“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead
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Iain Hamilton Grant Interview
Leon Niemoczynski has posted a FANTASTIC interview with Iain Hamilton Grant. A small sample to wet your appetite: As directly as possible, Idealism is that philosophy that affirms the reality of the Idea. The point is not that any account of reality must be from the standpoint of the Idea, of the Ideal, or that the conceptual Read more
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Images of Earth and Eros in Walt Whitman’s Poetry
Images of Earth and Eros in Walt Whitman’s Poetry A Presentation by Matthew D. Segall at the 2013 Cosmology of Love Conference Come, said the Muse, Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted, Sing me the universal. In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and Read more
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Deleuzian Ideas
Deleuze writes: “Ideas no more than Problems do not exist only in our heads but occur here and there in the production of an actual historical world” (Difference and Repetition, p. 190). Ideas are not simply located inside the head. Nor can Ideas be entirely captured inside the grammatical form of a logical syllogism, even Read more
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Reflections on “The Function of Reason” (1929) by Alfred North Whitehead
“The function of Reason,” says Whitehead, “is to promote the art of life” (4). Reason thereby becomes primarily an aesthetic concern, a matter of appetition, and of the appetition of appetition with “emphasis upon novelty” (20). Reason is not simply the art of surviving, but of living well, and living better. If some degree of Read more
“In one sense philosophy does nothing. It merely satisfies the entirely impractical craving to probe and adjust ideas which have been found adequate each in its special sphere of use. In the same way the ocean tides do nothing. Twice daily they beat upon the cliffs of continents and then retire. But have patience and look deeper; and you find that in the end whole continents of thought have been submerged by philosophic tides, and have been rebuilt in the depths awaiting emergence. The fate of humanity depends upon the ultimate continental faith by which it shapes its action, and this faith is in the end shaped by philosophy.”
—Alfred North Whitehead
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