Chi Rainer Bornfree, PhD
They/them
Previous work published as Chiara Ricciardone
I’m a writer, philosopher, and activist. Earned my Ph.D. in Rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley, and taught at Bard, Princeton, and NY state prisons before leaving academia. Lived around the world. Now growing vegetables and homeschooling my kids in the Hudson Valley, NY.
Coming Soon
The End Doesn't Happen All at Once: A Pandemic Memoir
Nothing was normal. Everything was possible.
For four years of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, C and R wrote letters, asking each other, and themselves: will we return to the old, broken world? Or make a new one? The resulting book is a brilliant, intimate glimpse into the courage to break with normal, the guts to change, and the complexities of friendship.
Co-authored with Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan.
Current projects
The Self and Other Fables: A collection of shortish philosophical fiction (extract here)
Not Normal (novel): An out-of-work programmer crushed by long Covid accepts an experimental AI implant to try to recover her normal life. But the implant comes with the unexpected ability to understand animals. Soon, the deep relationships Silver forms with animals and AI — and the conflicts they set off — threaten the very human fellowship that she craves.Can Philosophy Change the World? Essays from the Pandemic Era: Philosophy changes the world by working on and with the material of time. The essays collected here include targeted responses to charged questions, briefs on philosophical keywords, and adventurous mind journeys. Altogether a barbarous mix of classical Greek philosophy with contemporary sci-fi, poetry, feminist, black, indigenous, & activist theory.
Philosophy
- Where is Philosophy Going? A Catalog of Errors
- On Contradiction
- Artificial Fiction
- Liberating Plato’s Prisoners
- What is it Like to be a Self? Undoing Identity
- Can Philosophy Change the World?
- Different but Equal: How to have Diversity without Hierarchy
- Viral Ambiguity
Other Work
- AI for the People, a multi-genre vision of an ecological and anti-racist coexistence of humans and strong AI (co-created with Micah White and J.R. Harris). 3rd place winner in the Future of Life’s AI Worldbuilding Contest.
Conversations
- with Avi Alpert on The Good Enough Life
- with Jay Garfield on The Art of Losing Oneself
- with Samantha Rose Hill on Arendt and Politics
- with Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan & Brooke Holmes on What is We?
- with Robert Leib on Dialogues with AI
- with Kate Manne on Entitlement and Misogyny
- with Maggie Nelson on Messy Freedom
Activism
I’ve dabbled in most theories of social change. I participated in direct action non-violence in Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement. I investigated structural economic reform via a development studies program in Uganda. I’ve lived in an intentional community in Oregon and organized parent mutual aid networks. I facilitated the first meetings of Occupy SF and Occupy Berkeley. I co-founded and taught classes at Activist Graduate School, and taught inside New York State’s prisons via the Bard Prison Initiative. Most recently, I co-founded and led the mid-Hudson branch of the Still-Coviding movement.