Year: 2020
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Reading and Riffing on Murray Bookchin’s “The Ecology of Freedom”
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.
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Prayers to a Process-Relational God
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…
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Ecological Civilization, or Anarcho-Primitivism?
Here’s my original blog post: Imagining a Gaian Reality After the Virus
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Imagining a Gaian Reality After the Virus
Imagining a Gaian Reality After the Virus by Matthew Segall 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. … A specter is haunting modern civilization—the specter of Gaia. All the powers…
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Thoughts on William James, Pure Experience, and Materialism
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…
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Musing on “Consciousness” with William James & Alfred North Whitehead
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…
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What is life? interview with Tim Freke
Footnotes2Plato 