Category: Reviews
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Book Review: Clever Digs
Jenny Quillien identifies patterns that enable thought in her book Clever Digs: How Workspaces Can Enable Thought. Quillien focuses on thinking, but doesn’t address spaces for aliveness (Christopher Alexander’s “quality without a name“). I assume that places that support a sense of aliveness also are good for thinking — especially creative thinking. Patterns can be…
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Book Review: Biopoetics
Biopoetics: Towards an Existential Ecology by Andreas Weber connects our human experience with a scientific understanding of life. A major limitation of conventional scientific objectivity is the exclusion of the first-person subjective perspective. Rational thinking has omitted the rationality of the living body. Andreas Weber proposes an existential poetics for living systems: 1) Perception and…
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Book Review: Biology of Wonder
Andreas Weber writes in Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science that the more technology allows us to study life, the stronger the evidence of life’s complexity and intelligence becomes. For two hundred years, biology made no major efforts to answer what life really is. Most biologists assumed organisms to be tiny…
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Book Review: Matter and Desire
Andreas Weber pursues an ambitious goal with Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology. He investigates the principles of reality that we experience and are part of through a science of the heart. It became clear to Weber that we need to completely rethink how we understand life and its significance. It also means that we…
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Book Review: Enlivenment
Enlivenment: Towards a fundamental shift in the concepts of nature, culture and politics by Andreas Weber is an e-book published by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung which can be downloade here. Andreas Weber sees Enlivenment as a way to move beyond Enlightenment. Enlivenment is a way to acknowledge the deeply creative processes embodied in all living…
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Andreas Weber on erotic, poetic, and existential ecology
Introduction Andreas Weber is a biologist, philosopher, and author. He is one of the most interesting authors I have read lately. This is a review of Andreas Weber’s essay Enlivenment (Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2013), and books Matter & Desire (Chelsey Green Publishing Company, 2014), Biology of Wonder (New Society Publishing, 2016), and Biopoetics (Springer, 2016).…
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Book Review: Catafalque
Catafalque is a biography where Peter Kingsley offers a view of Carl Jung as a mystic and prophet. Kingsley is a pleasure to read. His writing is like music, but after a couple of hundred pages I got tired of the single tune. Catafalque is a meticulous work about Jung, and as such it’s impressive.…
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Book Review: Who Do We Choose to Be?
Who Do We Choose to Be: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity by Margaret J. Wheatley offers a perspective on how to engage sanely with the destructive dynamics of our time. We do that by facing reality, willingly seeing where we are, and how we got here. Wheatley seeks to understand the forces that have…
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Book Review: The I of the Beholder
The ”I” of the Beholder: A Guided Journey to the Essence of a Child by Annemarie Roeper is an amazing book. Annemarie Roeper spent a lifetime working with children. She was very sensitive to their needs and found delight in their beautiful Selves.1 Over the years, she began to see her daily experiences from the…
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Book Review: The Dynamics of Transformation
The Dynamics of Transformation: Tracing an Emerging World View by Grant Maxwell is a book about how a new world view has been emerging over the last few centuries. We participate in the unfolding meaning of the world. Participatory insight is an outcome of an integrative method, which seeks to reconcile opposed assertions. The integrative method…