as if they were "floating on their own".

The categorical-like expression "force of nature" seems typically taken as signifying "a natural phenomenon that humans cannot control". Since humans themselves are a subdivision of life, taking the generality of the latter as a force then at least runs into semantic conflict with regard to us.
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#4
Magical Realist Offline
(Mar 18, 2017 06:08 AM)C C Wrote: Michel Foucault’s work on power matters now more than ever
https://aeon.co/essays/why-foucaults-wor...-than-ever

EXCERPT: [...] For his part, however, [Michel] Foucault moved on, somewhat singularly among his generation. Rather than staying in the world of words, in the 1970s he shifted his philosophical attention to power, an idea that promises to help explain how words, or anything else for that matter, come to give things the order that they have. But Foucault’s lasting importance is not in his having found some new master-concept that can explain all the others. Power, in Foucault, is not another philosophical godhead. For Foucault’s most crucial claim about power is that we must refuse to treat it as philosophers have always treated their central concepts, namely as a unitary and homogenous thing that is so at home with itself that it can explain everything else.

Foucault did not attempt to construct a philosophical fortress around his signature concept. He had witnessed first-hand how the arguments of the linguistic-turn philosophers grew brittle once they were deployed to analyse more and more by way of words. So Foucault himself expressly refused to develop an overarching theory of power. Interviewers would sometimes press him to give them a unified theory, but he always demurred. Such a theory, he said, was simply not the goal of his work. Foucault remains best-known for his analyses of power, indeed his name is, for most intellectuals, almost synonymous with the word ‘power’. Yet he did not himself offer a philosophy of power. How could this be possible?

Herein lies the richness and the challenge of Foucault’s work. His is a philosophical approach to power characterised by innovative, painstaking, sometimes frustrating, and often dazzling attempts to politicise power itself. Rather than using philosophy to freeze power into a timeless essence, and then to use that essence to comprehend so much of power’s manifestations in the world, Foucault sought to unburden philosophy of its icy gaze of capturing essences. He wanted to free philosophy to track the movements of power, the heat and the fury of it working to define the order of things.

To appreciate the originality of Foucault’s approach, it is helpful to contrast it to that of previous political philosophy....

“power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to an ability to hide its own mechanisms.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
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