Being in Flux: A Post-Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self

Reality exists independently of human observers, but does the same apply to its structure? Realist ontologies usually assume so: according to them, the world consists of objects, these have properties and enter into relations with each other, more or less as we are accustomed to think of them. Against this view, Rein Raud develops a radical process ontology that does not credit any vantage point, any scale or speed of being, any range of cognitive faculties with the privilege to judge how the world ‘really’ is.  In his view, what we think of as objects are recast as fields of constitutive tensions, cross-sections of processes, never in complete balance but always striving for it and always reconfiguring themselves accordingly. The human self is also understood as a fluctuating field, not limited to the mind but distributed all over the body and reaching out into its environment, with different constituents of the process constantly vying for control. The need for such a process philosophy has often been voiced, but rarely has there been an effort to develop it in a systematic and rigourous manner that leads to original accounts of identity, continuity, time, change, causality, agency and other topics. Throughout his new book, Raud engages with an unusually broad range of philosophical schools and debates, from New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology to both phenomenological and analytical philosophy of mind, from feminist philosophy of science to neurophilosophy and social ontology. Being in Flux will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy and the humanities generally and to anyone interested in current debates about realism, materialism and ontology.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1 Ontology: some of the story so far Chapter 2 An ontology of processes and fields    Chapter 3 Me, myself and my brain Chapter 4 The self as an extended decision-making network    Concluding remarks Notes References

About the Author :
Rein Raud is a research professor at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University, and a Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Review :
“In this remarkable in-depth discussion of social process ontologies, Rein Raud enlists the resources, methods and intuitions of different philosophical traditions to present an original perspective. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, he defends a post-anthropocentric vision that honours the specificity of being human, but also decentres arrogant human exceptionalism. This brilliant and erudite book emphasizes the continuity between humans and nonhumans as the necessary premise to explain our ability to make sense of the world.” Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University “Rein Raud’s position in this book is almost the polar opposite of my own. Nonetheless, he brings fresh insights and arguments to the process materialism camp, and his lasting contributions to the debate make this an important work. Both process- and object-oriented thinkers should read it immediately.” Graham Harman, Southern California Institute of Architecture