Ted Toadvine: When is the Mind? Anthropocene Time and the Memory of the World

Guest Lecture


Abstract

Although the Anthropocene is a contested and problematic notion, both in its narrowly scientific sense and in its broader popular usage, it nevertheless makes salient the challenge of understanding the relation between “lived” human time and “deep” geological time. In this context, postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has described the advent of the Anthropocene as the breaching of two distinct temporal registers: the “global” calendar of human history and the unthinkably vast span of “planetary” time. According to Chakrabarty, the shock of the Anthropocene is due to the incommensurability of global and planetary temporalities, so that we encounter the planetary only as a “radical otherness.” In response, I argue that this binarism of chronologies fails to capture the plexity of our embodied temporal experience. Making sense of our entanglement in planetary and evolutionary temporal scales requires both a phenomenology of deep time and, in parallel, an appreciation of the ontological memory of the world.


About Ted Toadvine

Ted Toadvine is Nancy Tuana Director of the Rock Ethics Institute and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University. He specializes in contemporary Continental philosophy, especially phenomenology and recent French philosophy, and the philosophy of nature and environment. His latest book project, The Memory of the World, addresses deep time, animality, and eschatology in conversation with phenomenology, deconstruction, new materialisms, and the environmental humanities. Toadvine is author of Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Nature and editor or translator of six books, including The Merleau-Ponty Reader and Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself. He edits the journal Environmental Philosophy and co-edits the journal Chiasmi International and the Contributions to Phenomenology series with Springer. With Nicolas de Warren, he is preparing a new edition of the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology for Springer.


This lecture takes place at DIAS Auditorium and can also be viewed on our YouTube Channel.