Acta Apocrypha

Revealing the Unseen

[sapiarch]

Memes and traditionalism

From a honk honk meme with clown pepe and “revolt against the modern world”. It seems many scholars of comparative philosophy/religion veered towards a traditionalist stance. 

Mircea Eliade

Julius Evola: wrote Revolt Against the Modern World

René Guénon

Traditionalist School

[sapiarch]

Philosophical work of Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Philosopher working on intercultural philosophy, philosophy of culture, of architecture and films, and metaphilosophy.

Especially interesting:

A corpus-based computational analysis of philosophical texts: comparing analytic and continental philosophy: stylistic analysis of continental and analytic philosophy, which supports the idea that philosophical thinking is independent of language;

 THE COOL KAWAII: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity: a study of aesthetic concepts between the cultural superpowers of US and Japan, the “cool” and the “kawaii”. Here’s a review.

Transcultural Architecture:The Limits and Opportunities of Critical Regionalism: a study of the relations between Western and non-Western style of architecture. Here is a review. 

[sapiarch]

Philosophy of Antarctica

I found two projects currently working on Antarctica from the angles of political philosophy and cultural studies:

Political Philosophy looks to Antarctica, University of Oslo;

Antarctic Cultures, University of Tasmania

[sapiarch]

Telos, machines and organisms

Human-AI relations: https://aeon.co/amp/essays/the-robots-wont-take-over-because-they-couldnt-care-less

How are AI robots different from human beings? Could they ever care, for the sake of caring about their own life? What do they lack? Mortality? The awareness of mortality? The ability to suffer? A sense of community? A personal history developed in interaction with others (individuation)? Is created individuation “real”, and does it matter?

[sapiarch]

Hawaian history and philosophy

Lili’uokalani: last queen of Hawai’i and author

[sapiarch]

List of Fictions

Movies:

Zardoz 

Books:

Elif Shakaf: The Forty Rules of Love: on Sufi poet Rumi

[sapiarch]

Philosophy of Magic the Gathering

The Color Pie of Magic lends itself to interesting philosophical considerations. 

Here I will just provide some links to resources:

Article by DA Sabien on Medium;

Pie Fights, article by Mark Rosewater on conflicts between enemy colors and wedges 

Frenemies, article by Andrew Weisel on conflicts between allied colors

Identity Crises: article by Andrew Weisel on conflicts within one color. On a similar topic, the best and worst of each color.

Martin Rezny on the metaphysics of postmodern fantasy in Magic 

Humor: episode of South Park. 

If you wonder why the wheel is inconveniently rotated to the left, read this. 

[sapiarch]

Canadian aboriginal syllabaries

Created by an English missionary in 1827: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics. It is used to write a variety of indigenous languages, among which Cree, Ojibwe, Inuktitut.

It is an abugida type of syllabary. 

Also, Mikmaq had a series of logograms used as mnemonic aid.

[sapiarch]

Evolutionary robotics and art

Andrew Lincoln Nelson s work combines research and artistic expression to form a multidisciplinary exploration of self-replicating machines, futuristic non-anthropoid worlds, artificial life, speculative science fiction, evolutionary robotics, ruminations on posthuman intelligences and the nature of xenobiology. 

[sapiarch]

Post-colonial and subaltern studies

Introductory links:

postcolonialism

subaltern studies

concept of subaltern, where Antonio Gramsci is one of the main theorists

Gayatri Spivak, brilliant cultural theorist and translator of Derrida

Dipesh Chakrabarty, who wrote about the decolonization/provincialization of the anthropocene

[sapiarch]

Escaping government: Zomia, Somalia

Zomia is a region is south east Asia that has managed to remain beyond governmental control, examined in this book on its anarchic history by James C. Scott.

A sad account is that of the Somali Civil War, which is still preventing the establishment of a truly national government. 

[sapiarch]

Magical symbols

Veve are magic sigils are used in voodoo magic, connected to religious rituals, representing Loa, divine intermediaries of synchretic origin.

“Papa Legba is a loa in Haitian Vodou, who serves as the intermediary between the loa and humanity. He stands at a spiritual crossroads and gives (or denies) permission to speak with the spirits of Guinee, and is believed to speak all human languages. In Haiti, he is the great elocutioner. Legba facilitates communication, speech, and understanding.”

Chaos magic is a contemporary development of cyber-occultism mixed with epistemological experimentalism.

[sapiarch]

Rongorongo

System of glyphs found on Easter island. Yet undeciphered, it might constitute a case of isolated invention of writing. 

[sapiarch]

Flintpunk

Future stories from the distant past. 

Nantuket series, by S. M. Stirling, trilogy on an island brought back in the past and competing for world dominance.

[sapiarch]

Capitalist realism

Is there a possible alternative to capitalism? Fisher suggests[IT] to politicize realms of discouse whose de-politicization advances capitalist goals: treating mental health has a result of socio-economic conditions, and not of individual brain chemistry; global pollution. The strategy is to challenge the apparent necessity of the system by envisioning new possibilities, showing the contingency of the present system (this resonates with Hecht’s critique of Haff’s concept of technosphere).    Mark Fisher, Zero books, 2009. 

Concerning digital monopolies, check Evgeny Morozov’s stuff. He published Silicon Valley: i signori del silicio (2016)[IT], and talks about data privatization.

What if we start by spotting mental disease in our algorithms, with something like a very posthuman move to integrate them into the moral community and understand the causes and consequences of algorithmic bias and mistakes?

[sapiarch]

Cooperative politics

Some political concepts and ideas on cooperativism and mutualism. Alternatives to individualistic capitalism?

Libertarian socialism: Chomsky is a famous supporter. The article offers an overview of many different currents, individualist, collectivist etc. All the ones below are found on this page.

Mutualism: based on labor theory of value.

Social anarchism:  emphasizes community and social equality as complementary to autonomy and personal freedom. 

Collectivist anarchism:  is a revolutionary anarchist doctrine that advocates the abolition of both the state and private ownership of the means of production as it instead envisions the means of production being owned collectively and controlled and managed by the producers themselves.

Communalism:  refers to a system that integrates communal ownership and federations of highly localized independent communities.

Cooperative:  an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.

Check also [IT]:

socialismo liberale (Carlo Rosselli), variante liberale del socialismo, opposta al

socialismo libertario, di cui sopra, di stampo anarchico

[sapiarch]

Afrikan clicks!

Xhosa, bantu (Niger-Congo) language spoken in southern Africa and native language of Nelson Mandela. Chosen to be the language of Wakanda in Marvel’s Black Panther. It is a tonal language and has three main clicks: dental, palatal and lateral.

Taa language, a Khoisan language, the language with the highest number of clicks.