John Pickering: Personal Home Page
If a certain department of knowledge specially attracts a man, let him study that, and study it because it attracts him; and let him not fabricate excuses for that which requires no excuse, but rest assured that the reason it most attracts him is because it is best for him. For knowledge resembles virtue in this, and differs in this from other possessions, that it is not only a means of procuring good, but is good in itself simply.
From a lecture by A.E. Housman at University College London, October 3rd. 1892.
This page is updated at irregular intervals
My interests
Some of the people, ideas and other things in which I'm interested are listed below. The order has no significance whatsoever. As and when I can, I'll be adding links to say something about why I think these things are interesting.
Consciousness ; Ecological psychology ; Buddhism ; Theravada ; Vipassana ; Mindfulness ; Adviata Vedanta ; Sumedho ; Amaravati ; Amaro ; Ecopsychology ; Deep ecology ; Arne Neass ; Aldo Leopold ; James Gibson ; Affordance ; Social affordance ; Colwyn Trevarthen ; Embodied intersubjectivity ; Mutualism ; Jesper Hoffmeyer ; Kalevi Küll ; von Uexküll ; Umwelt ; Yuri Lotman ; Semioshpere ; Biosemiotics ; Transhumanism ; Artificial Life ; Singularity ; Ray Kurzweil ; Donna Haraway ; Cyberpunk ; Bruce Sterling ; William Gibson ; Process philosophy ; Alfred North Whitehead ; Concrescence ; Fallacy of misplaced concreteness ; William James ; Radical Empiricism ; Charles Sanders Peirce ; Abduction ; Panpsychism ; C H Waddington ; Brian Goodwin ; John Crook ; Tim Ingold ; Mary Midgley ; Baldwin effect ; Susan Oyama ; Humberto Maturana ; Francisco Varela ; Autopoiesis ; Progogine ; Stengers ; Emergence ; Epigenetics ; Merlin Donald ; Terrence Deacon ; Michael Tomasello ; Neo-Lamarckism ; Genetic Assimilation ; Niel Theise ; Kabbalah ; Avraham Heschel ; Friedrich Hayek ; Sensory Order ; Karl Popper ; World of Propensities ; Heraclitus ; Henri Bergson ; Dureé ; Elan Vital ; Samuel Butler ; Giles Deleuze ; Felix Guattari ; Baudrillard ; Hyper-reality ; Sign value ; Foucault ; Knowledge/power ; Sigmund Freud ; Carl Gustav Jung ; Archetypes ; Psychoid ; Wolfgang Pauli ; Synchronicity ; Entanglement ; David Bohm ; Basil Hiley ; Unbroken wholeness ; Holomovement ; Soma-signification ; Signa-somatic ; Constructive Postmodernism ; David Abram ; Gary Snyder ; Taoism ; Tai-Chi ; Confucianism ; Han Fei Zhu ; Marc Chagall ; Laurie Anderson ; Modigliani ; Penguin Cafe Orcheststra ; A.E. Housman ;
Contact details below. To avoid spam, I've written my email address out in words.
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Email: |
'j' , dot, 'a', dot, 'pickering', at sign, 'warwick', dot, 'ac', dot, 'uk' |
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Voice: |
024 761 50039 |
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Fax: |
024 761 524225 |
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Post: |
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. |
Some papers of mine are below. If you want more exact references for them, please contact me.
On C.S. Peirce and habit of the world.
Is nature habit-forming? What we call "laws" of nature are best thought of as habits.
On A. N.Whitehead, C. S. Peirce and Merleau-Ponty:
Signs in the Flesh. Signs link different levels of being - it's signs all the way down.
On Ecopsychology and Wellbeing:
Is Wellbeing Local or Global? A Perspective from Ecopsychology "Humankind cannot bear too much reality"
On Buddhism and psychology:
Postmodern Psychology and Buddhism It is now easier to bring Buddhism and Western Psychology closer.
Buddhism and Cognitivism Buddhism and Cognitive Science complement each other.
Mutualism The mind is a part of nature, not apart from it.
Postmodern Psychology is Postcognitive. The mind is not a machine; Selfhood is a process.
Active Information in Physics and Psychology James Gibson and David Bohm were both concerned with meaning
On cybernetic culture:
The Architecture of Power. Walter Benjamin in cyberspace.
Artificial Life is Real You can't programme intelligence, but you might grow it.
Designs on the City: Urban Experience in the Age of Digital Technology. Virtual cities, real violence.
Agents and Artefacts All objects are social, but some are more social than others
On Alfred North Whitehead:
Psychology moves towards Whitehead. Whitehead anticipated embodied cognition
Whitehead, embodied cognition and biosemiotics. A therapeutic perspective on Whitehead.
On educational technology:
Education and Network Culture Post-Fordism in the Academy
Internet in Universities: Liberation or Desensitisation? Education in screen culture: perils and potentials
Computers: When Will They Feel Natural? Why books are better than screens.
Danger: Hypermedia At Work. Beyond the hype about hypermedia.
The Hypertextbook. Hypermedia are powerful teaching resources.
Biosemiotics and the shift from reduction to emergence:
A talk first given in the Psychology Department at Warwick on May 15th. 2007. Slides here and notes here.