Thread by @davidshorter

If you enjoy critiques of pure reason, then I highly suggest the "Swarm" episode of Netflix's season three of Love + Death + Robots when to counter human hubris we learn that "intelligence is not a winning survival trait." 1/5

I'll use Swarm in my #UCLA class on Aliens this Fall. I ask students to "think with aliens" rather than get stuck on their existence, and to "stay with the trouble" to see that humans are apex predators (so far) who are cannibalizing their own longevity (so not THAT smart). 2/5

I assign Lee Irwin: "Reason, in both its synthetic and its analytic sense, represents only one epistemic ground and is limited by its frequent usurpation of other vital epistemic means, such as aesthetics, dreaming, myth making, and visionary experience." 3/5

"The...intellectual shift in science...from a rigidly Cartesian, determinative, causally conditioned, and mechanistic world order and toward a more holistic, indeterminate, interactive, and nonlocal patterned world of interpersonal events has powerful implications" (22) 4/5

Note: the alternative to rationality (or science) is not faith or belief. Faith says to give up knowledge. Decolonizing science says let's shift how we get there: intersubjectivity rather than individuality and object orientation. Relations not resources. 5/6 More:

"Reason has its place in the field of human experience, but need not be regarded as the most significant means for the attainment of knowledge.... Aesthetic, symbolic, and visionary capabilities deserve equal attention as sources fundamental to...any epistemic world." Irwin 6/6