Author of EMOTION AND EMBODIMENT: FRAGILE ONTOLOGY (1993, Peter Lang), THE TRICKSTER, MAGICIAN AND GRIEVING MAN: RETURNING MEN TO EARTH(1994, Inner Traditions), & EARTHBODIES: REDISCOVERING OUR PLANETARY SENSES (2002, SUNY) and HUMANS, ANIMALS, AND MACHINES: BLURRING BOUNDARIES (SUNY, fall, 2008). He has also published 72 poems in 38 literary journals, including North American Review, Spoon River Review, Rosebud, Many Mountains Moving, Sou'wester and others. Glen is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities and former Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Masters Program, Penn State Harrisburg. He was awarded THE PENN STATE HARRISBURG FACULTY RESEARCH AWARD FOR 2009. His newest book, MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE SENSUAL DEPTH OF THE WORLD should be written by fall, 2009.
Here is a sample of some of my poems. Just click on the title to see the poem. Thanks!
Humans, Animals, Machines: Blurring Boundaries (SUNY, September, 2008). This book probes the blurring of boundaries among humans, animals and machines. It explores how this blurring has become intensified in ways both destructive for humans, animals and the environment, and also offering fruitful possibilities for these three realms to work together.The book is unique in looking at the comparison of all three realms together, instead of just comparing two of them, as most studies do. Also, the book is unusual in being so interdisciplinary, drawing upon philosophy, artificial intelligence studies, physics, animal research, writings about autism, literature, aesthetics, technology research, poetry, attachment theory, and psychology.The approach is largely phenomenological, concerned with fidelity to most people’s experience. Other phenomenological approaches to the questions asked, such as Heidegger’s work on animals, are examined. Throughout, Merleau-Ponty’s approach to embodiment is used to articulate the relationships among humans, animals and machines in new ways. The intention of this work is to go beyond the shrill warnings about the dangers of ecological damage or the pitfalls of technical enhancement of humans or of the increasing power of various technologies, to reconsider how given that each realm does overlap with the other two, there must be ways that humans, animals and machines can work together for mutual thriving. The book dares to give new definitions of humans, animals and machines given their historical development and reconsiderations of their relationships. The book is not content to deal with philosophical concepts or abstractions, but works with contemporary examples of animal behavior, technological advances, robot experiments, or the life-transforming experience of someone with a cochlear implant. Readers will find a concrete path into these thickets of questions facing postmodern culture and be challenged by its conclusion that we need a new ethical response to animals and machines as “persons.” The book ends with a call for an ecospirituality.
Emotion and Embodiment: Fragile Ontology (Peter Lang, 1994) is a phenomenological exploration of the differing ways we know the world through the emotions, and how both the world and we as knowers are different by knowing the world within the emotional life. It draws upon a lot of literary examples, as well as works of philosophy and psychology. It extends the work of Merleau-Ponty on the embodied, percetual basis of emotional apprehension and expression. This book has been cited by ALTER: The Review of Phenomenology in France in their 1999 issue devoted to the phenomenology of the emotions as one of the four most landmark works on the phenomenology of the emotions.
Earthbodies: Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses (SUNY, 2002) details a sense of embodiment that entails different notions of time, perception, and the relationships to the natural world, to animals, to cyberspace, and to space itself. It is also a critique of American culture and its disconnectedness, and examines the fascination with vampires, ghouls, aesthetes, and the Internet. It is a book intended to help us move from a sea of sentimentality and violence towards an existence of commitment and the graceful affirmation of the natural world, other people, differing cultures, and each person's unique rootedness in a history and place.
More Popular Book:
The Trickster, Magician, and Grieving Man: Reconnecting Men with Earth is a critique of the Men's Movement mentality of Robert Bly and draws parallels between Bly's metaphors and mindset and Bush's in conducting the Gulf War. It critique's "tank embodiment," "high altitude living," "missile sexuality" and language use as "the briefing." The second half of the book suggests ways in which the traditional male gender roles could benefit from contact with ways of other cultures, like the Native American traditions of trickster, with taking differing stances towards emotions and especially grieving of losses, finding creative ways of dealing with death, old Hindu myths of being "food" for all and hence learning to cook for others, relations with the slower time of nature ... etc. (Inner Traditions, 1994)
I recently wrote an essay on Bhakti and me entitled "Our Embodied Friendships with Dogs" (in WHAT PHILOSOPHY CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT YOUR DOG, ed. by Steven Hales, Open Court, 2008), as well as "The Archetypal Alchemy of Technology: Escaping and Returning to Materiality's Depth" in Spring: Journal of Archetype and Culture (Jungian Studies), vol. 80 (Winter 2009), pp. 1-35; "The World of Wolves: Lessons about the Sacredness of the Surround, Belonging,The Silent Dialogue of Interdependence and Death, and Speciocide" in Environmental Philosophy, vol v., issue 2, Fall 2008, pp. 69-92 and "Cyborg Life: The In-between of Humans and Machines" in PhaenEx, Journal for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, vol. iii, no. 2, Fall, 2008, pp. 14-36.
