Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Month: May 2015

  • 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…

  • Pluralistic Panpsychism v. Monistic Idealism: another response to Kastrup (part 1 of 2)

    Kastrup has responded to my post a few days ago. The topic? Panpsychism. In any back and forth discussion like this, it is important to acknowledge that each of us has evidently written a great deal articulating our perspectives. Other than his brief essay on the threat of panpsychism, I have not read any of Kastrup’s…

  • Schedule for our track at next week’s Whitehead/Ecological Civilization Conference

    Section III: Alienation from Nature, How it Arose Track 3: Late Modernity and Its Re-Imagining (Lebus Hall, 201) Friday, June 5 2:00 PM – 2:45 PM Track Session #1a – Tam Hunt “Absent-minded science and the ‘deep science’ antidote” 2:45 PM – 3:30 PM Track Session #1b – Christian de Quincey “A Radical Science of…

  • Leron Shults’ “adaptive atheism”

    “A clash of doctrines is not a disaster – it is an opportunity.” -A.N. Whitehead This morning, Jesse Turri sent me a draft of LeRon Shults’ soon to be published paper “How to Survive the Anthropocene: Adaptive Atheism and the Evolution of Homo Deiparensis.” His basic thesis is that modern day religion (defined as “shared imaginative…

  • 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…

  • The Threat of Panpsychism?: A response to Bernardo Kastrup

    Bernardo Kastrup, a computer engineer turned metaphysician, recently posted a short essay called “The Threat of Panpsychism: A Warning.” I found the essay somewhat encouraging if only because it is another signal that contemporary philosophy (both within and outside academia) is moving beyond the tired “materialism v. anything else” debate and toward more interesting and relevant debates, like that…

  • Minding Time: Chronos, Kairos, and Aion in an Archetypal Cosmos

    Notes for a brief talk I gave today at CIIS. [Update (July 15, 2016): This talk was expanded into an article published in Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology] ………………………………………………………………………………..  “…what is time? Who can give that a brief or easy answer? Who can even form a conception of it to be put into words? Yet…

  • 45th Annual International Jean Gebser Society Conference: Architects of the Integral World @ CIIS Oct. 16-18th, 2015

    45th Annual International Jean Gebser Society Conference: Architects of the Integral World IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE PHILOSOPHY, COSMOLOGY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS PROGRAM, PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION DEPARTMENT, CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF INTEGRAL STUDIES SAN FRANCISCO, CA ~ OCTOBER 16th–18th, 2015 CALL FOR PAPERS In the winter of 1932, from a grammatical detail in the poetry of Rilke, Jean Gebser intuited an entire shift in the…

  • Eric Smith on the geochemical inevitability of life on earth

    For more from Smith, see this co-authored essay “The Origin of Life”: “As we see it, the early steps on the way to life are an inevitable, incremental result of the operation of the laws of chemistry and physics operating under the conditions that existed on the early Earth, a result that can be understood…

  • Open Letter to Oakland Mayor Libby Schaff Regarding Oakland Wildfire Plan

    Originally posted on Becca Tarnas: Dear Mayor Schaaff, I am writing to you as a concerned Berkeley citizen and a life-long resident of the San Francisco Bay Area. There is much that I love about living in the East Bay, but one that I appreciate most is the easy accessibility of the beautiful forested hills…