Academy Roundtable: Towards a Metaphysical Totality
with Alexander Bard, Cadell Last, Thomas Hamelryck, and Andrew Sweeny
A Parallax Roundtable about philosophy, religion and metaphysics east and west with Alexander Bard, Cadell Last, Thomas Hamelryck and Andrew Sweeny.
Guests
Cadell Last: I’m a philosopher (Ph.D.) with an interest in anthropology and psychoanalysis, and the author of Global Brain Singularity, and Sex, Masculinity, God. I am currently working on various philosophical projects, as well as working as a psychotherapist at the intersection of psychedelic psychotherapy.
Alexander Bard: Alexander Bard is a Swedish author, lecturer, artist, songwriter, music producer, TV personality, philosopher and political activist, and one of the founders of the Syntheist movement along with his co-author Jan Söderqvist. His books include “The Futurica Trilogy”, “Digital Libido” & “Syntheism”.
Thomas Hamelryck is a Lecturer and Researcher at the Bioinformatics Centre at the University of Copenhagen Biocenter. His academic research interests revolve around Machine learning, Bayesian statistics, Protein Structure Prediction, Probabilistic Programming, Deep Learning. He is also an enthusiast of Réne Girard, and denies all rumours that he was once the keyboard player for Depeche Mode.
Andrew Sweeny: Andrew Sweeny is a writer, editor, blogger, Youtuber, published poet, podcaster, musician, and teacher. He has worked as a touring musician and put out several albums, published a book of poetry, and animated two popular podcasts and a philosophical blog on Medium and now on Parallax. He Lectures at Sciences Po, in Paris, France.
About the Strange Attractor Series
In the last couple of years, we have witnessed the emergence of different meta-models, theories, and future visions which try to go beyond the worldview of postmodernism: a strange attractor that seems to run on new and exciting algorithms. But what—if anything—do all of these models and movements have in common? Is there a shared deep-structure that is expressing itself, not only in new and more complex ways of thinking and cognition, but also in geopolitics, science, industry, religion, ecology, sexuality, parenting, culture, technology, architecture, the arts—and in every other area of contemporary life. Is there a strange attractor that emerges after postmodernity? What are its shape and characteristics? What new and exciting vistas and opportunities do these new vistas open up for us? Can they contribute to solving the existential problems of the current meta-crisis? What are the moral and ethical injunctions that we could infer from the present emergence of these meta-tribes.
In this Roundtable-series - hosted by PARALLAX - we invite a multitude of ‘post-postmodern’ pioneer—thinkers, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, educators, economists, and artists—to have an interdisciplinary discussion about the essence of Post-Postmodernity – given there is such a thing. More precisely, this podcast-series is an experiment which seeks to find out whether these movements and models after Postmodernity have something in common. Can these movements leave their respective bubbles and contribute something essential to the development of the world we live in? That is our primary question.