Tag: pluralism
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In Dialogue with Seth Zuihō Segall about Virtue, Wisdom, and Pluralism
I had a wonderful time dialoguing with my cousin Seth Zuihō Segall about his new book The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom, and Plurailsm (2023). We started with Frank Sinatra’s song “The House I Live In” recorded toward the end of WWII. The lyrics were written by Abel Meeropol, a blacklisted Jewish Communist who…
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Panpsychist Pluralism
The following is based on a revised transcript of a recent lecture. Anyone paying attention to academic philosophy over the last decade or so will have noticed the new philosophical kid on the block. I’m talking about panpsychism. While a couple of decades ago the position would have been laughed out of court or met…
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Robert McDermott & Matt Segall on Rudolf Steiner’s 12 Ways of seeing the world
see also: Foreword to an upcoming anthroposophical book on twelve ways of seeing the world
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Foreword to an upcoming anthroposophical book on twelve ways of seeing the world
Below is the draft of a foreword I’ve coauthored with Robert McDermott. The book, Twelve Ways of Seeing the World by Mario Betti, should be out later this year via Hawthorn Press. Betti’s book builds fruitfully upon the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. You can read Steiner’s original lectures on the topic of the 12 human worldviews…
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Politics and Pluralism in the Anthropocene
Notes from a talk I gave at CIIS this past March titled “Politics and Pluralism in the Anthropocene” Here’s the video of the whole panel: https://youtu.be/sgoAZV4VVsc Foucault on Hegel: “[T]ruly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the…
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Whitehead’s Way Beyond Postmodernism
Based on this paper delivered at the 2015 International Whitehead Conference.
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Lectures on Timothy Morton’s “Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People”
Process and Difference in the Pluriverse (opening lecture) My Spring course at CIIS.edu finishes up this week with a set of modules on Timothy Morton’s book Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017). Earlier in the semester, we read works by Plato, William James, Catherine Keller, William Connolly, Bruno Latour, Anne Pomeroy, and Donna Haraway. Below, I…
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Process and Difference in the Pluriverse: Plato, William James, & W.E.B. Du Bois
I’m sharing the lecture from the first module of my course this semester at CIIS.edu, PARP 6135: Process and Difference in the Pluriverse. The lecture discusses Plato’s Republic, William James’ pluralism, and W.E.B. Du Bois’ critical inheritance of James’ philosophy. Here’s a PDF transcript of the lecture
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Process & Difference in the Pluriverse, an online course at CIIS.edu
A trailer for my course being offered this Spring at CIIS.edu. PARP 6135 Process and Difference in the Pluriverse will explore the ethical, social, political, and ecological implications of process-relational philosophy. You could call it a course in applied or experimental metaphysics. We will read and discuss texts by radical empiricist William James, revolutionary sociologist WEB…
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The Universe Story, and/or A Pluriverse Story?
Sideris’ article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion Lisa Sideris and Mary Evelyn Tucker speak at a conference about The Journey of the Universe Brian Swimme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Swimme Lisa Sideris: http://indiana.edu/~relstud/people/profiles/sideris_lisa
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War of the Worlds: Love and Strife in the Pluriverse
Another one for the ontological pluralism file. Delivered a few months back at the Cosmology of Love conference at CIIS.
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Pluralistic Panpsychism and Mystical Experience: a response to Kastrup (part 2 of 2)
[This is part 2 of my response to Bernardo Kastrup; part 1 is here]. Kastrup is confused by what I said in my original response to him regarding the room that ontological pluralism leaves for both the extraordinary experience of unity and the ordinary experience of plurality. Ontological pluralism seems more true to experience (both…
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Whitehead’s Non-Modern Philosophy: Cosmos and Polis in the Pluriverse (draft)
The following was an early draft of a talk I gave in my own track at the Whitehead/Ecological Civilization conference in Claremont, CA. For video of the actual talk, click HERE. This track has been given the task of re-imagining late modernity, and in particular, of re-imagining what John Cobb has called late modernity’s reductive monism. In my…
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“William James: Politics in the Pluriverse” by Kennan Ferguson
I’ve just finished Ferguson’s book on James’ pluralist contribution to political theory. I can’t recommend it highly enough to those interested in the political implications of ontological pluralism. Ferguson contrasts James’ prescriptive pluralism to the far less radical liberal understanding of multiculturalism. For liberalism, pluralism is a problem to be overcome, whereas for James, pluralism…
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Towards an abstract for my presentation at the International Whitehead Conference, “Re-imagining Late Modernity’s Reductive Monism”
My track at this year’s International Whitehead Conference is titled “Re-imagining Late Modernity’s Reductive Monism” and is situated within the umbrella section called “Alienation from Nature: How It Arose.” Other participants in my track include Elizabeth Allison, Sean Kelly, Richard Tarnas, and Brian Swimme. I hope to have the schedule and abstracts for everyone’s contributions posted by the…
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Towards an Ecological Metaphysics
Leon Niemoczynski (here) and Adam Robbert (here) have been having a productive back and forth regarding the prospect of an ecological metaphysics. Speculative Realism is not far afield of their conversation, with subslogans like “dark vitalism,” “new materialism,” and “bleak theology,” and key influences like Plato, Schelling, Nietzsche, and Deleuze, all hovering in the background. They…
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Nietzsche’s and Whitehead’s post-nihilist pluralistic process philosophies (part 2)
Since my post a few days ago (“The ‘innocence of becoming’: Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Nihilism as a Pathological Transitional Stage between Monism and Pluralism“), I’ve re-read chapter 4 of William Connolly’s The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (2013). Here is his summation of that chapter, which compared Nietzsche’s and Whitehead’s process philosophies: “It…
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The Pluralism Wars Return: Towards a Diplomatic Ontology of Organism
I was wondering how long the cease fire would last… The pluralism wars flared up again this afternoon over on FaceBook (this link may not work for everyone). Misunderstandings abound, or so it seems to me. My position–which is greatly indebted to thinkers like James and Whitehead, and more recently, Bruno Latour–is that of ontological pluralism. What is finally real…
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Building Shared Environments: Towards a Pluriversal Theory and Practice
The videos below are philosophical dialogues, first with the artist and YouTuber Mike Vahl and second with Professor Corey Anton. Both a relevant preface for the third video on pluralism and process-relational cosmology, which is largely a response to the recent blogosphere pluralism wars:
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Pluralism as the Choreography of Coexistence, with William James and Co.
There’s been quite an uproar recently across the philosophy blogosphere regarding the possibility of a pluralist ontology (see Critical Animal’s recap of this cross-blog event). The multitude of angles being offered got me thinking, and eventually sent me back to William James’ A Pluralistic Universe, from which I quote below (lecture 1): The theological machinery…
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Life in the Pluriverse: Towards a Realistic Pluralism
Levi Bryant recently called for a cross-blog discussion concerning what he perceives to be the problematic relationship between ethnographic pluralism and ontological realism. His call was instigated by Jeremy Trombley’s post on the so-called “ontological turn” in contemporary anthropology and ethnography. Trombley articulated what might be described as an ontology of the concept, wherein concepts…
Footnotes2Plato 