Being in Flux
| Author | Rein Raud |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | |
| Language | English |
| Subjects | Ontology, Process philosophy, Self, Neurophilosophy |
| Publisher | Polity |
Publication date | 2021 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 238 |
| ISBN | 978-1-5095-4951-1 Search this book on  . |
Being in Flux: A Post-Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self (2021)[1] is a book by Rein Raud, in which the author presents a system of process philosophy and applies it to the human self in a manner that critiques the traditionally dominant anthropocentric views.
Summary
The book contains four chapters. In the first two, Raud first criticizes the currently dominant views on ontology and then outlines his own system of process philosophy, and the second half of the book is dedicated to the theory of self and the critique of several influential solutions offered to the mind-body problem. According to Raud, it is misleading to treat the human mind as supervenient on the brain and opposed to the rest of the body, and he introduces the term bodythink to refer to the view that the entire body participates in mental processes.
Many sections of the first half of the book are dedicated to critical engagement with the influential Object-Oriented Ontology proposed by Graham Harman which, according to Raud, does not overcome the anthropocentrism it claims to address, because it attributes to the world a structure that corresponds to the human cognitive apparatus.
Raud’s ontology endorses gradualism and prefers gradients to binary oppositions whenever possible. It argues for a form of presentism claiming that “minimal instances of being”[2] are momentary and basically consist of possible relations with other such point-instances. A thing, according to Raud, is best understood as a field, which is a cross-section of a process and is held together by “constitutive tensions”[3], which seek release and thereby produce change and movement. The same view, he claims, can be applied to the human mind as well as to groups of people, who come to constitute collective persons as a result.
References
- ↑ Raud, Rein (2021). Being in Flux: A Post-Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self. Polity. ISBN 978-1-5095-4951-1. Search this book on
- ↑ Being in Flux, p.75ff.
- ↑ Being in Flux, p.78ff.
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