The Place of Psychedelic Chemistry/Alchemical Consciousness in Philosophy

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https://youtu.be/R3SWnrNLDVM Transcript: I wanted to see if you guys might help me think through Aldous Huxley's psychedelic phenomenology, because I'm writing about it, preparing a draft of what will become a chapter in an anthology on the philosophy of psychedelics. I'm also writing about Descartes' famous Meditations on First Philosophy and interpreting his experience as [...]

Episode 6 of The Future Faces of Spirit

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Bruce Alderman of Integral Stage has been releasing a multipart video series called "The Future Faces of Spirit." Other participants include John Vervaeke and Bonnitta Roy. Here is Alderman's description of the series and my contribution: "What paths lie ahead for religion and spirituality in the 21st Century? How might the insights of modernity and [...]

Reading and Riffing on Murray Bookchin’s “The Ecology of Freedom”

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Zooming out from the horror show of the upcoming presidential election, I decided to do some thinking with Bookchin about social contracts, participatory vs representative forms of democracy, and direct action as permanent revolution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb41foDwLOY part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSTejCAGCHs part 2 https://youtu.be/r8h9YHtHPoY part 3

Prayers to a Process-Relational God

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In Whitehead's scheme there is no equivalence with regard to the temporal ontology of past and future. There is no space-time block. There are multiple timelines in Whitehead's relativistic pluriverse. His metaphysical scheme is perspectival, meaning that any statement about the cosmos must be situated in some actual occasion (this is Whitehead's "Ontological Principle"). There [...]

Imagining a Gaian Reality After the Virus

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Imagining a Gaian Reality After the Virus by Matthew Segall >>Click Here for a PDF of this blog post<<Download What follows is a brief paper outlining a path forward for post-pandemic humanity. It attempts to integrate Marxist critiques of capitalism with the efforts of contemporary Whiteheadian philosophers to compose an alternative ecological civilization.  … https://youtu.be/YUMJ1rlCvPI [...]

Thoughts on William James, Pure Experience, and Materialism

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Idealism and panpsychism seem to me to make easy friends in the debate against materialism. They both affirm that consciousness or experience or mind in some generic sense are intrinsic to Nature. There are important differences between idealism and panpsychism, of course, and there are a variety of ways one can be an idealist or [...]

Musing on “Consciousness” with William James & Alfred North Whitehead

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William James (from "A World of Pure Experience," Part 2, p. 568): “With this we have the outlines of a philosophy of pure experience before us. At the outset of my essay, I called it a mosaic philosophy. In actual mosaics the pieces are held together by their bedding, for which bedding the Substances, transcendental Egos, or Absolutes of [...]

Metaphysics in Process (reflections on Whitehead’s system of philosophy)

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As best I understand it, in Part IV of Process & Reality, Whitehead attempted to account for how geometrical measurement of the physical world is possible without any empirical presuppositions. He was worried that physics had not yet fully accounted for its own experimental practices and so searched for a presuppositionless mathematical starting point for [...]