Ben Woodard – författare

F. H. Bradley, an exemplar of British Idealism, offered a rich strain of idealism that has been unduly neglected for almost a century. Beyond idealism's reputation as mere fanciful speculation, Bradley's work plumbs the everyday difficulties of thinking a world infused with feeling, of a world that never divides into easily rational fragments. For Bradley, our inner lives and our outer lived experience entangle and pollute one another a mess that requires collective dialectical thinking to unravel.This book engages with Bradley's central problem, of how to think the gap between one's experience and the structure of reality on which it is founded, as one that still haunts contemporary philosophy. Not only was this pivotal to the post-Continental philosophy of the 2000s but it also remains extremely relevant for renewed interest in Spinoza and Hegel as well as for how contemporary analytic philosophy defines itself with and against metaphysics.

Using Schelling's philosophy, Ben Woodard examines how an expanded form of naturalism changes how we conceive of the division between thought and world, mathematics and motion, sense and dynamics, experiment and materiality, as well as speculation and pragmatism. Nature, in Schelling's eyes, is not the great outdoors or some authentic pastoral realm, but the various powers, processes and tendencies which run through biology, chemistry, physics and the very possibility of thought itself.

Using Schelling’s philosophy, Ben Woodard examines how an expanded form of naturalism changes how we conceive of the division between thought and world, mathematics and motion, sense and dynamics, experiment and materiality, as well as speculation and pragmatism. Nature, in Schelling’s eyes, is not the great outdoors or some authentic pastoral realm, but the various powers, processes and tendencies which run through biology, chemistry, physics and the very possibility of thought itself.

Despite humanity s gradual ascent from clustered pools of it, slime is more often than not relegated to a mere residue-the trail of a verminous life form, the trace of decomposition, or an entertaining synthetic material-thereby leaving its generative and mutative associations with life neatly removed from the human sphere of thought and existence. Arguing that slime is a viable physical and metaphysical object necessary to produce a realist bio-philosophy void of anthrocentricity, this text explores naturephilosophie, speculative realism, and contemporary science; hyperbolic representations of slime found in the weird texts of HP Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; as well as survival horror films, video games, and graphic novels, in order to present the dynamics of slime not only as the trace of life but as the darkly vitalistic substance of life.