Under Lovecraft’s indifferentism humans become just another form of matter in the universe,
simply another form of entropic fodder in a mechanistic cosmos. Lovecraft’s indifference is deeply
connected, as ST Joshi has shown, to his commitme…particularly in his early works, is adamant about the necessary material pre-condition of all thought and all being. Nature is completely indifferent to human existence how is it then that intelligence is removed from the developments of na…
Ernst Haeckel
scientist · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Ernst Haeckel was a 19th-century naturalist and monist philosopher whose materialist vision of nature—where thought and being emerge from purely physical processes—shapes the cosmic indifference that permeates Lovecraft's fiction. The course readings use Haeckel to ground Lovecraft's horror in a genuine philosophical position: if intelligence is merely a natural development rather than a special human faculty, then human consciousness becomes contingent and insignificant in an entropic universe. This move connects early speculative fiction to the anxieties about machine intelligence and artificial consciousness that structure the seminar's concerns about what happens when we theorize intelligence as simply another natural process.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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