AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

More recently a variety of philosophers have taken up the cause of non-human agency, such as Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter, and the movement known as Object-oriented ontology ). I’m not philosophically competent enough to evaluate these theories, but they seem to be about applying philosophical concepts usually reserved for human subjects and applying them to material objects, and thus well within our refactoring umbrella.

The flood of green books, freshly minted journals, essays, research grants, talk shows, films, fellowships, political campaigns, and endless conferences on the Anthropocene, animism, life, vibrant matter, and the “ontological turn,” so on and so forth, amount to a renaissance in planetary self-awareness, even if couched in crabby secular language. (p56)

Awhile back I stumbled on the book Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett whichs seems to be a post-Latourian philosophy of vitalism, or something like that. From there I learned about the concept of conatus, which means something like the innate tendency of all things to try and persist themselves.

Vibrant Matter

29 Apr 2024 - 19 Feb 2026

Awhile back I stumbled on the book Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett whichs seems to be a post-Latourian philosophy of vitalism, or something like that. From there I learned about the concept of conatus, which means something like the innate tendency of all things to try and persist themselves. There's a whole modern vitalistic tradition that is apparently not dumb (as defined above) but it's not clear what it's implications are or whether it's truly worthwhile or a dead-end.

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