“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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reading list of recent Schelling scholarship
I’ll be working on a comprehensive examination this summer on the recent resurgence of Schelling in continental philosophy. Jason Wirth recently published a short article on this resurgence. Below is the beginnings of a reading list for the comp. exam. My goal is to focus on contemporary scholarship (last 10-15 years), but a slightly older Read more
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The Power of Adjectives: Two Poems on Imagination by Patrick Lane and P. K. Page
“Albino Pheasants” (1977) by Patrick Lane At the bottom of the field where thistles throw their seeds and poplars grow from cotton into trees in a single season I stand among the weeds. Fenceposts hold each other up with sagging wire. Here no man walks except in wasted time. Men circle me with cattle, cars Read more
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[final draft] Poetic Imagination in the Speculative Philosophies of Plato, Schelling, and Whitehead
Poetic Imagination in the Speculative Philosophies of Plato, Schelling, Whitehead The Garden of Eden and Expulsion from the Garden by Thomas Cole “I am convinced that the supreme act of reason, because it embraces all ideas, is an aesthetic act; and that only in beauty are truth and goodness akin.–The philosopher must possess as much Read more
Alfred North Whitehead, Ancient Philosophy, Coleridge, Goethe, Iain Hamilton Grant, imagination, Isabelle Stengers, Kant, Plato, Romantic Philosophy, Schelling, speculative realism, William James
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Whitehead’s Experiential Universe (a response to Archive Fire)
Michael posted another fine response to me yesterday. I have Process and Reality in hand, and will quote a bit in a minute. Alfred North Whitehead left us a cosmological scheme, not a complete system. His scheme aims for experiential coherence, not explanatory completion. “Explanation,” as modern (i.e., Cartesian) science came to understand it, is only Read more
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“black bloc” anarchists strike again…
Last fall, I expressed my frustrations with the “black bloc” tactics of some anarchists after attending the otherwise successful General Strike in Oakland (HERE and HERE). Now they are at it again, only this time in San Francisco’s Mission district. Across the country in NYC, there have been reports of white powder being sent to Read more
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Fragments of a Romantic Theory of Evolution
Darwin is supposed to have discovered something nowadays called “evolution” and to have laid to rest something nowadays called “creationism.” But if this is so, what are we to make of the theories of Schelling and Goethe in Germany, and of Coleridge in England, articulated several decades earlier than he? Their Romantic conception of the 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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